Belgium/ 8.3 Arts and cultural education  

8.3.2 Arts in schools

Flemish Community

The Flemish community has various tools at its disposal to achieve the policy objectives set out for arts and cultural education in primary and secondary education. Tools to prepare, implement and evaluate the arts and cultural education policy objectives are:

• funding criteria for initiatives on a project or a structural basis within and outside school hours (applying to schools, arts education organisations and cultural institutions);
• funding schemes, such as dynamo3 provided by CANON Cultural Unit;
• assuring quality management, for example by using attainment targets; and
• support at educational and didactic levels.

The Flemish government recognises that a consistent line of reference is necessary for integrated arts and cultural education in primary and secondary education. In order to create such a framework, Flanders is participating in a four-year research project of the University of Groningen. In addition to the work done by the Culture and Education Committees, these research results can contribute to embedding arts and cultural education continuously and structurally in the education curriculum.

Although schools are supervised by national education policies, local or regional institutions, education networks, umbrella organisations and by the school board, they - and particularly their teachers - can largely decide for themselves how to organise and implement the curriculum. The range and quality of expressive arts therefore mainly depends on the school. However, the attainment targets, including those for expressive arts, act as a directive for primary education as the government considers these minimum goals of knowledge, insight, skills and attitudes necessary and achievable for a certain pupil population (source: http://www.comace.org).

Your Comments on this Chapter?