Across Europe, arts education is increasingly recognised as a vital site for inclusion, creativity, and as a space for enhanced wellbeing. Yet young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) remain systematically underrepresented within cultural and arts-based learning experiences beyond the classroom. This exclusion is particularly acute for students educated in specialist settings, whose access to museums, galleries, libraries, and cultural venues is often limited by structural, sensory, and pedagogical barriers.

This paper examines how long-term, co-constructed partnerships between specialist schools and cultural institutions can reconfigure arts education as a site of radical inclusion. Drawing on a sustained collaboration between a specialist secondary school and the Gardens, Libraries and Museums (GLAM) of the University of Oxford, this study explores how arts-based learning can be designed with rather than for young people with SEND.

The central research question is:

How can long-term, relational partnerships in arts education enable meaningful creative participation and challenge exclusionary practices for young people with SEND?

The paper situates arts education not as a compensatory or therapeutic intervention, but as a rigorous pedagogical space where creativity, identity, and cultural participation intersect. It argues that exclusion in arts education is not primarily a consequence of individual impairment, but of institutional norms that privilege particular sensory, cognitive, and communicative modes of engagement.

The theoretical framework draws on Hilary Cottam’s Radical Help (2018), underpinned by the capabilities approach (Sen, 1999; Nussbaum, 2003). This framework foregrounds participation and purpose, borne out through the concept of flourishing. Within this perspective, arts-based partnerships are understood as infrastructures for capability-building, where creative practice becomes a means of developing agency, voice, and belonging.

Arts education is conceptualised here as a collaborative and relationally grounded practice, developed through shared creative processes rather than pre-determined instructional models. The practices within the data show co-construction between teachers, artists, museum educators, and young people. Through these dialogic and relational approaches, young people are repositioned as key stakeholders who enacted greater autonomy in regard to their own learning as opposed to the often deficit, passive framing of students with SEND.

Although grounded in a UK case study, the paper addresses shared European concerns relating to inclusive arts education, access to cultural venues, and the role of universities and cultural institutions in supporting educational equity.

The study adopts a qualitative longitudinal case study methodology, informed by reflexive and practice-based research traditions within arts education. The case examines a partnership developed over eight years between a specialist school and the Gardens, Libraries and Museums (GLAM) of the University of Oxford. Methodologically, the case study is structured through the stages within Radical Help as an analytical framework. With examination of the five stages demonstrating evolution over time and iterative co-construction. These included: identifying stakeholders, framing the problem, generating creative ideas, prototyping arts-based projects, and sustaining practice over time. This methodology is highly reflexive as the researchers also represent leadership roles within the partnership. This process mirrors design-based and arts-informed research approaches commonly used within arts education scholarship with a of goal bridging the research-to-practice and practice-to-research gaps in knowledge. Data sources include: • Practitioner reflections on access and inclusion • Documentation of specific arts-based projects • Practitioner reflections on pedagogical and institutional change • Reflections on a specific planning application to change the built environment in a major museum space informed by the young people in this study The study prioritises depth, reflexivity, and transferability, contributing methodological insights for arts education researchers interested in inclusive, relational, and co-constructed practice.

The findings demonstrate that arts education, when embedded within long-term cultural partnerships, can operate as a powerful site of radical inclusion for young people with SEND. Creative participation enabled learners to develop agency, confidence, and a sense of cultural belonging, while challenging normative assumptions about who arts education within cultural spaces is really for. These are transferable outcomes which are driven by the co-construction within this case study. This suggests therefore that similar outcomes could be achieved in other settings which may include: • enhanced access and agency among participants • increased visibility of disability within cultural narratives and exhibition spaces • pedagogical shifts among educators towards relational, sensory-attuned practice • institutional learning within cultural organisations • significant changes to access arrangements and the way in which access is understood • a reorganisation of resources that benefits specific groups of young people The study highlights that inclusion in arts education cannot be achieved through isolated activities or simplified adaptations. Instead, it emerges through sustained relationships, and shared ownership of cultural spaces. For Network 17; therefore, the paper contributes to debates on arts education as a space for social justice, offering an empirically grounded example of how creative practice can reshape educational relationships and institutional cultures.

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