LCEP Lead Producer: Progress Blog
This is a blog space which will track the progress I make as the Lead Producer of the LCEP
New Beginnings...
In January of 2025 I was appointed as the Lead Producer for the LCEP in Lincolnshire. This was an opportunity for me to take up the challenge of delivering a powerful strategic service to support children and young people.
The post is managed by Lincolnshire Music Service is funded through Arts Council England and will run until July 2026. The post technically affords 1 day a week of my time, term-time only. The job at hand however requires more than that and the time investment and commitment I am personally making to this endeavour exceeds this.
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I am a passionate advocate for the value, importance and significance of cultural and creative activity in the lives of children and have been since I returned to Lincolnshire in 2003.
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My career in Lincolnshire was managing the Lincolnshire Schools Improvements Service's New Opportunities Arts project which delivered regular activities into clustered schools across the county. This was a programme I delivered and managed and eventually evolved into a subscription programme called the Arts Menu.
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Returning to take up a post to lead the Cultural Education Partnership feels very much like a return home.
Early Progress...
February 2025
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I first set out trying to establish the core principles and strategic ambitions for the LCEP. These were developed and framed by best practice examples I have observed across the UK and my own knowledge and expectation for Lincolnshire's needs and challenges.
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The work on setting up the Mission & Vision was an important step in beginning to define what an LCEP means for Lincolnshire and importantly this needed to be contextualised by what has been achieved and implanted elsewhere as well as balanced against what are the idiosyncrasies of living, working and learning in Lincolnshire.
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The strategy needed to heed what has happened before and what a future strategic vision might need to resemble as we build for success!
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A lot of my early work was spent reviewing the reports and research documents which are available in the research section of this site.
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The shape of things to come...?
In January of 2025 I was appointed as the Lead Producer for the LCEP in Lincolnshire. This was an opportunity for me to take up the challenge of delivering a powerful strategic service to support children and young people.
After taking time to research and indeed visit with a wide range of individuals, groups, businesses and communities - work began in earnest looking at developing a way to engage educators and cultural facilitators in a process that would provide meaningful outcomes for children and young people and that would also enable us to test some strategic principles for commissioning and resourcing activity.
It is fair to say that the discretionary budget available to develop projects and resource activity is 'modest' and this requires us to be very focused in the way we approach and tackle the issues around LCEPs and the lively existing networks of opportunity.
A key part of the journey to date has been engaging with regional partner organisations such as Platform31 Captivate ChalleNGe
to get an informed view of what is taking place across the region and suggestions, ideas and operating principles for LCEPs which seem to have greater self efficacy and organisational resilience.
Empowering Growth
A key part of the ambition within Lincolnshire's LCEP is the drive to empower. It is my contention that the LCEP should not seek to create a demand for itself instead it should empower the 2 sectors of education and creativity & culture to integrate better and maximise the outcomes they can inspire.
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When looking at this conundrum it become clear that a key area of attention was the need to address the relationship between SUPPLY & DEMAND - in particular the DEMAND end of the spectrum and its clear correlation with schools, multi academy trusts and educators