Research and archive

Understanding children understanding the world

All submissions will form part of an archive of creative outputs produced by children 5-16 years old at the time of a global pandemic, partly as a documentary record of how children understand and cope with these extraordinary times, and partly for research purposes.

In the School of Education, Bath Spa University, we are educationalists that aim to transform people’s lives locally and globally, through excellence and expertise in educational research and professional practice. Through high quality research, we seek to understand how children learn and we use this knowledge to regularly develop new methods for learning and teaching to equip the country’s future teachers. At Bath Spa University, we have been educating teachers for over 70 years.

This competition takes place during a unique moment in time, and understanding how children make sense of the world around them is particularly important to inform teaching and support methods. Your submissions will enable us to explore children’s feelings at a time of high uncertainty and how imagination can be used as an outlet for the extraordinary situation they find themselves in. We aim to understand the relationship that children wish to have with their surroundings and the importance of creativity in dealing with large scale, global problems that have a profound local impact on young lives.

The Royal Fine Art Commission Trust, which has an explicit educational remit, is interested in how the imaginative capacity of children can be harnessed to improve the visual and functional quality of the places and spaces we inhabit. In the current circumstances, we wish to explore how children’s perceptions of their built environment are altered and shaped by limitations on physical access to familiar places.

IMPORTANT: Any entry forms and submissions kept for research and archive purposes will be completely anonymised. All personal information will be deleted in line with our privacy policy, and will only be kept for as long as required to administer the competition. However, if you do not wish us to use your submissions for future research projects, in line with the information we have provided, please ensure that you let us know on the entry form at the time of your submission. We regret that you will not be able to withdraw your submission from any future research once entries have been anonymised.