The Raploch

North Berwick is the most beautiful town in Scotland. As of last month, that’s official. But I didn’t know that when, for the first time in my life, I headed there last week. Previously, for me it had been nothing more than a cluster of buildings glimpsed from the train. So I was glad to have the chance to see up close how fully justified that new title seems to be. I think a long weekend break may be in order soon…

I was visiting this paragon among communities to take part in two workshops at the annual conference of ‘Vocal’, the Voice of Chief Officers of Cultural and Leisure Services in Scotland—or, to put it another way, those senior Council staff whose brief includes the arts.

It was a very good conference. The setting, the grand, Victorian, Marine Hotel, might have suggested some sort of indulgent jamboree (and it is true that some delegates were rather late retiring on the Thursday night), but the proceedings were focused, practical, realistic, and, at times, genuinely inspirational. Culture Minister Mike Russell opened proceedings on the second day with a typically canny speech. Given his own professional and personal credentials as a cultural practitioner–as producer and writer–Mike Russell should need no aides to prompt him on the priorities of his remit. Instead, he has the knack of pulling the rug out from under his audiences, by presenting back to the cultural sector those very arguments which that sector has been trying for years to get across to politicians, at both local and national level.

So, on this occasion, he picked up on the debates at the conference about how well—or badly–Local Authorities measure the positive impacts of the sizeable sums they spend on cultural provision, and he turned the argument on its head: think, he said, what the negative impacts would be of not investing in culture. In what is clearly going to be a long period of limited resources, elected members may think that they need to concentrate on what are crudely termed ‘frontline’ services. But they will do this at their peril. Not investing adequately in cultural provision may prove to be much more costly in the long run.

The workshop I was participating in then offered an immediate and arresting example of the power of this argument. The Raploch, in Stirling, is the location for what may possibly be the single most important cultural experiment in Scotland today: Sistema Scotland, or, to give it its local title, the Big Noise.

As is now well known, El Sistema is the extraordinary Venezuelan programme which now involves over 100,000 children and young people, mostly from impoverished and deprived backgrounds, in over 100 youth and 55 children’s orchestras. Its flagship internationally is the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, whose appearance at the 2007 BBC Proms was, by general agreement, among the most exciting concerts ever broadcast.

Sistema Scotland is the brainchild of Richard Holloway, Chair of the current Joint Board of the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen. It is being piloted in the Raploch partly, I suspect, to test out concerns that such a remarkably successful programme might not necessarily transfer to a first world country with different kinds and degrees of deprivation. Fortunately, just 18 months in, the first signs are highly encouraging, with half of all the children of nursery and primary school age in the Raploch already involved, by their own choice, in the programme, and much anecdotal evidence of the huge impact on individual children, and their parents.

But the killer argument may yet be the economic one. The cost of training each of the children involved in the programme is about £2,000 per year. But with the cost of each young person caught up in the criminal justice system easily running to six figures, Sistema Scotland only needs to divert two or three such young people a year from a future path of ASBOs and Young Offender Institutions to justify its costs in the hardest audit terms.

And the other intriguing aspect of Sistema Scotland, as of its parent programme back in Venezuela, is that it works precisely because classical music is the focus. In other words, an artform often dismissed as elitist, old-fashioned and irrelevant, may yet prove one of the most important tools in the processes of social change and personal growth. The reasons are self-evident: appreciating classical music, let alone playing it, requires concentration and patience. Playing in an orchestra requires high degrees of both self-discipline and team spirit. Already, in children as young as five or six, the Big Noise is showing major behavioural changes in terms of reducing hyperactivity and disruptive behaviour, and encouraging focused attention and awareness of others. The X Factor, this is not.

Classical music saves the world? Perhaps. But in the medium term let’s hope at least that the Big Noise helps the Raploch inhabitants to feel as proud of living there as the good people of North Berwick must be in being part of Scotland’s ‘most beautiful town’.

© Robert Livingston, 2009