Art Workshops at the V&A Museum for Children with Special Needs
ArtSocial is happy to continue supporting the V&A’s multi-sensory and interactive sessions for children with special educational needs and disability
The Victoria and Albert Museum is the world’s leading museum of art, design and performance, housing over 2.3 million objects and spanning over 5,000 years of human creativity.
The V&A holds many of the UK's national collections and some of the greatest resources for the study of architecture, furniture, fashion, textiles, photography, sculpture, painting, jewellery, glass, ceramics, book arts, Asian art and design, theatre and performance.
It is important to make their national collections available and accessible to all through varied and specialist programmes tailored to meet the needs of different audiences.
Since 2017, ArtSocial Foundation funds an innovative programme for SEND students enabling more than 100 children with special educational needs and disabilities per year to access the V&A’s outstanding collection in a session tailored to their needs.
Multi-sensory and interactive, the sessions for students with SEND are based around some of the most popular objects in the collections and encourage exploration through hands-on tactile objects and activities. Facilitated by an artist educator with specialist SEND training, the sessions also incorporate hands-on making linked directly to the object they have explored.
In particular, during only the last academic year, 172 students with SEND aged 6 -19 years from 9 different schools have been given the opportunity to explore the V&A Museum art collection through 9 free multi-sensory interactive sessions, helping them to foster and develop their creative thinking; ludic skills and fine motor skills.
“They were learning [for the] first time in [a] museum, in front of real objects”- Teacher
“It was lovely, the children gained so much from it, I think they will talk about it for a while”- Teacher
