 Good afternoon and a very warm welcome to the Festival of Politics 2021. I'm Claire Adams in MSP. I'm convener of the Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee. I would like to welcome you all to this special online edition of the Festival of Politics in partnership with the Parliament's think tank, Scotland's Future Forum. This afternoon's panel is titled, Why Culture is key to good health and wellbeing, and is held in partnership with the Edinburgh International Culture Summit Foundation. We are delighted that many people are able to join us online today, and I look forward to hearing your comments and questions as we get into our discussion. So how important is culture in the health and wellbeing of society? Thanks to a growing body of clinical and neurological research, there is increasing evidence that participation in cultural activity offers revolutionary benefits for a range of medical conditions, from dementia and singing, to Parkinson's disease and dance. The social and economic benefits of arts and healthcare are still being explored and understood by policy makers, the public and the medical community. So exactly how powerful are the arts and culture in addressing society's health and wellbeing? This panel aims to address these issues in the next 60 minutes, so do stay with us and enjoy. We are delighted that you are able to join us and take part, and I would encourage you all to use the event chat function to introduce yourselves if you could put your first name and your geographical location and pose any questions that you would like for the panel. I am absolutely delighted to be joined today by David Leventhal, programme director, dance for PD and former member of the Mark Morris dance group. Sarah Munro, the director of Baltic Gateshead, who has over 20 years' experience of cultural leadership, is also a board member of Scotland's future forum, and Professor Raymond MacDonald, Professor of Music, Psychology and Improvisation at Edinburgh University. He is also a chartered health psychologist and also a saxophonist and composer. There will be an opportunity for our online audience to put questions and views through the event. If you would like to make a contribution, enter them in the question and answer box and make sure to state your name and where you are this afternoon. I think that that has been covered twice in the script that I have in front of me, sorry. I would like to begin now by asking each of our panellists to summarise, and this is my first prompt to the day, coincidiously or possible, how you would summarise the respect and importance that arts and culture currently command in the world of health and wellbeing in the UK and further afield. Sarah Munro, if you could outline your thoughts first, please. Certainly. Hello and thank you for having me here today. It's really good to join you all from Gateshead. I'm slightly outside the Scottish borders but not very far. You'll have to slightly forgive me. I've just come out of a very horrible, flwy, chesty, coffee thing. I hope that it feels quite unusual for me just to be speaking out loud, but to be precise and concise, I started working in the arts almost 25, if not slightly more, years ago. Actually, my first deep worry into work was in Edinburgh and it was within an organisation called Artlink. We worked with some of the most marginalised communities within Edinburgh, so working with people with quite significant experiences of disability, of mental health concerns and of long-term health needs. One of the earliest interventions that I got involved in was when, at the tight of the AIDS crisis with AIDS and HIV, there was clear evidence of the importance of building responses that involved creative participation to support people's health and wellbeing. Right back in the days of the first milestone house when it was built in Edinburgh, a facility that's no longer required, thank goodness, has been something that has been recognised and embedded. We've seen increased over the years of working in that front line of the practice of arts. We've really seen that significant impact. We've seen real specialism develop, particularly around things like Alzheimer's and music, around dance and around visual-created participation. In my trying to be precise and concise, one would also say that it has not nearly gone far enough. We've seen this evidence. There are bodies and bodies of evidence that are thesis and PhDs. We're now at a stage where even Public Health England in 2016 started to publish a report to try and provide that framework to show what the evidence was. Any of us who do it and witness it on that front line can absolutely are convinced and can see that it's transformative in many ways. I suppose for me the quote just quickly from Public Health England back in 2016 that they were convinced that arts had the great potential to contribute to integrated person-centred health and social care, that the arts can be used for prevention to support independent living and to meet the physical, mental and social needs of those with long-term health care. For me, I would go even further. We've begun to articulate quite clearly where it can help with very particular mental or physical health problems, illnesses, but where we now need to see a significant investment and an increase in the way that we're trusting what arts can do is around young people and mental health. I think that it's the public health concern that is most pushing and challenging at the moment and one that needs to enable us to bring and focus more arts and activity into building, because we have got real proof that that reduces anxiety, that it creates social connectivity, that it builds people's social, cultural capital and aligns with a lot of those social and confidence building that's required at the basis of any great society. For me, the arts and health care is fundamentally needs to be invested not just for the individual but for the good of our communities, the health of our communities and even further the health of our societies. I see it as being something that's required as a fundamental for democracy. Where do we come together to listen, to understand, to build awareness of others? We do that through active participation in classes, workshops, programmes, activities but also through that very quiet contemplative going to the museum, looking at that object, sitting in front of that painting, slowing ourselves down. There's so much evidence around all of that that, in my book, yes, we've gone a long way but I would like to see creativity and cultural participation being utterly embedded across every single department of government for the challenges that we have of the next 10 years. So far as to say, there's also very low carbon or it can be done in a very low carbon way. There's a few areas that I'm very interested in around there. Thank you, Sarah, for taking all the government boxes there about what the key issues are going forward. Can I back in, David, next, please? Sure. Thank you so much for having me here and Sarah, thank you for your really thoughtful and compelling words. To add to Sarah's comments, I want to acknowledge that the sort of traditional viewpoint is that health and well-being lives within the domain of health care and health care provision and is the primary responsibility of medical professionals. I think over the past 20 years we've started to see a shift in which health care professionals are acknowledging that they can't do it alone. We're starting to see some real demographic challenges in how in many cases the conditions related to mental health, which are dramatically increased of course by the pandemic, as well as conditions related to aging. We are all living longer, which is a good thing, but our health care system and network, wherever we are, whether you're talking about the NHS or the American model, I'm based in New York, we are strained to deal comprehensively with issues related to aging, whether that's neurodegenerative conditions, physical conditions, mental health, social isolation. Even within health care, there's a realization that we can't go it alone, we need to build partnerships and the most obvious choice in those partnerships is those working in arts and culture because I think even in health care there's a realization that it's not just about what's the matter with me, it's also about what matters to me. For many of us around the world, what matters to me is art and my culture, whatever that is, and a sense of connection to others. I would say that the UK and Scotland in particular has emerged as a leader in envisioning ways that policy can incorporate arts and culture into health and well-being. Part of that is through social prescribing, some of it is through other policy changes, some of it is through creating reports like public health, and also the World Health Organization Europe came out with a report in 2019 that did a summary of research in the area of arts, health and well-being, and really made a compelling argument for more provision. But there is a long way to go. I think one way to look at this is to understand that in my view at least, arts and culture is to health and well-being what solar power is to a livable planet. It's abundant, it's everywhere we are as humans, but we have to figure out a better way to tap that energy, to tap arts and culture in the service of health and well-being. We know it's there, we know the research shows that it's effective, we need more research, and we need to figure out better ways to tap that incredible resource that's all around us to create a more sustainable health infrastructure so that the issues that I talked about earlier, mental health issues of ageing, neuro-generative disease, are better addressed and overall we're promoting better quality of life. Finally, Raymond, thank you. Oh, thanks very much. I think I would just like to echo both Sarah and David's points and emphasise that there's now unequivocal evidence that cultural engagement has an absolutely fundamental important role in our life and also an important effect on our health and well-being. We are all creative, we are all musical. Every human being has a biological and social guarantee of musicianship, and that's not a vague utopian ideal. We look at the neurological evidence, we can look at the psychological evidence and the cultural evidence, and at all points to this fact that to be creative to engage in culture is a defining part of our humanity. It creates community, it bonds us together, and we express what it means to be human by being creative and by working together. A couple of examples. The earliest communication between a newborn baby and its parent is essentially musical and improvisational. Colin Travarthon's work at Edinburgh University showed through very fine-grained microanalysis of how a baby bonds with its new, with its parent, that the movements are musical, the movements are rhythmic, they're dance-based, they have more in common with music than with natural language. So the earliest and most important bonding relationship of our life is partly musical and improvisational and dance-based. The patterns of interaction laid down in those early weeks and months will influence for the rest of our lives, and they're essentially musical. A parent interacts with their new baby creatively and improvisationally. It's fascinating that, in many respects, many people will say, I love music but I'm not musical. I love art but I can't paint. I love dance but I can't dance. I think one of the challenges that we have is to empower people, to make people feel that they are creative, to change people's identities, to create healthy cultural identities, healthy cultural creative identities, so that everybody feels that they can engage in culture and everybody feels that they can engage in music. So the relationship between cultural engagement and our sense of self and who we are is very important. Even if we think about how we will listen to music, there's also an incredibly powerful way of maintaining our mood and maintaining our health. We can now access an infinite array of music at any point in the day, but when we decide what do I want to listen to, what music do I want to listen to, we make a number of very sophisticated and highly complex psychological assessments. How do I feel right now? How do I want to feel in five minutes? Who's going to be listening to my music? Am I listening to it by myself on the bus? Am I in my bedroom with my friends? Is this a party? What music is going to meet those psychological and social needs? What's incredible is that we do that very quickly and very sophisticatedly. We're all engaging with music and we're all engaging with music and health in a number of very sophisticated and very efficient ways. In that sense, we're all musical because we're all using music every day in a way to engage with music. We can also all learn to express ourselves through music as well. We can all learn to engage culturally with music and dance. Those are challenges for our education system, for our healthcare system, to create healthy cultural identities, healthy creative identities so that we all feel that we can engage in these activities. I think as both Sarah and David have said, research has made huge advances over the past 20 or 30 years. There's been a revolution in research technology from brain imaging technology that can now show, and I'm quoting Peter Fox, the director of neurology at San Antonio University in Texas. He says, the whole brain lights up like a Christmas tree when we're engaged in music. It's no longer just particular parts of the brain that we used to think were involved in music. When we're engaged culturally, our limbic system, our frontal cortex, the whole brain is engaged in cultural engagement. So, these research advances are providing more evidence to show that the importance that cultural engagement has in music, and I think in terms of thinking of this as a festival of politics, there are political issues for us to engage with as well in terms of increasing access and making sure that people can express themselves and engage fully with cultural activities. That's wonderful. Thank you. Of course, the First Minister did a TED talk a while ago about the ambition for a wellbeing society in Scotland and the programme for government. We see that mentioned many, many times. I'm talking about the mainstreaming of culture across different government areas. I wonder if it would be helpful for the audience and certainly for myself. If we could hear some specific examples of what might happen, I'm aware of a choir that has been done with people with COPD, which has helped their lung function and improved their mental health as a result of that. If we could hear some specific examples, I think that might be quite helpful. I'm going to go to David first, obviously, with your project and Parkinson's disease in particular. Sure. The dance for PD, dance for Parkinson's disease programme, started at the Mark Morris Dance Centre in Brooklyn, New York 20 years ago. The goal was really very simple. It was to share the experience and knowledge that professional dancers had gained in their training and in their process of performing with people living with Parkinson's and their families. The goal really wasn't to create a therapy experience. It was to engage this community in the arts. As Professor McDonald said, it was so much about harnessing what individuals already had in them as musical beings, as creative beings, as physical beings, even though they were living with a challenge, physical challenge, they were able to tap into their own creativity and their own imagination in the service of movement. One of the objectives of this programme was really to, well, I would say it's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we wanted it to be sort of a journey out of the medicalised identity, out of someone feeling that they were living as a patient, and to invite them into the realm of living as an artist, living as a dancer, living in this creative space, and to not think about Parkinson's at all. But as we started to evolve the programme, what we realised is that everything that dancers do in their training, and this applies also to musicians and other artists, everything that dancers do is applicable to something that is starting to change or go away in Parkinson's. So when you look at Parkinson's as a challenge of automaticity, for example, people with Parkinson's have difficulty doing everyday movements like walking or turning, dancers need to think very consciously about all of those motor skills. We need to practice them. We need to use imagery and music to strategically approach physical challenges that come up in the choreography. And so that sort of relationship, that corollary between what dancers do and what people with Parkinson's need to live well became really clear to us within two to three years, and that helped us design the approach and the curriculum that we still use today, and that has been shared with communities all over the world. There are versions of the original Brooklyn programme now in more than 25 countries around the world. What's remarkable to me is not so much the spread of that, but the fact that in each of those places where a dance for Parkinson's class exists, it is reflective of the local individual cultural traditions, music, dance styles that are native to that place. So it's not so much that, you know, this particular form of dance, whether that's ballet or modern or musical theatre, which is what we focus on in New York, that this particular form of dance is helpful for this population. It is that dance and music and community are vital ingredients to people with Parkinson's who are trying to live with dignity, to improve their motor skills, and to build a sense of connection. And that works as well in New York, as it does in Edinburgh, as it does in Pune, India, as it does in Beijing, as it does in Sydney. Because the model is the same, it's the content that has flexibility and changes. So I think to sum up the idea that we started with 20 years ago is unchanged, and that is that it's the artistic nature of what we do that is applicable and is beneficial to people with Parkinson's. As soon as we start to pull away and treat it as solely as therapy or as a medical intervention, we lose the sauce that makes it beneficial. And we've seen this in the research. We've seen research projects that try to desiccate the artistic nature of that experience. And what we found is, as Professor McDonald said, when we think about the brain, the regions of the brain lighting up when we listen to music, we want that effect in the class. And that happens when people are engaged in an artistic experience, not so much when they're thinking of this as a clinical intervention. So we've tried to maintain that. And again, also pulling away from the idea that dance is only about exercise, because I think we in dance have this, we have to really defend the fact that, yes, there are elements of physical exercise embedded in all dance forms. But first and foremost, dance is an art form. It is expressive. It is imaginative. It is creative. It is musical. And it is integrative in terms of bringing all those elements together in the service of expression. So, yes, we certainly say that the elements of physical exercise are embedded within dance, but it's so much more. And it's that so much more that really provides the physical, social, cognitive and emotional benefits for people living with Parkinson's. Thank you. I'm going to come to Professor McDonald's again, Raymond, particularly as someone who maybe has been involved in desiccating a few of these issues over the years. You can maybe give us some examples of the projects that you feel have been particularly influential. Sure, Clare, I'd be delighted to. One of the projects that I work in is with a Glasgow-based organisation called Limelight, and we were involved in working with it. Sorry, Raymond. I've lost your sound. I don't know if it's just me. Can everyone else hear Raymond? I wonder if Raymond's been somehow put on mute. I think what we'll do is I'll jump to Sarah at the moment. If somebody in the moderator could maybe message Raymond, let me know that we can't hear him at the moment. I know that Sarah has already given us an example of the project in Edinburgh, the AIDS project, but I wonder if she could just give us another example of something happening more recently. I'll jump in until we get Raymond back. Actually, I'm going to pull just because David's example was so fantastic and around almost that kind of coming towards the end of life ageing. I'm going to talk about something that has a tiny trajectory because we just started it in 2020, but it's working with babies, 20 babies for 2020. Again, it's some of those very similar principles and we were very concerned. Actually, if you're okay, I'm going to read a couple of very short quotes just about statistics that we're informing our thinking a year ago. We have a lot of children and young people surrounding the institution that I lead here in Newcastle Gateshead. Some of the statistics that we're coming through as a result of Covid are children and young people, particularly those. This is a big issue for us about where, if we want to improve the benefits of society, we need to look at the equity and level up for some of our poorest and most disadvantaged communities when we're talking about any kind of work. I include that when we're focusing on wellbeing. Our children and young people, particularly those living in poverty, have been disproportionately affected by Covid-19. With little recourse to influencer change, they've experienced quite catastrophic impacts. Here's just two quotes. A quarter of pupils, roughly 2.5 million children in the UK had no schooling or tutoring during lockdown. 74 per cent of those at private schools had full days of teaching, and we will all be very aware that our private schools are not cutting back on their arts education. They are increasing it and increasing the investment, but had full days teaching and the proportion was only 38 per cent of state pupils. Now, this is across the whole of the UK. These diminished educational and economic prospects compounded the burden of the pandemic on young people's mental health and wellbeing. In July 2020, the mental health and young people's survey included over 3,500 participants between the ages of 5 and 22 and found that 16 had a probable mental disorder, which had increased from 11 per cent the year before the pandemic. We are seeing a significant increase. One in 10 young people aged 11 to 22 that they often or always felt lonely and 30 per cent reported sleep problems. As a basis for our young people going forward, whether it's in to contribute to the economy, to provide positive citizenship, to contribute in all sorts of ways, that mental health piece for us has become a very important critical piece of work within this wellbeing. Two projects that we've been doing over the last wee while, and one was our 20 babies, so we took 20 parents or carers who had had children and young babies during lockdown or just before lockdown where we could see that there was a significant impact of that isolation, not passing the baby around the community, not shading the conversation and not having as much integrated play. We've just started a year long, and what's been really fascinating is—and it is absolutely based on that—we have two researchers from the university embedded in the partnership with us. We've got a private company who works on product design for babies, for creative products, and there's quite a significant piece of work going on to try and really understand what difference it makes by bringing people together. What we found in those situations is the combination of a really clear framework for the creative practice and the participation, but with a very clear framework for understanding their social and wellbeing piece. We've started to align a lot of the work that we're doing now with children and young people—very similar—building their social connections, building their social networks, and we use a very simple framework, which is the NHS five steps to wellbeing, because we've found that one that a lot of people can pick up on. Whatever groups we're collaborating on and however we're building civic partnerships, lots of different partners can understand the outputs that we contribute together. That's about how people feel and how they're able to function almost, so the feeling in the function is sitting. It's very much looking at the difference that the arts make to self-esteem, to confidence, to their individual value and their worth, and it can be defined through things like acts of kindness that come as a result of people being able to be in these kinds of participatory. Basically, through getting the knowledge and the skills and the kind of networks, how are they then empowered to help their own lives and help those lives of others? What we are seeing is whether it's babies with their carers or their parent, or whether it's young people in their networks with each other, that these things are profoundly enhanced through the experience of using the arts. That's where I feel now is the time to really increase how we're really focusing on this. Particularly, you can take it through to education, where we know that a lot of children, particularly those with some more neurodiverse or slightly autistic experiences, struggle with a lot of mainstream education and can feel very isolated from the learning environment, put them into a creative class with the same kinds of learning outcomes and they'll perform very differently. Right across the piece, the investment in creative access is quite a critical part of how we build back our society. Thank you, Sarah. I'm going to hopefully get back to Raymond. Yeah, so how's that? Can you hear me? Sorry, I don't know what happened there. But yeah, I'd like to give a couple of examples. One of the projects that I'm involved in is with a Glasgow-based company called Limelight, who specialise in working with all sorts of people from disadvantaged groups. In one of our projects, we worked with people who had mild or moderate learning difficulties and they were involved in percussion workshops aimed at playing a Javanese gamilan. Over the course of a six-month period, we were able to quantify people's musical skills and people's communication skills and their levels of self-esteem. What we were able to show was that being involved in these percussion workshops significantly enhanced people's musical skills, but the people involved in the workshops got better rhythmically. Very importantly, there was a resultant development in communication skills. As well as developing musically, there was also a psychological development, and that psychological development stretched to people feeling better about themselves and how they expressed themselves. In subsequent research, where we interviewed people to ask about what it meant to be involved in musical activities, and this goes back to one of David's points earlier, that it wasn't necessarily the clinical objectives, the clinical aspects of what were important, but it was involving people in a holistic experience where people were engaged socially, they were engaged musically, they felt they were getting better at playing music, they got opportunities to perform in public. The whole cultural experience was very important for this group of people with learning difficulties who were involved in the percussion workshops. A second example that involved listening to music, another project that I was involved in, we asked people who were coming into hospital for a minor operation on their foot to listen to their favourite music. That was very important. We wanted them to listen to their favourite music, we wanted to know what sort of music they listened to and how often they listened to it after the operation. What we found was that when we compared a group of people who were listening to their favourite music after the operation in comparison to a group who weren't listening to any music, people who listened to their favourite music felt less anxious in the hospital environment. We subsequently showed not only would people feel less anxious, but when they listened to their favourite music in a laboratory setting, they also felt less pain. So listening to your music reduced your levels of pain and it reduced your levels of anxiety. We suggested that the reason for that was that when you're listening to your favourite music you're emotionally engaged, you're emotionally engaged with something that's very personally meaningful for you and you're also possibly distracted. So listening to music as well as engaging in music has both clinical and psychological and educational benefits. Coming right up to date, there's another project that I was involved in with a group called the Glasgow Improvises Orchestra. When lockdown started and we were all locked in our houses physically isolated, we attempted to communicate online musically and said, can we get together once a week and play music together? What we anticipated was that this would just be a social thing. We would just get together once a week and it would just be a way of chatting with your friends and maybe playing some music. What we quickly found was that this became a very important way of staying connected with our community. The group that met grew to over 100 people from around the world and we started a research project where we began to interview people about their experiences of playing music online, of improvising online and what we found was that when we talked to people they frequently said that playing music online reduced their sense of isolation, enhanced their mood during a very difficult period and, from a creative point of view, helped them to make new creative breakthroughs. We took some of that and some of those developments and then I was involved in a transatlantic music education music therapy project where tutors from Limelight and Glasgow worked with the Centre for Music Therapy in Austin, Texas with people with quite severe neurological illnesses. They created a band, a transatlantic band, where they wrote songs together and recorded these songs. Once again, we were able to show the positive social and psychological benefits of engaging in creating a pop band together. What was also fascinating was that this was done remotely and it came out of the pandemic. It also points to the fact that music has such an important role in our identity as well because when we interviewed people about their experience they talked about when I write a song I can express how I'm feeling, I can express my preferences, I can express my likes and also when I'm writing a song with other people I feel part of a group, I feel part of my friends and these friendships can be established remotely as well. I'm aware that I could rant and rave about the projects that I've been involved in for quite a while. Those are two or three examples of some of the work that I'm involved in. I'm also very conscious that we haven't had many questions from the audience, so I know that there's a large number of people on the call this afternoon. If you could, if you do have any questions at all, please use the Q&A section. They'll be fed back in due to the panel and I will try to get through as many of the audience's questions as possible this afternoon. It's really wonderful to hear all of these examples and the work that you're doing. As someone who's not from this background at all but has experienced this through my work as an MSP over the years, I have seen a step change in people's attitudes towards it, which I hope is starting to filter through. I'm also aware that, a few years ago of NHS Lanarkshire, my home area, I had put on a concert and it was the medical staff, the people who worked there, who were the performers on that evening and had cultures from all over the world. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience. The staff understood what it did for their own wellbeing and we had an NHS choir in Lanarkshire for Covid as well. All those get examples. When we're hearing this, what are the barriers still to the acceptance that this needs to be further mainstreamed and what exists in it? Obviously, I'm going to go to David first, because he might give us examples of what's worked from a New York perspective, and then to hear how Raymond and Sarah feel that we need to change that attitude to make it more mainstreamed. If I go to David first, please. Sure. I think that there are three types of barriers that we see in our work. The first is the perception from the community that the arts and the dance in particular are off limits. They're only for elite, they're only for people who've danced before, all of which is a misconception clearly, but I think this has evolved over many decades of perhaps good-willed messaging from arts organisations themselves. You say, you know, come see our performances, come see our incredible company perform, and that only reinforces the sense that, oh, I could never do that. Those people are on stage and I'm very far removed. I think we have seen great changes in the last 20 years in terms of inclusion, equity and accessibility in the arts that it's not enough to put on a show. We need to engage audiences in different ways and really redefine the term of who an audience is. In our vocabulary, an audience is somebody who comes to a dance for Parkinson's class. It's a young person who comes to a special class for kids living on the autism spectrum. So those are audiences too. It's not just about getting people into the theatre and that's a critical change that needs to be made from the arts organisation side in terms of creating programming that really involves the full spectrum of the community in that artistic process. So that's the perception from the public that this is off limits. The second is I think the idea that medical professionals somehow feel separated from the arts, that they feel perhaps even a bit guilty about referring people to artistic programs or interventions because it seems separate from what they do as opposed to an essential part of the overall prescription. We have challenged that dramatically by inviting neurologists and medical professionals to the class, to see the class for themselves. This was particularly important before there was the wealth of research literature that we have now. 15 years ago there really wasn't a lot of literature on the impact of dance and Parkinson's or arts and other aspects of health. So we had to bring people in to see it to believe it. I will say that made a significant difference when you include medical professionals in that process, when you invite them in to see what's actually happening. There's a real world recognition because they see their own patients walking and moving and interacting very differently than they do in their offices. That's a fundamental shift. I think the third is related to that and that pertains to research. The barrier that medical professionals have in referring people to programs like Dance for a PDE or many of the programs that Raymond was talking about relate to a compelling body of research that is at least getting close to what scientists perceive as the gold standard. We'll never get to the gold standard because you can't do double blind testing in arts. You either know you're in a dance class or you're not. So there isn't really that placebo pill. However, we can certainly increase the rigor of scientific research as it pertains to arts programs and that includes imaging work. That includes larger cohorts. That includes really understanding the mechanisms for why these programs work. We know they work, but we can't always explain in scientific terms the under the hood, I guess you say bonnets, under the bonnets mechanisms for why they are working the way they do. So we need more work in that regard. Those in my mind are the three barriers. The reason I'm so excited about this work is that I'm seeing progress in all three of those areas. I'm seeing more people recognizing that they can be included, that they are part of these artistic organizations and communities. I'm seeing medical professionals refer their patients more and more readily and passionately to these programs, particularly when they've had a face-to-face interaction with those programs. I'm seeing more rigorous long-term studies on the impact of the arts on health. One thing that's really interesting is that we're starting to see longitudinal studies. There was a study done at York University in Toronto on the impact of a dance class for people with Parkinson's over three years. That's a dramatic shift over the 10 to 12-week studies that we've seen before. What was even more encouraging is that the benefits were astoundingly positive. The degree of symptom impairment that you would see over three years in a regular cohort was dramatically decreased in people who took a regular dance class. Again, it's not news to us because we see that every day in our work, but what's important is that it's being studied and it's being published. Those results really do make an impact, both on the medical side but also on the participant side. We don't want them to come in because it's good for them. We want them to come in because they want to engage in the arts, but it certainly helps to make the case for why arts need to be a fundamental part of everybody's daily experience. I'm coming to Sarah and then I'll go back to Raymond to do this one. Thanks. David, I think just said that so succinctly and that seeing those barriers when you've worked in something over that kind of real sort of arc of a career path and seeing what things are improving. I think it's fantastic that those things are, you know, we are beginning to see people refer more, be more, include themselves. I think that one of the things that does work in our favour potentially at the moment is that so many people in lockdown had a fundamentally changed their understanding of what that every day participation in every day culture was. In that I'm including gardening, I'm including cooking, but people picked up the crafting, they did the cutting and the gluing and the sticking and the making and the walking and the I didn't quite do the cooking piece but I did start gardening for the first time ever. So I think there is a sort of fundamental thing that shifted. I think people do now see and understand and I think so for me it's a number of things. I think one, institutions, there's a big, there's a significant amount of funding through culture within cultural organisations that's invested that have an absolute huge capacity to support some of these really big challenges and work in a more aligned way with other parts of the civic body and whether it's from the parliamentary policy level through to things within local communities. So I think there's a fundamental shift in people's understanding of that value that is a positive. I think the other things that in terms of the big question of the day around how do we decarbonise, how do we create and how do we ensure social and environment within that, the social justice piece within that, so the equity piece within how we include and engage as we decarbonise and reduce that extreme. So I think there are the conversations, I would have to say in my head that probably one of the things you need to do is reform capitalism. What do you need, Claire? We need to reform capitalism but actually if you are only going to value your citizens through the economic lens and not through the wellbeing and not through the social and not through the much more that humanistic holistic sense of who we are as people and how I remember getting a big argument a few years ago on stage with a politician but I was like we are so much more than our economic lives but of course we need jobs and we need security but we are so much more than that. I think there is something here that if we can understand that the bottom line is not about extracting up to some profit for a small number of people but is a very different way of understanding what is economic investment and I think that I am very excited by the Scottish Parliament's approach to the wellbeing agenda. I think that that does give us a lot of potential opportunities and we are seeing these changes, we are seeing even the DCMS at the moment is working with the Department of Trade and Industry to try and create a new matrix working with people around the world to understand how do you quantify joy and actually what is the economic value that can contribute to that so that we can win those investment articles, investment arguments not articles into creating more investment. I think the other thing we need is again that evidencing and articulation and I think we all need to get better at being very concise with our language and how we communicate. I think sometimes that art world itself is not always the best in doing that, we can be some are better than others but I think that listening and responding really listening to our communities understanding what it is that people really need and I suppose for me finally it is about brave leadership isn't it because really to make the level of change that we need it can't just rely on that individual coming in to see that class, that arts professional or that medical professional coming in to watch and sit through a session with 20 babies or an Alzheimer's dance troupe or whatever the thing is it has to be scaled up more quickly than that and that to me is about our political leaders really finding out and understanding and then being able to articulate and lead at the policy level the changes because I used to think that we could change the world one taxi driver at a time but we ain't got enough time to do it one taxi driver at a time so actually these things do need to be scaled up and I think that Scotland is in a very strong position to take some real global leadership on this very issue. I can ask Raymond to say if he can it sort of concisly about some of the barriers that would be great lots of questions in the Q&A now and I'm very conscious word not got much time left so I'll go to Raymond for that. I'll try and be concise. I think just to echo what Sarah and David are saying I think it's really important so one of the big issues is we want to normalise creative engagement emphasise that everybody's creative and I know that sounds like a sort of a glib statement but so many people I talked to will agree about the importance of culture but they'll say oh I'm not musical my family aren't musical I don't have a musical gene I can't dance you know it's so important that we look to engender positive cultural and creative identities in everybody and so that we and I think that leads on to my to my second point I guess and David was talking about more rigor in research I think from a research perspective we've moved beyond now the desire to try and show these precise cause and effect relationships within cultural engagement research technologies and research theory has moved on now so we have a whole wealth of possibilities of using video elicitation techniques neurological techniques advanced interview techniques to have a holistic picture about what cultural engagement means for people so I think we've got a a sort of cultural goal in terms of normalising creativity there's a goal here to use new research methodologies to understand more about what it means to be engaged in music and I think once again we're at a festival of politics so we have to emphasise that the political agenda is fundamental it's all very well as talking about the importance of research but there are significant challenges politically I mean just yesterday the UK government talked about reducing the number of arts courses in universities for for young people and we've got to make sure that teaching music teaching art teaching all manner of creativity is absolutely embedded in children's earliest experiences of education and that's a political question as much as it is a cultural question I don't know if that was concise enough but that's great we've got a few questions and someone is looking for direct links to some of the reports that have been mentioned so that's been something that we can gather and distribute after the point lots of people talking about good examples already in the NHS but we tend to from a parathrase on what's in there because I can't go to every single question now the long-term and chronic conditions it seems to be well understood mental health and anxiety conditions well understood but how is it feeding into other areas of medicine that are to do with more somatic issues is one of the questions and a real bit think about those ones and really the big one in all of this is the response to Covid and the wellbeing and the mental health of young people in particular how that might impact so I'm just going to put around that we're probably going to have just one more time to go through them all but if I go to David first on this one is it a similar picture in New York to what you think is happening here for young people and the impact of Covid? Absolutely I you know it's obviously not the primary population I'm working with but I know from colleagues who are working in secondary education and university education that there is a there is a mental health crisis as many students are returning to in-person classes but they're returning really without the tools to navigate the emotional experience that they're having now and the trauma of what's happened over the past 18 months and we as a society at least in the US have not been have not adequately prepared people to deal with the trauma of what's happened I think we have we're caught up in the news cycle we're caught up in the urgency of what's happening we're caught up in the fear but we haven't done the other side of that which is giving young people the tools they need and the community they need to really build up mental health resiliency and to have an outlet for for challenges that they're experiencing. I think of course and I'm biased in this but I think our other guests would agree that the arts are a significant partner in building resiliency for mental well-being for creating the kinds of communities where you can express fears and anxieties in a safe way where you can use outlets like music and art making and dance to work out things that are otherwise very difficult to talk about. So this is all happening at the same time that we're cutting arts education and we're trying to scale education to be as Sarah said that sort of line with the capitalist model what can my skills earn in the marketplace as opposed to how do we create healthy engaged politically conscious young people and so we need to we need to change that dialogue and I think ensuring that funding arts at the secondary and university level is maintained and is critical as we start to see countries like Australia pairing back on arts majors in university that the university is not going to fund you know people who are majoring who are getting a degree in arts this is this is insanity as we start to start to look at you know how we as a as a society are dealing with trauma so I'll leave it at that but we have some real self-reflection to do in this as policy makers. Raymond, do you want to convince them that you've gone into the education side of it? I just want to get echo what David is saying that so often in these arguments we are told that there's not enough money or that we have to emphasise more important aspects so I guess that the argument shouldn't be is there enough money for the arts we have to prioritise the arts and say actually it's not a question of is there enough money it's to move arts up the priority level so that it does warrant and it does get the finances that we need in order to sustain it so I think that that's very important that also in terms of coming out of the pandemic there's so many examples of where the arts were absolutely crucial for sustaining community for enhancing community I think we saw lots of examples of community singing community requires people getting together and just being together through artistic engagement over the over the over the internet and I think we can take some of those developments and keep you know as we move into a hybrid way of being we can keep these these developments that we made during lockdown and integrate them into our on-going practice so I'm looking at time so I want to stop talking. Sarah, do you want to come in on that question? One really quick one as an example of that and just as you were talking there when it came back to me was I had been following the pandemic from very very early on on Twitter when it was in Wuhan as it was kind of coming down through Iran nobody was talking about it in terms of our politicians publicly yet and then there was that moment where very quickly we went into to lockdown and the moment that I still get goosebumps on my arms thinking about was when the viral there was some video went viral of them singing sunshine over leaf in the banana flats of the bottom leaf in leaf and to see my community that you know from that just and through song how people came together at that absolute moment of you know uncertainty unknowing not necessarily having great leadership at that point from from understanding where we were going but as a community they came together and expressed that sense of resilience and solidarity for what comes next and I think those are you know that was just a really good example of how we deal with this but I think absolutely it's young people their mental health crisis we have is astound it's absolutely the next thing that's going to be happening we were seeing a mental health crisis in young people before the pandemic it has simply been and you add into that their sense around the equal what's happening in terms of the ecology the environment the collapse of our biodiversity you know and so those things together the social impact of social media on our young people and I think that that is where if we put a really concerted and strategic approach to embedding activity and participation in culture for our young people across policy areas and how do we join up those policy conversations to really come up with innovative solutions is is one of the most critical questions we need to get right in the next 18 months okay thank you I'm just looking to a couple of more of the comments and Jill has asked about is there a need for a body or organization to be a lead in bringing these things together or is it something that in in government level and you know in policy making level we just have to grasp the thistle on that one as they would say and and make that happen across different areas and also I guess I was going back to say this point you just mentioned a few times about the climate and what's happening as we move towards and what they're talking about is the 15 minute communities and communities where we are and and and that culture and everything is embedded in our communities and obviously we have big challenges with the islands and rural communities in Scotland about that participation is is is how do we ensure that you know everyone has access to this going forward and I'm going to go to Raymond with that one first and oh so how do we ensure that everyone has has access so I guess thinking about changing or not in changing about enhancing people's sense of themselves as creative creative people I guess there's a an often stated quote from Picasso it says every child is an artist the challenge is for them to remain artists through their through their whole their whole life and I think you know we want to encourage people to to feel creative and to be creative and to express themselves creatively so yeah enhancing opportunities making sure that education and our education policy and the educational opportunities of young people includes all types of creative activity and making creative engagement and creative activities at the heart of young people's education so that it's seen as just as important as other aspects of their education so in the last term of the parliament I was the computer of the education skills committee so we did the report into music tuition in schools and which has thankfully been adopted and music tuition is now going to be made available and free of cost across Scotland but I'm very very struck that a lot of what we've talked about today was the reason why the committee was so unanimous in supporting this because the young people speaking to us for some of them it was about being artists and going on to the conservatoire and becoming you know professionals in this area but for most of them it was about that sense of belonging an escape a place to be that they when they felt stressed and also the the skills that built in in the human interaction of being part of a small ensemble or an orchestra it was the responsibility that came with that and not letting other people down and building those life skills so absolutely great here so that's part of the education jigsaw a lot a lot more still to do but I'm glad that one's in place so I'm going to go to Sarah again just on those issues yeah no I think the key thing for me and I'm saying this from an English has somebody who spent all my life working in Scotland until the last five years and the thing that is most depressing for me within the English system at the moment despite some really great pieces of activity and work happening is the obsession with STEM with the STEM subjects this idea that we can get ourselves out of where we are and all the problems that we have simply by investing in science and technology and actually the arts the creativity piece within that if we do not understand people and and how they need to learn and absolutely that whether it's for the small number that may go on and choose to come great artists and theatre makers and you know or fashion designers designer your entire you know you walk around the street everything is visually designed by people with skills and knowledge expertise but there's that piece of it just as you say just actually how do I exist in this world right now which is difficult and hard and anxious inducing anxiety inducing so actually that embedding of our of creative education across all of our schools if you look at what the private schools are doing you know it's it's really critical for highly privileged people to have access to the arts so let's ensure we don't deny it to our the rest of our children and young people as well thank you and david did you want to give us a little perspective from new york on this well I think we're we're encountering the the same challenges in that as the you know the economic forces have come to bear on on our young people there there seems to be less incentive to to study the arts and to engage in the arts even even as to become ever more important and I think back to the story of uh of steve jobs as as he was dropped out of re college and this took a calligraphy class which he then talked about as being one of the most influential kind of experiences in his in his professional life because it brought him back to being creative and looking at design uh from a completely different perspective which then influenced the designs that he did for for apple so I think you know we we tend to focus on the immediate goals and and try to try to find solutions to that and right now that's about that seems to be about STEM but the really I think the successful approach is is really you know a steam approach that art is very much part of that because you can't you the the worlds of art and science are much closer than we imagine and scientists need to think creatively um about problem solving they need to improvise um they need to look at the world as artists do and so we we have a lot to learn from each other so I I anything that silos fields into various points and silos students into um separate fields is something that that needs to be questioned and challenged and changed so more we can integrate the more we can bring artistic methods to bear on on stem the better off we're going to be and the more chance we'll have for solving the really big problems like like climate change so as a computing science graduate I'm happy to say my science hero's Richard Feynman who was also a brilliant bongo player and said very much about his bongo playing being very influential to his um thought processes um in quantum physics so yes absolutely integrated indeed um right up against time now if I could just ask for one sentence just to sum up what you've you've thought of today that would be wonderful if you can do it best it's like today I'll come to the sara first please forgetting that I get unmuted there I think for me there's I'm just going to mention something that we haven't mentioned yet and it's it's opened up a whole new debate up or it's part of it but diversity understanding different perspectives different cultures different and how we build that I think there's something in within this piece around mental health and healthy communities and healthy societies and healthy interaction and I think that that sort of it it speaks to our needs of diversifying our thinking going forward as well it's just a neary we haven't touched on yet but I'll fall in with that Raymond so I would say Scotland is world leading in culture you know Sarah's been part of a whole generation of artists that have gone on to lead the world musically artistically um theater from writing you know we are Scotland is known across the world we want to embed that world leading mentality in the whole culture so that everybody shares in this fantastic history and the fantastic present and the fantastic future that we can have for our cultural life in Scotland David final thought oh I would argue that the success that Scotland's had is due to the intersection and collaborative nature of your society that you bring together artists academics researchers scientists policymakers politicians to really forge a better path and it's that spirit of collaboration and bringing diverse voices to the table that is the answer to many of the challenges we're going to face now and in the future so collaboration is the keyword and collaboration and partnership that brings many people to the table together fantastic thank you all for your contributions this afternoon and from everyone in the audience who's joined us this afternoon particularly those who did put the questions in we will try and get a way of getting back with regard to the reports specific reports that have been mentioned this afternoon it's been absolute pleasure for me to host this as convener of the committee our committee is about to publish a report into the first budget inquiry which is about funding for culture in Scotland and many of the topics that we've talked about this afternoon have been covered in that report that we're doing at the moment which is something else that we can maybe share with the people who joined us this afternoon but wonderful way to spend this Sunday afternoon thank you to everyone and on that I'll close this meeting of the best role of politics