Understanding sustainability in school arts provision: stakeholder perspectives in Australian primary schools

Although the notion of sustainability is popular in rhetoric associated with arts programmes in Australian schools, shared meanings are lacking. References to sustainability may be rooted in any combination of pragmatic, economic and/or health bases. We chose to investigate what stakeholders involved in the provision of school-based arts practices understood about the notion of sustainability in the specific context of those programmes. To do this we interviewed a range of school professionals and asked them to explain how sustainability related to arts programmes in their schools. In this article we present the particular elements that stakeholders described as being sustainable. Five categories emerged through inductive analysis that included: benefits for students, benefits for the schools, the arts programmes themselves, physical artefacts, and the capacity for schools to provide arts experiences. Notable were descriptions of sustainability from several schools that saw ongoing programmes as less important than brief arts experiences that students could carry into other areas of their life. Results illustrate the diversity of understandings about what should be sustained from arts engagement for 27 professionals in Australian Catholic Primary Schools. An ‘exposure’ model of arts programmes is articulated that captures the sustainable benefits beyond sustained involvement in and provision of arts programmes in primary schools.