Project Background

The Highlands and Islands of Scotland have a small population (369,317) scattered over an area the size of Belgium. Access to training, quality childcare facilities and the arts is therefore difficult, due to remoteness and poor public transport. Employment for local artists is also difficult to find in their own communities and training and skills development for those artists is rarely available to enable them to work with new client groups.
 

Stimulating Creativity was launched by HI~Arts in September 1997 to run as a year-long pilot project to explore the potential benefits of linking the arts and childcare. Partnerships were created between local musicians, visual artists and drama practitioners and childcare groups in four remote areas of the Highlands and Islands.
 

HI~Arts worked again in consortium with the childcare sector in the more remote areas of the Highlands and Islands to provide a rolling programme of training for childcare workers and artists, with the emphasis on ‘training the trainers’, under the name of ArtsPlay. New skills and increased confidence enabled them to nurture children’s development and to stimulate their creativity through early and continued involvement in the arts.
 

A pool of six local artists in each area worked with Gaelic and English medium playgroups, out of school clubs, childminding groups, Sradagan (Gaelic medium out of school clubs) and nurseries, with an age group range of 3 to 12 years – in each of the ten Local Enterprise Company areas of the Highlands and Islands.

The project was delivered over two years in the Western Isles, Orkney, Shetland, Caithness, Sutherland, Ross and Cromarty, Inverness, Nairn, Moray, Badenoch and Strathspey, Skye and Lochalsh, Lochaber and Argyll and Bute, and started in Spring 2002.
 

The project attracted funding from The Community Fund, Highlands and Islands Enterprise Network, Esmee Fairbairn Foundation and the Local Childcare Partnerships in the Highlands and Islands.

When the pilot project was completed, there was considerable demand from childcare organisations in the rest of the Highlands and Islands to take part in a similar project and experience the benefits, which resulted from the pilot project.
 
The major benefits included:

• Enhancing children's social, intellectual, personal and physical development.
• Increased access for communities in rural areas to arts activities, arts opportunities and new resources.
• Improved level of skills in the childcare sector and professional development for artists.
• Increased employment opportunities for artists in their own communities.