Dear ICEnet members

Welcome to the first official ICEnet newsflash! With nearly a hundred members now, our community is growing nicely.  There are creative professionals who attended the International Creative Practitioners Forum in Vilnius in May (which marked the official launch of ICEnet online platform); those involved in Creative Partnerships Norway; artists involved in the exchange Artists in Creative Education – Pakistan and UK; and…

An blogpost by a creative practitioner explaining us why it is worth the effort to work with young children and the arts. An inspiring list of six reasons:

1. Children are ready for arts. Now.

Children are born receptive, ready to learn.

At birth, we have almost all of the 100 billion neurons that make up our brains, and about a quarter of the connections between them – synapses. But almost all of these synapses are formed by the age of around…

CultureNet Flanders, a Belgian audience development agency, has developed a toolkit  to help networks identify their relative strengths and weaknesses, their different audiences and how they can collaborate to create a comprehensive offer for local families. This is a more elaborated version of the toolkit the Arts Council England and Audiences UK created a couple of years ago that provides a range of resources and guidance to enable cultural organisations to engage more…

Paul Collard's first blog is now on the Creativity, Culture and Education website – to read the blog click here.