The Challenge

​​

The Royal Opera House aimed to understand teachers' needs and challenges in 'levelling up for culture' schools, particularly in relation to arts education. With a focus on their National Schools Programme, ROH wanted to discover how teachers search for and use online teaching materials, and how their offer could best meet teachers' needs effectively. They sought to understand how to make their educational resources more accessible and valuable to teachers in resource-constrained environments.​​​

​

 

​​​Our Immersive Approach

​

We conducted a series of interviews with primary school teachers from 'Levelling Up for Culture' areas across various geographical locations, ensuring a mix of poorly resourced and well-resourced schools to gain a comprehensive understanding of different contexts. Participants represented a range of teaching experience, confidence levels in arts subjects, and awareness of ROH. 

​

• Lesson planning processes: We explored their lesson planning processes, resource discovery methods, and specific needs for arts education materials.

• Online search behaviours: We delved into teachers' online search behaviours, investigating what they look for when seeking materials and their preferences for 'schemes of work' versus 'lesson fillers'.

• First impressions: We explored teachers' first impressions of the ROH offer, gathering feedback on its relevance and potential to meet their needs.

​

​

 

The Result​

​

The findings enabled ROH to enhance their National Schools Programme, making it more accessible and valuable to teachers in 'levelling up' schools. We uncovered teachers' strong preferences for materials to be designed in specific ways that that save time and provide confidence in teaching less-familiar subjects. We also identified effective ways to organise educational materials, ensuring they are intuitive and aligned with teachers' needs.

 

The research not only informed immediate improvements to their educational resources but also provided a roadmap for ongoing engagement with teachers, ultimately supporting ROH's mission to bring arts education to a wider audience.