Room 13

Page 2

The very phrase "independent art room" raises questions. How can an art room inside a state primary school be independent? How can the children escape from their time-tabled classes to attend this independent institution? How can the staff get paid?

The story of the beginning of Room 13 provides the necessary answers. Rob Fairley, the artist in residence, was originally employed as artist in residence to the whole area around Fort William in 1994. When the funding ran out, the children from Caol Primary asked how they could make him come back to them, and he said that would be easy - all they had to do was pay him. He came in for one day a week, and by taking and selling school photographs and postcards and other more typical fund-raising the children managed to buy their own paints and occasionally pay him a little. Catriona Jackson, the eleven-year-old who was managing director of Room 13 in 1999/2000 applied to the Scottish Arts Council for a grant of £19,000 and with this employed Rob and another artist, Wendy Sutherland, on a job share. Various private companies were also very supportive, and Room 13 also received occasional lump sums from Enterprise Scotland.

Then in 2002 Caol won £20,000 for the Barbie Prize, which is sometimes described as the junior Turner. The current treasurer wanted to give it all to Rob, but the management team decided that instead it should be used to benefit the entire school. It bought a reserve of materials and is now used as the basis for funding travel.

"When I came," said Miss Cattanach, the head of the school, when she spoke to me," he only worked on a Friday. On a voluntary basis, basically. There was very little financial input. And sooner or later he found he was involved in a project that he wanted to see through, and then, bit by bit - 'Do you mind if I come in an extra afternoon? Do you mind if I come in an extra day?' - And slowly but surely it built up - and it has to have grown really quickly, because that was only six years ago."

Rob is now in school all day; children are of course free to go to Room 13 in break times, after lunch and after school, but they are also allowed to leave their classes to go to Room 13 whenever they have finished their day's work and have permission from their teacher. In Primary 7, the top group, they don't even have to wait for permission; they can just "go through", as it is termed, whenever they want.

For years Rob was working, as Miss Cattanach said, virtually on a voluntary basis, but this changed in 2003 when Danielle Souness and Eileen Innes approached NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, with an application for a grant of £250,000 over three years, "to extend the present project from the existing one school to embrace a firm geographical base of three full time units in neighbouring primary schools and in time to open a further one in the local secondary school." The two girls filled in the fourteen-page proposal form with only the same sort of advice as anyone else would have needed when faced by such an unfamiliar task, and after a good deal of discussion, involving many emails between Fort William and London, they received a grant of £200,000, which they are now administering themselves, submitting invoices to NESTA as the money becomes needed. At last Rob is being paid a sensible salary. Rosie told me, "The good thing about having the NESTA money is that this is the first year not having to pay Mr. Fairley's wages. The project is now secure for the next three years, so we can experiment a lot more."

After the three years are over, the future of Room 13 may depend on the Crannog project, a £64 million scheme for developing a waterside retail and cultural centre at Fort William. For Finlay Finlayson, the local businessman backing Crannog, a Room 13 headquarters would be an essential part of the development. Children from Caol Primary School have been involved in the planning, and there is a map of the proposed development on the wall in Room 13 itself.