Private banking and the invisible market for next-generation wealth

One of the world's leading arts institutions wanted to strengthen its education programme - not by producing more content, but by understanding how primary teachers actually find, trust and use external support. The ambition was to become genuinely useful in classrooms where arts education is perpetually squeezed.

We spent time with primary teachers across regions, watching how lesson planning actually happens. What emerged was an informal infrastructure: WhatsApp groups with neighbouring schools, quick asks on Facebook, resource-swapping between colleagues, and teachers paying out of their own pocket to make a lesson work. Arts education hadn't been abandoned - it had been left to individual resourcefulness, where confidence, quality and continuity depended on who you happened to know and what you could find.

The insight reframed the brief. The institution didn't need to produce better resources; it needed to provide structured, trusted support that saved time and built confidence - designed around the way teachers really work, not the way organisations tend to publish. It shaped a programme built for the informal networks teachers already rely on, rather than one that expected them to come looking.