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.
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.
My career in Lincolnshire was managing the Lincolnshire Schools Improvements Service's Arts Service which delivered CPD, regular activities into schools across the county. This was a programme I delivered and managed growing branded and sustained support for children and young people including: The Menu, The LAFTAs, The Young Journalist Academy, BFI Film Academy, and many many more - not forgetting the annual summer Arts Festivals held in the summer at the Lincolnshire Showground. I was made redundant from this role in 2015 and it was then I founded Paradigm Arts - a dedicated vehicle to rescue the support from an untimely end.
Returning to take up a post to lead the Cultural Education Partnership in Lincolnshire feels very much like a return home.
Early Progress...
February 2025
Once in post it became clear that there was a real need to establish some core principles in order to begin building the strategic ambition for the LCEP. These core principles were developed and framed by best practice examples I have observed across the UK and my own knowledge and experiences of Lincolnshire's needs and challenges over the last 20 years. They create a sensible point of departure and will serve as a guide for activity and action to follow
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 implemented elsewhere, as well as balanced against the idiosyncrasies of living, working and learning in Lincolnshire.
The strategy needed to heed what has happened before and what a future strategic vision might need to resemble as we build for success!
A lot of my early work was spent reviewing the reports and research documents, some of which are available in the research section of this site.
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.
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.
To inspire and engage with schools as well as the creative and cultural supply chain I developed the idea of the Culture Collider - a wilful attempt to increase the frequency of opportunities for schools to engage with opportunities and importantly to refocus our understanding why these collisions (opportunities) posses so much value. Following the model from CERN our intention is to increase the frequency and to actively promote the value and magic that is the debris from these collisions.