Barking and Dagenham: New Town Culture

New Town Culture is a curatorial project within the Culture and Heritage Service that integrates arts and culture into Children’s and Adults Social Care. It promotes a ‘Creative Social Work’ approach that has been adopted into our practice framework, using training and artist-led interventions to counter transactional practices and harness the transformative role of culture in people’s lives.

New Town Culture has worked in partnership with Goldsmiths University, Create, South London Gallery, Tate, Serpentine, BDYD, Arc Theatre, Company Drinks and The Foundling Museum. It is a demonstration of innovative and progressive practice which makes it attractive and interesting to practice social work in Barking and Dagenham.

Social care accounts for over 75 per cent of the council’s budget and with an increase in the complexity and urgency of resident needs, such as children's mental health and domestic abuse, there is a huge amount of pressure on social work services. We often hear social workers are faced with overwhelming workloads, extensive and bureaucratic systems and staff shortages, which leads to unambitious, box-ticking forms of social work – dissatisfying for social workers and service users alike.

In Barking and Dagenham there is an ambition to do social work in a different way, by returning social care to its radical, relational roots. This is evident in the CARES practice framework, giving a clear commitment from the leadership team that there is an objective to see social workers becoming less process-driven and more creative and curious in their work.

In response, New Town Culture was set up in 2018 to explore how artistic and cultural experiences can reframe the work of social care and support adults and children in need of social care services. NTC believes that creative work in social care can support systems and processes to be more engaging and accessible, to uncover knowledge about people’s needs, build new relationships, build confidence, shift fixed narratives for service users and provide a space for exploring cultural identity.

The project aims to support social workers and carers to think and work creatively, through training programmes, resources and tools, and knowledge exchange sessions with people using social care services, staff, and cultural practitioners.

Below is a quote by a social worker working in London borough of Barking and Dagenham sharing how their experience of working with New Town Culture helped bring culture and creativity into their practices and systems.

We can get very blinkered in social work – monotone social work. We need to recognise we are working with different children with different cultures and needs. We can still do direct work, but we can do this in a more creative and engaging way. I was sceptical at first about the idea of art and social work – how will I have time? But now I feel I understand how to adapt social work so it’s more fun and engaging for children.

Supervising Social Worker, London Borough of Barking and Dagenham

Since 2018 New Town Culture has had a significant impact within the borough, NTC have worked with over 1,500 children and young people and over 800 staff have taken part in training. Over 120 interventions for young people have been delivered, including:

• Creative mentoring programmes for young people in the leaving care service
• Podcast making clubs with the youth justice service
• Dance and drama workshop with Arc Theatre and BDYD
• Weekly after-school art clubs for whole foster families led by creative practitioners
• Gardening clubs at The White House for care experienced young people
• Creative interventions led by artists during contact time for parents and birth children
• Poetry and spoken word clubs for young women and girls with experience of exploitation
• LGBTQIA+ art club for young people with a connection to social care services
• Empowerment projects for boys and young men within the youth justice and vulnerable adolescent service
• Print-making workshops for care experienced young people
• Radio Ballads, a large-scale project and exhibition led by Serpentine Gallery. It was later nominated for the Turner Prize award 2023
• Over 80 CPD and training opportunities for staff members through the various training programmes, large-scale away days, exhibitions and site-specific designs.

The innovative and ambitious approach to creative social work has been admired by cultural partners and other local authorities locally and nationally. The work of NTC has also had a positive impact on internal projects within the culture and heritage service.

NTC have worked closely with Goldsmiths University to understand the learning of the programme. In 2020 and 2022 a detailed report was carried out by staff in the Social Therapeutic and Community department at Goldsmiths that focussed on establishing a theoretical framework for NTC and providing a language to describe NTC’s approach and ambitions, which is grounded in theory that is relevant to art and social care. The five creative processes identified were:

• Hopeful disruption (artistic acts which challenge conventional ways of talking and acting within social care spaces and cultural spaces)
• Radical hospitality (welcoming others warmly and sharing control over relationships, spaces and boundaries)
• Ceremony (repetition, use of symbols and rituals as a part of everyday life to celebrate an individual’s identity and culture)
• Unlocking culture/s (opening people’s eyes to new possibilities and ways of thinking, doing and being – with the aim of giving them new sources of belonging and self-worth)
• Not knowing (not always knowing the case history of young people and allow young people to be seen in a different way.

Contact: [email protected]