The art of empowerment

Thursday 17 July 2025

Falinge Park High School in Rochdale delivered data-informed creative wellbeing activities with its pupils and community as part of Curious Minds’ Artsmark #Beewell programme.

Simon De Courcey is the school’s Director of Cultural Capital. Here he reflects on the impact and legacy of their involvement for pupils, the school and its community.

The opportunity

I was excited to be involved in Artsmark #Beewell from the outset. Our school had been participating in the #Beewell Greater Manchester schools wellbeing survey since 2022. We welcomed the opportunity to use longitudinal data from that survey to shape our priorities and curriculum provision. 

From what we’d seen of the data so far, our pupil’s access to arts and cultural activities was of particular concern in the post-pandemic landscape. We’d already started to strengthen our schools cultural offer and were interested in how we could use creative engagement as a tool to improve student wellbeing. 

We were committing to an extended programme of work, running from 2023 to 2025, but I wasn’t interested in scratching the surface of the issues at stake. Our involvement in the Artsmark #Beewell programme would support us to deep dive into the survey data at micro, district and regional levels and develop wellbeing responses that would make a real and lasting difference for our school and its pupils. 

The programme allowed us to invest in student (and staff) leadership and commissioning skills, using the RSPH accredited ‘Encouraging Creative Activity’ learning module to train a small cohort of qualified young leaders who would go on to be integral to project decision-making and successful delivery. It was also a platform for developing new or strengthened co-creation partnerships with stakeholders from our local community. 

Woven throughout this was Falinge Park School’s journey towards the Artsmark Award – an Arts Council England accreditation for schools that offers a framework for excellence and ambition in creative and cultural provision.

Following the data… creatively

Interrogating our school’s #Beewell data together, our Creative Health Champion students and key staff made the decision to focus on the following priorities for our commissioned activities:

• Developing community cohesion and the tolerance of others 
• Developing participation in arts and cultural activities
• Developing optimism and self-esteem

These three priorities remained constant throughout the development of our micro-commission and, later, of our neighbourhood commission. 

The micro-commission saw us engage the expertise of Skylight Circus Arts in Rochdale to deliver a ‘Train the Trainer’ workshop to 19 students, who then cascaded their newly learnt skills to wider pupil cohorts. 

This commission led to the creation of practical training videos for long-term use and a special circus kit that is now managed by our young ‘Circus Champions’. Peer-to-peer modelling meant that a series of lunchtime activities could be offered to targeted students, growing confidence, self-esteem and social networks across year groups.

I got to be really collaborative, not only with the other year elevens that are part of this project, but also the younger years … seeing what influences them and what they really like about nature and how that that links to wellbeing. 

FPHS Pupil

Commissioning with ambition

The success of the micro-commission emboldened staff and our Creative Health Champions to try something totally new and ambitious for a much larger neighbourhood commission.

Ergon Environmental Theatre Company was engaged to create eight original audio pieces. They would be assisted by the school’s Nature Group, key staff and Petrus, Rochdale – a local charity working to end homelessness. A series of one-day workshops saw students explore themes of the environment, wellbeing and connection to create striking poems, stories and music we called ‘Sowing Sounds’.

Sowing Sounds at FPHS 

That activity was further woven into our creation of a substantial ‘Arts, Words and Wellbeing Garden’ on the school site - the development of which was made possible by generous funding and in-kind support from several organisations, both local and national. The Sowing Sounds audio pieces have been integrated into the Arts Words and Wellbeing garden using sound installation equipment. In this way, the targeted activities of the Artsmark #Beewell programme became part of something even bigger that will serve the school for years to come.

Young people championing change

Alongside their work on the neighbourhood commission, our Creative Health Champions were exceptionally busy advocating and making change. 

They were featured in a case study for the 2024 impact report of Rochdale’s local cultural education partnership, Create Rochdale. They also engaged with local radio shows to discuss MIND’s ‘Five Ways of Wellbeing’ and led Transition Day workshops in school, speaking about the importance of mental health with incoming pupils. They worked alongside staff to provide teaching resources and video assets to support wider classroom delivery across the school, and the logos they generated were incorporated into our final garden design.

Achieving lasting outcomes for all

Through Artsmark #Beewell, the wellbeing benefits of cultural engagement have been made clear to all stakeholders at Falinge Park High School. Students recognised how they can be empowered change-makers - shaping both their school and their community. The creative activities we commissioned improved the ability of young people to articulate their emotions and have helped to destigmatise discussions around mental health, self-esteem and resilience. 

By embracing MIND’s ‘Five Ways Of Wellbeing’ following the Creative Heath Champions’ advocacy, school staff have felt the benefit of having a common frame of reference, both in the classroom and in our wider school offer. Governors have noted the impact the programme has made on student leadership and the pride of students discussing their achievements.

I feel more confident, ready to take on new challenges and help my community more. 

FPHS pupil

Use of data-driven priorities explicitly helped to sharpen the aims, processes and outcomes of our creative partnerships with external organisations and set expectations for future co-created work.

Our school-level #Beewell data highlighted that we need to help our young people learn a more complex vocabulary for emotional articulation. This understanding has, in turn, shaped our Artsmark journey and what’s yet to come. Students need to be allowed more time to reflect on the impact and wellbeing benefits of their cultural engagement, and we strive to communicate this to parents, families and the communities we serve - explicitly linking it with employment viability, communication and creative skills.

Our intention now is to now make our schools young Creative Health Champions more visible - amplifying their voices and ideas across the borough and beyond, to put them at the heart of strategic cultural planning and place-making in Rochdale. We want more of our area’s young people and families to feel the joy of seeing, doing, learning and thinking about creative activity - embracing a lifelong cultural journey that nourishes them as individuals and enriches the community.