CHEAD Subject Association Alliance at The Margate School (Part 1)
A reflection by Uwe Derksen, Director, The Margate School
Photo credit: The Margate School
On 19 February, CHEAD’s Subject Association Alliance held it’s first in-person event in Margate, in collaboration with The Margate School, an independent art school in Kent. The event aimed to generate discussion in response to a provocation reflecting on the intersection between macro and micro ecologies in arts education across the UK. Here, Director of The Margate School, Uwe Derkson, reflects on the discussions that took place and examines The Margate School’s position in the context of the Higher Education landscape.
“The Margate School is on the street, not just in the gallery. Totally unique, evolving and responsive to social situations and injustice”, Jane Trowell
We engage in and offer purposeful creativity by advocating for the transformative power of learning and making, of the arts. We believe in their ability to inspire empathy, provoke critical thinking, and foster social change. By harnessing creativity for good, we can elevate voices, challenge norms, and cultivate a more compassionate and inclusive society and care for
our environment. Art, Society, Nature. The Margate School in and for Margate.
The Margate School (TMS) as such has developed into a vibrant creative community of artists, makers, students, academics, and volunteers. As a not-for-profit postgraduate liberal arts school and creative community hub, we focus on the role of art within the context of social and environmental justice. We take a radical and democratic approach to arts education,
empowering students to shape their own future. We support artists and makers to develop sustainable practices. We are currently a community of around 100 practitioners of which maybe a quarter are students.
As such, we believe, The Margate School is a radical experiment in learning and making and we continuously ask what it can be, who can access it, and why it matters. Our key ally is our French partner and friends at the L’École Supérieure d’Art (ESÄ) based in Dunkerque and Tourcoing in the region of Nord with whom we deliver our European MA in Fine Art (Diplôme
National Supérieur d’Expression Plastique).
We don’t have much, but what we have we share. What we receive in donations, voluntary contributions and fund-raising, hard work, goodwill and belief in the project from the TMS community, we use to make a genuine difference to people’s lives, to Margate and to changing education for the better. We provide space for makers, community groups, the general public
through studios, technical facilities, exhibition spaces, a community and sculpture garden, and numerous public events.
The Margate School was created as an independent not-for-profit organisation. This is a legal and financial framework and allows us to operate. But it also relates to the idea of freedom and dignity on the one hand and the allocation of resources on the other, in short, it relates to the debate around ownership, individually, locally, collectively, globally. In a sense people can’t be owned, in all senses a human being must not be owned, but people can own their practice and learning and therefore can own the School. It is anchored in our Human Rights “whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”. So, would it not be wonderful if the School’s community was made of individuals, partners, friends, lovers, families, groups joining by their own choice, given space to explore, experiment, contradict, contribute in a way that is possible for them, help to shape and reshape, learn and teach, help and care, be cared for, choose to leave and choose to return and all loosely framed around
social justice, ecological awareness, joy of creative practice, respect to the people and the space? A sort of “hippie-esque” radical humanism that listens to our contradictions and gives us space to explore, studios of humanity to find the humane.
Photo credit: The Margate School
Education
There are about 650,000 postgraduate students at UK universities (HESA data). We, that is The Margate School, have currently 13 post-graduate students enrolled, our only students currently, and that equates to circa 0.0022% of our share in the UK. Our current provision is in Fine Art and this equates to circa 0.05% within the Creative Arts and Design disciplines. We want to grow the student population to around 150 students, that would allow us to financially sustainable. 150 students would give us an approximate share of 0.6% of the creative arts post-graduate student population in this country. We are smaller than small and we will remain small, yet we have the same pressures as those much larger educational institutions do, be it financial pressures, rules and regulations, competing in the marketplace. In many more than one way we are the underdogs, including access to resources, student market penetration, political influence, financial support, public or private. To compare The Margate School with a university is like comparing a rain puddle with the ocean. Theoretically, we should not matter to ‘them’, yet there is interest and curiosity in what we are doing, maybe because there is some soul searching going on in the education and the university sector particular, and maybe what we are representing is the soul that seems to get buried in the sector, maybe those who were at the receiving end of experimental education in the 60s and 70s recalled that memory or even that spirit?
What is clear is that the university sector continues to be under pressure, mainly driven by the question who should pay for the provision? Over the last ten years the policy emphasis has been to move away from public funding to study fees paid for by the students via a loan. “Support through the funding council for teaching … was cut particularly quickly from 2012 to 2015. The 2020-21 total for teaching is 78% below the 2010-11 figure in real terms. … The cash value of all student loans has increased from below £6 billion in 2011-12 to more than £17 billion in 2019‑20 and is forecast to reach £22 billion in 2024-25”, Briefing Paper, Higher education funding in England, 8 February 2021. As a result, many, such as Lee Jones (Reader in International Politics, Queen Mary University of London), criticise how the very nature of university education has and is being skewed towards a commodification of education, an off-the-shelf product or service; market orientated competition rather than learning driven competition; increased bureaucracy by shifting the responsibility of regulatory frameworks from the state to the university; university management driven by capital accumulation and growth pressures rather than educational needs; the issue of how national student (read customer) satisfaction surveys that feed into the university league tables start to inflate the academic grading (‘I paid for a degree and expect to get what I paid for’); increased private borrowing put pressure on the need to grow and shifting priorities away from the educational provision itself, and all this brings the insecurities and instability of the university and the sector itself, even the possibility of universities faltering. Other related issues are student debt (around £50k by the time they receive their degree), the difficulty in reaching less privileged students, the rise of VC salaries (averaging around £250k p/a not including any other benefits) and generally the rise of management cost, especially when academic pay is substantially lagging behind. Then mental health issues, rising stress levels and wellbeing, the overseas student ‘cash-cow’ debate, institutional racism accusations (see The Guardian, 28 April 2021) and the list could go on.
Since 1992 Further and Higher Education Act art schools (as did polytechnics) have moved into the world of universities and with it the benefits as well as all the pressures, not least the pressure of carving out an identity as an academic institution (or faculty if integrated into a local bigger university) that can compete with the ‘big boys’ (so-called High Tariff Universities),
there has been a growing disillusion with the art education. But even before then and especially in the business of art education, there is a history of artists and designers breaking out of the formal and traditional structures of the art school and setting up their own schools or educational initiatives. Bauhaus (1919) and Black Mountain College (1933) are two renowned
and of course connected examples and influenced by Ruskin’s and Morris’ notion that design and making can improve everyday life. Other art schools would transform themselves radically, of which the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design under the late Garry Kennedy in the 60s and 70s is an important example. The Leeds College of Art under Harry Thubron and Eric Atkinson in the 50s and 60s is another example in this country. There was also the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research (FIU) (social sculpture) initiative set up by Joseph Beuys in the 70s and continued by some of his former students, such as Shelly Sacks and her Social Sculpture Lab and the University of the Trees (see Latest News | University of the Trees) or the Cyprus College of Art founded by the late Stass Paraskos (formerly at Leeds) in 1969. Others would follow (see for a short overview Beuys’s Legacy in Artist-led University Projects – Tate Papers | Tate and Sophia Kosmaoglou research page ALTERNATIVE ART EDUCATION | sophia kosmaoglou (videomole.tv)) and since the introduction of student fees, an increasing number of artists and academics started to reflect on the nature of art education and whether the art schools that now turned into universities are the only place where art education needed to take place or does take place or as The Guardian put it provocatively back in 2013 “Angry at soaring fees and disillusioned with established courses,
artists are simply doing things for themselves”.
Photo credit: The Margate School
The art school and the university
It is at that time of higher education reforms, in the beginning of the 90s that I started to work professionally in the Higher Education sector in Britain, and for the next 35 years would witness the continuously changing policies, increasing work pressure on staff, the rise in managerial driven systems and powers, the struggle to find an identity: is our university a community orientated, teaching intensive, research intensive, industry focussed, discipline focussed, faith based higher education institution, a specialist institution? Is it a college, a university college, a university? Is it a proper university, a token university, an elite university? With policies framing education, including higher education, increasingly as a marketplace, debates and resources around branding and marketing became paramount. When I moved into arts education the same discussions continued of course. Crucially for the art schools and in addition were the discussions around how the art school ethos fits into this new world of university academia and its concomitant requirements. What is artistic knowledge? What is the relationship between arts practice and academic research? What is art practice led research? What are learning outcomes in art education? How accessible is arts education? What are the employment opportunities for art students? This of course coincided with the classification of the creative disciplines in an economic and industrial context, driven by the then New Labour government under Tony Blair. The concept of the “creative industries” was born and the art schools needed to find their place and role in that policy development. The art schools suddenly (re-)discovered their histories, originally invented in part as ‘servants’ to the manufacturing industries. And then there was also the already inherent tension between that industry oriented “utilitarian” tradition with that of the art-for-art’s sake academy tradition. If one looks back it is quite staggering to see the quick rise and spread of the art schools in this country since the Great Exhibition in 1851 and especially in the county of Kent (see David Haste’s The Art Schools of Kent, 2013), as the Government then was trying to catch up with the proliferation of art schools of its French neighbours.
Discussions about universities and the role of the art schools all fed into the deliberations as to why and whether to establish the School, The Margate School. But the considerations go much further and relate to the phenomenon of learning itself, what conditions it and vice versa, hence The Margate School: Art, Society, Nature. Discussing the purpose of education, a mentor of mine once told me over 30 years ago “education frees the mind”, and that certainly stuck with me. If education is liberating, then what will we be liberated from? At the very least it should liberate us from prejudices, ideology, sloppy theoretical premises, inconsistent logic. At the very least it should give us a critical distance, yet not necessarily dismissive distance, from religious beliefs or rather organised beliefs. At the very least it should teach us about Socratic humility, recognising the infinity of knowledge and at the same time the limitations of what we believe we know. At the very least it should teach us the consequences and potential consequences when applying what we have learned. Although it is important to have the space
to remove ourselves from our immediate reality and observe and examine that reality, yet (at least since the Manhattan Project) we ought to understand that our hard fought neutrality will always be a temporary respite from the moral decisions we are obliged to make as human and social beings.
The Outlier
Over the last ten years there has been much discussion about so-called ‘alternative art schools’ outside the mainstream university and art school sector, mainly driven by the introduction of student fees and the changing nature of university education. But long before then and ever since, the world of education has been the ground for experimentation and attempts to provide alternatives to existing provision. The Margate School is part of these explorations, yet doesn’t see itself as alternative necessarily, being a liberal post-graduate school without, and deliberately so, art in its name. The Margate School – Art, Society, Nature: the process of making, the artifacts we create as a social as much as a physical act, artistic act as cultural, social and natural ontology at the same time.
Indeed, the starting point for The Margate School was not whether there should be an alternative art school, a self-organising school and many of those discussions over the last decade voiced by the Tate and other influential cultural organisations and artists who had and have a platform. Though these discussions and initiatives are of interest and are an invaluable
contribution to debates about arts education and more generic education, they are not the key to the development and founding of The Margate School. And despite all the issues with university institutions raised above, there is a huge amount of work universities and art schools themselves have undertaken in terms of widening participation addressing student access,
retention and attainment and most recently progression beyond graduation. Those discourses touch upon but don’t follow through the crucial questions relevant to the thinking of The Margate School. These crucial questions are those that query the nature, place, application of learning and all the social power configurations inherent in the structures and processes that
underpin and facilitate learning. In many ways ours is a holistic approach recognising the social, economic, cultural and environmental challenges that condition and concern us, whilst it attempts to resist the somehow inevitable rise of bureaucracy and managerial culture in education, in Higher Education, in art schools, whilst recognising the value of the developing professionalism and innovation potential. The Margate School also looks to appreciate the entrepreneurial and personal culture of an art school as a counterbalance to the rise of managerialism. The Margate School is in a way an outlier. In statistics, an outlier is observed as a data point that lies outside the overall pattern of a distribution. Often the presence of an outlier indicates some sort of problem and tends to be excluded from analysis as it might not fit the model used in a piece of research, or is an assumed error in measurement. Yet, in the arts and art education outliers are a key part of our world, our experience in practice and as such The Margate School and similar organisations and groups can provide art schools and departments ‘locked’ in a pressurised Higher Education system with an opportunity to create ‘breakout’ points be it for learning, practice or research. The challenge will be to create an amicable structure locally, nationally or indeed internationally.
Being informal education also does not automatically equate to limited learning taking place, but it can and what for many it does means is to be excluded from many the social, cultural and economic benefits that one’s society has in store for its people through formal education environments. The other side of that coin (especially compulsory education) can also mean the nurturing of a system that produces a compliant “army of citizens”, hence the deschooling debate at least since Ivan Illich’s exposé Deschooling Society in 1971. One has to remember that the art school was often the home for the non-conforming student, the outliers!
As Paulo Freire (1921- 1997) pointed out “Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the
transformation of their world.” Here the learner becomes aware at the very moment of learning that she has entered the realm of verstehen, partaking in the onset of erudition, of enlightenment. In The Margate School we aim to extend that learning potential, we seek to do this in the expanded field, through art practice, philosophical reflection, scientific exploration, technological enquiry, engagement in today’s environmental challenges and sociological investigations. Learning as a practice of freedom in a way demands a measure of openness. Josef Beuys once said “on the contrary, I always need to take as a starting point, that a human brother, who knows nothing of these things – maybe knows nothing at all of art – that I can learn infinitely much from him. Otherwise I will be on the wrong path from the very outset”. Being now on the outside, the ‘outlier’, it seems to me that some of these really important considerations about arts education, practice, learning, freedom and humanity are de-emphasised in educational institutions, whereas at The Margate School they are the foundation not just in words but in all or least most of our decision-making. We struggle and endlessly grapple in our consideration, is it right or have made a mistake, is it a compromise that has gone too far? We strive to care, open up the School and in doing so the community and that makes us vulnerable, but necessarily so. In recognition of this ideal I wrote the below as part of an intervention.
Peel Back
Let’s drop all our inhibitions
our fears, our show of erudition
Let’s, for a moment, ignore our plight
our dire straits, the stress, the fights
Let’s suspend all etiquette, manner, style
all desires, views, all we want to beguile
Let’s pull back bare our economy
our freedom, politics, autonomy
Let’s tear open our wounds
remain silent as we feel what looms
Let’s lose all that what we call identity
all facades, make up, gentility
Let’s cut off all sensibilities, the sane
all inferiority, the superior, the mundane
Let’s ignore all questions that seek to edify
that answer our call to justify
Let’s remove us from our status
our role play, classification, hiatus
Let’s peel back all to the point of utmost vulnerability
One step away from nothingness and infallibility
Let’s peel back for a split second
as disturbing mirrors beckoned…
What now?
Uwe Derksen
The Margate School
February 2025