Cultural Rucksack

Our ambition is to improve the coherence and impact of cultural education in Nottingham by strengthening partnerships between schools and local arts and cultural organisations and venues.
The Cultural Rucksack is a new initiative in partnership with Nottingham's Education Improvement Board (EIB) to collaborate in creating a well-coordinated, sustainable and progressive city-wide offer for all young people throughout their time at school, supporting schools and partners in their delivery of high quality creative and cultural learning. 

The 5 Underpinning Principles of Nottingham’s Cultural Rucksack: 

• Creativity: encouraging all young people to develop their creative talent
• Citizenship: linking the Cultural Rucksack to ideas of active citizenship and participation
• Place: students should learn about, identify with and feel part of their own city.
• Equity: linking the offer to an entitlement for all, not just the more advantaged. 
• Sustainability: strengthening partnerships that will move beyond projects and dependence on individual relationships, to develop high quality experiences that support and extend the curriculum. 

The Cultural Rucksack is more than just a ‘tick list’ or ‘bucket list’ of activities and experiences. It is an organising metaphor for arts professionals and teachers to work together to understand and develop cultural capital.   

It recognises that each of us has our own ‘cultural rucksack’ filled with valuable experiences related to our heritage, ethnicity, preferences and talents – we pull different things out of our rucksack at different times in our lives  

It provides a focus for joint planning about what should go into the rucksack, and values what different partners can contribute.   

It is easy to understand and publicise - helping make the case for resources.