Everyday magic, the Trust's Arts in Education programme, has been running in ten primary schools in Kensington & Chelsea. The programme aims to broaden children's opportunities for creative expression.

One major project, Family Faces, focused on family portraits. There was a visit and tour of selected family portraits in the National Gallery. The storytellers engaged by the Trust told the stories behind the portraits and then worked with the children's own family stories, photographs and artifacts to produce their own family portraits and recordings of their stories.

The project aimed to help children appreciate and understand visual arts and their place in society and also to boost their confidence in their own ability to express themselves through art and the interpretation of imagery.

Jessica Finer, Headteacher of Marlborough Primary School, describes how Family Faces worked in her school.

I was excited because of the link with storytelling in the Family Faces project and with stories from our pupils' own families. They all learnt to look at how portraits tell stories and that learning to look and how to look at art as a visual record was important.

I went to the gallery with them so I could see how magical that was. It was great because all the children could fully engage with it. Not only could they see portraits in the gallery but they could also link that experience to the stories which might lie behind them and to the stories behind their own family portraits.

We have a very multicultural intake, with 59% of pupils families having English as the second family language. As a result we had a very rich selection of family stories to accompany the family portraits. Every parent got involved with helping the children find photos and then being interviewed by the children about which family stories related to those pictures. Some of these stories were from a long way away and all brought something unique to the project and to the walls of our classroom.

We've now worked on projects with Westway Development Trust and its Arts in Education Coordinator Anne Johnson for three years. The different projects have explored culture and history as well as art and worked across many different media but always with the idea of contributing something to the whole school community, like a performance or a recorded CD, or an interactive installation or display. We would certainly be open to more of this type of work and we hope to engage in a fourth project next year.

Anne Johnson tells us about five innovations in the 'Everyday Magic' programme:

Integrating musicians with the regular storytelling has added richness to the programme

We now have a cellist, a violinist, a classical and jazz guitarist and a percussionist. They are all very comfortable with improvising. The guitarist, Roger Goula Sarda, has been accepted onto a very soughtafter course with the National Film Theatre to write music for film. He recently performed one of his own compositions at the National Gallery. The violinist, Charlotte Newman, regularly plays in the pit orchestra for the West End production 'The Producers'. The cellist, Gina van Hoorn Alkema, tours with a company that performs Shakespeare in prisons. The percussionist and drummer, Tuup, tours regularly with 'Trans Global Underground'. We have run workshops where storytellers and musicians experiment with different ways of working together.

The response from the schools has been extremely positive. Many of the children had no idea at all what these instruments were, let alone how they sounded. Gina played a blues composition in an assembly for Black History Month at Ashburnham School and some of the children had tears in their eyes. This meant that in the session later we were able to speak about the emotional impact of music and how music can move you to tears.

Integrating visual art into the regular 'Everyday Magic' sessions has broadened the scope of the programme

In three of the nine schools where we are working, their walls display with great pride the work the children have done with 'Everyday Magic'. Our contribution helped Marlborough get the 'Gold Arts Mark Award'. Thomas Jones has a beautiful display in all their public spaces of work done with Year 3 and 4 on Ancient Greek and Indian themes. Bevington has displays of the Perseus project, The Rainforest project and Family Faces. The children have learned many new techniques: different kinds of printing, mask making and modelling with clay.

There were two visits to the National Gallery, a place none of the children had ever visited before. The artists are all highly experienced, working with the BBC, with Thames Festival, in Amsterdam and in exhibitions of their own work in a wide range of venues and galleries.

Integrating more opportunities into the regular session for children to tell and act out stories has worked very well

At Park Walk School with Year 6 we ran a story marathon where each session the children had to re-enact and tell the story they had just heard. They worked in groups. Their teacher, Mandy Vasey, said, This project does so much for their confidence and their ability to work with others and is the best kind of preparation for the transistion into secondary school. We are now working to put a 'Transitions' project together based on this work.

The working relationship which has developed between storytellers, musicians and visual artists has given an added depth to the performances

For example shadow puppets were brought in as an integral part of the storytelling. The EAL support teacher at Servite School said the children kept saying how beautiful it was and 'like magic'.

Working together term in, term out, the relationship between artists and key teachers in the schools has also developed into a very friendly and open exchange

This has been important in riding out OFSTED inspections or sudden crises within the schools and in fostering an ongoing collaboration between artists and teachers within each school.