When I was about six or seven, my parents took me to an exhibition at Tate Britain where you could climb along planks and swing (if my memory serves me correct) on giant ropes across the room. It made me think museums were fantastic fun. It was probably this and the excitement of getting a postcard and a Coke, every time we went to an exhibition, that began my lifelong passion for museums, galleries and art.

As a child I was shy, I lived in books and drawing. My junior school teachers described me as hard working. I only came out of my shell through performance, singing, acting and as part of an audience – I gained confidence and challenged my shyness, my life was transformed. Through the arts I learned about others, how to understand them, work with them and see their potential. I developed personal values that shape who I am now and drive me to work for others. I was lucky, my secondary school invested in the whole child and the facilities implied by that. We had a theatre, we had rehearsal rooms, great studio spaces... We hosted a local cinema and regular professional theatre productions. The Head Teacher took risks and gave us the space to experiment and argue with staff about our creative experiences.

When I was very little (five or six) I went to see a school play. A young child was understudying the lead, who was sick. I was struck by her cool and her panache, and by the critical liveness of it all. My memory has it that, soon after this, my parents took me to see the film, My Fair Lady. It was OK, but I can distinctly remember the feeling that the film was a cheat, because the actors weren't actually there. Somehow, that sense of danger and live, communal event, was absent. I worked hard to articulate this. I would say 'I prefer the one where the people are really there'. This memory sticks with me because, not necessarily by design, here I am, 40 years later, presenting and making theatre. For children.

My love of the visual arts. Aged 4 1/2 I painted a picture of a train "Intercity 125" (Most people unfortunately see it as a car!) in bold, gloopy colourful poster paint. I won a school prize for it, and have continued to practice the visual arts to this day.

A great thing about being born and brought up in Oxford was the potential to go to the outdoor Shakespeare put on in College gardens in the summer. Like all undergraduate productions, these ranged from magical to dire, but Shakespeare survived all of them and allowed me a degree of exposure to the words which I would never have acquired through school visits (too infrequent) or theatre (too expensive for my parents at the time). This reinforces the benefit of frequent access – it needn't always be excellent, it just needs to be there and engaged in with commitment.

My mother was employed part-time in three homes in our avenue to clean and tidy the homes of some very well-travelled elderly people. As she cleaned and dusted their homes – when I was under five years of age – I enjoyed to look at and touch some wonderfully crafted art pieces – small bronze sculptures, pictures of battles and foreign parts. It was a museum experience week by week which has never left me these past 60 years.

My love of dance and the arts came from my parents, and this was nurtured through ballet, piano and theatre experiences as a young child and teenager. I performed semi-professionally in plays, musical productions, ballets and operas all through my teenage years and am now an executive member of the National Dance Teachers Association and Senior Lecturer in Dance, PE and Education Studies at Bath Spa University. Throughout my teaching career – now more than 20 years – I have taught children of all ages how to think imaginatively and 'dig deeper' when it comes to finding dance movements and ideas. I encourage our teacher trainees to do the same at the university and I know that my own passion for the arts and cultural experiences are appreciated by them and positively influence their attitudes. I believe that cultural learning is essential to us all as human beings, for it contributes to our spiritual and emotional well-being. Children simply must be exposed to more, more, more!

When I was eight years old I saw a pantomime performance of Sleeping Beauty at the Johannesburg Youth Theatre. As pantomimes do, they asked for three volunteers from the audience to be the fairy godmothers to the baby Sleeping Beauty. My hand shot up – "Yes, I want to be a fairy godmother". I stared intently at one of the actors walking through the audience deciding who'd be one of the lucky ones. I was so intent that I didn't see that someone had already chosen me, another actor was pointing at me, my mother drew to my attention. Then I had the absolute delight of going BACK STAGE where a tiara was placed on our heads and we received a cushion with a gift on it for the princess! It was magical, a whole different world and I was entranced immediately. I remember the thrill of being part of this whole other world, this realm with its own rules and mysteries. When I sat back down next to my mom, I said "This is what I wanna do!" and that was the end of the beginning.

My elder sister played piano and recorder. She insisted I joined in and taught me recorder. I sang, according to my parents, before I could talk, and would sing myself to sleep. I remember a group of musicians coming to my primary school in rural Devon. I was mesmerised. When I was about seven, my parents took me to hear the B.S.O. at the Winter Gardens. They played Sibelius and he continues to be a favourite composer. Most of all my parents gave me so many opportunities, drove miles to take me to concerts and were always so supportive. They really encouraged my love of music, and without that encouragement I would not have the life I have now.

I can trace the beginnings of my love for theatre and dance to a single and early cultural experience. At the age of five I was taken to productions of 'Lark Rise' and 'Candleford', performed in the Cottesloe auditorium in 1978-9. The promenade nature of the piece made it a truly magical and all-consuming experience. As far as I was concerned I was in it, I was in that world and it was joyous, beautiful and full of music. I danced and danced and danced. I have endeavored to create experiences like that for others ever since.

As a child, being taken to the Edinburgh Festival in the late '60s provided me with enough impetus and succour to get me through the dark days at school amongst the black landscape of Doncaster's mines. That and visits to see foreign film at the Film club in town gave me the intellectual and moral stimulus to pursue the career I have now – introducing kids in similar situations to arts and culture, fun and thought.

I left school with a D in woodwork, told I was thick as a plank, ironically. 7 Years later I got a PhD. I became a senior lecturer and decided their was a need for perivate investment and independant resources, where you people could explore, vai project led learning. We have just opened the new center www.timemachinefun.com and launched www.reclaimfun.com. Its a long time since I was at school, and if you have read this far will realise I suffer from dyslexia. The center is unique, in that the exhibits are experiments and we take things apart and 'shake the science out of them', every part had to be designed, engineered and manufactured. We then repair, reuse or recycle. I hope young people are allowed like me to think outside of the box and able to explore the richness of creativity, its not easy but its fun

When I was five we travelled to London to visit the Natural History Museum. I clearly remember my first experience of "scale" when I peeped through the doorway in the exhibition hall and first saw the Blue Whale. It was so big that I ran and ran scared out of the main exit and my dad had to find me! Perhaps that was the moment when I became an artist. I have not looked back since!

Seeing The Royal Ballet perform ballet aged ten. I still want to be a ballerina.

My earliest one is the clearest. We lived in West Yorkshire and my parents didn’t go to art galleries or concerts, but they often went to the theatre, on their own. They liked musicals, but they also loved Shakespeare and when I was eight they took us to see Laurence Olivier in Twelfth Night at Stratford. I was dumb-founded by the evening, particularly as in the interval I wandered into the lighting technicians’ area and was shouted at to leave “get out, you horrible child”. The whole thing was astonishing – here were people doing something magical, serious and uncompromising. I immediately “auditioned” for a part in Alice, Thomas and Jane in the children’s drama club back home and pretended throughout the show that I was acting in the West End. The learning here was about confidence and individuality and that some adults inhabited a totally different and imaginative world.

My local public library is what opened up the world for me. It’s where I fell in love with books and with reading. We took weekly trips there when I was a little girl and I’d leave loaded up with as many books as I could carry. I had my own library card, which, when held in my little-girl hands, made me feel grown-up and sophisticated. From the South Side of Chicago, that card and that library let me go anywhere – back in time through the Little House books or forward through A Wrinkle in Time. It set me on my way and seeded a love for reading that runs deep within me.

My parents, grandparents and my school encouraged us to visit the library and museums, to go to dance classes and be in shows, to act, to paint and draw, to play and explore, to watch films, listen to and play music, learn a party piece, write and illustrate stories, go to the pantomime and theatre, make puppets, turn the shed into a secret den. Using our imaginations and creativity is what makes us humans and helps us to communicate and understand each other.

Music and Movement, Drama and Singing were part of the weekly experience at my progressive state primary school in the 1970's. We "found a space" and exercised our imaginations as well as our bodies, dancing about in our pants and vests, dodging the smears of mashed potato on the school hall floor, responding to the instructions pouring forth from the radiogram. I remember one time imagining I was moving a huge boulder from the mouth of a cave, in order to explore inside. I still remember crawling along in the dripping emerald gloom. My body experienced the chill, the damp and the physical effort, without me ever leaving the hall. While I strongly support all efforts to visit cultural institutions, I think it is even more important that children have the time and space to do creative activities as part of the their everyday lives; and for this we need to inspire and support creativity in their teachers.

When I was at school it was expected for us to take part in the music competition at the Bath Festival. I remember plonking (rather ineptly) through a piano recital and steeling myself to bear the humiliation of a merely adequate performance. However, I now look back on the experience, and on the nerves and tension it generated, with humour and affection, and in recognition that it was all good practice and a great lesson for meeting life's challenges generally!

When I was in the 6th form at a girls' high school in Norfolk, through my school, I was given the opportunity to sing in a massed choir (mainly comprising adult choral societies) in a performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion. It was my first real exposure to adult voices en masse, with orchestral accompaniment, and to the power of great music. It had a profound effect on me. A sleepless night ensued as the vibrancy of this glorious yet plangent music whirled around my head. I knew then, that I would have to pursue any and all opportunities that would permit me to have a life filled with nourishment like this.

When I was nine, every class at my school put on a play. 300 of us sat on the floor, and we saw Rocky O Leary, the school's smallest boy, who was playing Chicken Licken. Hilarious. I saw loads of short plays culminating in a fine comic turn from Andrew Brown, that I can still imitate. Sure, I'd been on a couple of coach trips to watch big musicals in big theatres, but this was way better. The big theatres didn't have Rocky O Leary.

I have two. The first aged four, sitting at home being taught to sew by my grandma. I remember every technical and creative detail instilled at that early age. Fast forward 13 years later and I'm being taken to The Lady Lever Art Gallery by college. I see a woman telling an extraordinary story in front of a painting to a group of small, mesmerised children. I knew that second, that was what I wanted to do, and have been lucky enough to do it. I still have and love that feeling every day.

It's hard to recall one memory because I was lucky enough for my childhood to be filled with culture. My parents are arts educators, so there were museums, books, music and inspiring friends. We know parental influence is a vital factor in young people's confidence in exploring culture. To pick one memory, it's Edward & Ruth Barker's sculpture studios in Norfolk. My dad taught summer courses there. We kids hung out in their garden, drawing giant hogweed, squidging clay into tree bark, flicking through books about Picasso. I remember feeling that art was something we could all do, children and adults, as it was simply looking and playing, over and over. I was privileged, not because of any special talents, but because I lived with adults who knew how to keep art in their lives.

I was four years old, growing up in 1950’s communist Budapest, when I first was taken to see Mozart's The Magic Flute. It was cheaper for my parents to take us to the subsidised state opera than to employ a baby sitter. In the opera house I was stunned by the enormous marble staircase, the paintings, the chandeliers, the gilt statues and the plush velvet box where we sat. The highlight for me was the glamorous costume and the extraordinary voice of the Queen of the Night. From that day on my love of music has never waned and has always been part of my life. At The Art Room we often play Mozart’s music which helps to create a calm atmosphere in which vulnerable and challenging children, at risk of exclusion, can learn and achieve through art.

I have always been into arts and culture from a very young age and have been lucky enough to attend schools where culture was considered to be very important. At my former high school, Petra, in Zimbabwe, I participated in everything from school plays, to exhibiting art to reciting my own poetry at the annual cultural evenings that were held. Culture is also a very big part of the way of life in Zimbabwe and I think it is very beneficial to young people, like myself (I'm 16) because it opens your eyes to different experiences and you gain the confidence to discover new things for yourself.

I grew up in Newcastle Upon Tyne. My mother used to take me regularly to the Hatton Gallery and the Laing Art Gallery when I was very young, before I went to school. At the Hatton Gallery I would sit in front of Kurt Schwitters' Merzbarn. There was an egg shaped form that I especially liked. It puzzled and amused me. At the Laing I can remember paintings by John Martin and Willian Holman Hunt. I used to make up stories about them when I got home. I have lots of early memories about fabric, one aunt had a heavy velvet tablecloth with a fringe that could be plaited and tangled up. My grandmother embroidered flowers onto white cotton curtains. I had a 'best' frock with french smocking on the front and a wide sash. I cried bitterly when I outgrew it. It remains today the best dress I ever had!

We used to go on holiday every year to a remote part of Devon (my Dad was the loyalty scheme king), staying in a hotel which hosted an improvised theatre show every Friday night. Guests were encouraged to perform plays, songs, poems, stories, and share their secret talents. It was an inspirational night – experiencing the unearthing of incredible talent as performers immersed themselves in their roles – and everyone loved it. From the age of eight, I would spend the entire week on the beach writing and re-writing plays, roping unwitting friends into playing various parts, and running the most unrelenting rehearsal schedule imaginable amongst the deck chairs and sand castles. For me, the magic of the night was being inspired by seeing so many ‘normal’ people’s creative potential come to the fore, knowing anything was possible, and having the one opportunity to go for it myself – until the next year!

A number of cultural experiences have stayed with me from my younger years, the earliest and strongest as a child was seeing The Crazy Gang at the Victoria Palace. This may explain the level of my cultural appreciation today! Cinema in general and the films of Buster Keaton were a huge influence – certainly on much of my playwriting. Music also played a major part. I was under ten when I saw a short film at a news cinema of an orchestra playing Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony and going with my mother to a concert rehearsal of a Beethoven Piano Concerto with Solomon as the soloist made an impact. My father was a violinist and one time leader of the LSO and although I was very young when he departed the marital home, music remains a vital part of my life.

Brought up in a mining family in South Yorkshire, I grew up surrounded by cultural experiences. Dads, mine included, grew and competitively showed prize flowers as well as food. Many people’s parents were male voice or women’s choristers or brass band members. I learned to garden, cook, sew, shout at the local lower league football team, sing solo and ensemble pieces, play the piano, and appreciate local dramatic and operatic productions. My comprehensive school taught me to act, appreciate literature and art. Took me to museums and galleries as a matter of course. All these influences are part of my very being. They inform how I do my job, love my family, pursue my adult cultural interests with the same passion as I did then, and value my origins. And I’m delighted to say that I could no more single out just one event from this rich palette, than fly!

One of my most memorable cultural experiences was, while recovering from a childhood illness, having lots of days off school (!) and visiting art galleries and museums with my mother. During week days we often had places to ourselves and would wander round at our own pace. I have strong memories of being lost in my drawings in response to amazing artefacts and images. Later at secondary school, I would often stay in the art room at lunchtime, sharing marmite sandwiches and recalling these experiences with my art teacher. I would rework old drawings and turn them into new work. I think I was fairly obsessed with drawing ... sometimes I didn't get to school and would be found drawing in the nearby park. As soon as I could, I worked in the local library, also a gallery, alternating this with the art supplies shop (and a necessary supply of art materials). These early experiences have had a real impact on my belief in the arts and culture to offer meaning and significance to being human.

One of my most memorable cultural experiences is also one of my earliest. I know I loved the Egyptian collection in the British Museum from a very young age, but my strongest memory is of seeing the Turner paintings in the National Gallery shortly after my fourth birthday. There was something about Turner’s vortex of paint, sea and sky which was utterly mesmerising for me as a child. My passion now is Cornish art but I can probably trace its origins back to that moment. I watched my five-year-old son have a similar experience in 2009, when he literally skipped through and around the Anish Kapoor sculptures at the Royal Academy, loving every second, and interpreting it for me with such confidence, as if everything there had been created just for him. I hope the experience stays with him as my Turner moment did with me.

My first cultural experience was taking part in a school play. An English teacher called Mary Higgins joined the teaching staff of my secondary school and she began to direct whole school plays. We started with Scrooge, moved on to My Fair Lady and eventually ended up doing The Winters Tale. Those plays were hugely important to me. They seeded a love of theatre and drama work that lasts to this day. Through the process of taking part in the plays I learnt about the impact that powerful learning experiences have on children. I also learnt some valuable lessons about team work and developed a confidence about speaking in public. I draw on all of those in my current job. Twenty years later, I now run the education department at the Royal Shakespeare Company and hopefully enable other children to have a similar experience to the one that inspired me.

At the age of 17, thanks to the skill of an A-level English teacher and his inspirational teaching of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, I understood the joy of poetry. As a consequence of this I chose to read English Literature at university and have subsequently thoroughly enjoyed my career as a teacher. This experience taught me that a skilled and knowledgeable teacher can have a long-lasting impact on his or her students. A passionate joy of the arts can enthuse others with quite profound and long-lasting consequences.

I have a vivid memory of performing Bliss’s 'Things to Come' in the 1960's as a member of the Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra at the De Montfort Hall. It was a spectacular event with hundreds of children on stage from many of the county’s primary schools, dancing enthusiastically to a packed house and accompanied by an orchestra of around 100 young musicians. The performance was one of those special moments. We had been challenged and supported in achieving a highly professional standard of presentation in the combination of different art forms. But it was also the camaraderie and the excitement of the whole experience, including the rehearsals, that made me want to devote my life to participating in music, and later, to sharing and empowering others to have access to similarly life-transforming moments.

In one of my very first English Literature A-level lessons, we embarked on TS Elliot with some trepidation. My English teacher, for whom I had a growing admiration, played us a recording of 'The Wasteland' read aloud by the man himself. I couldn’t begin to understand the work on any intellectual level but had a reaction deep in some other part of my heart or mind to the sheer scale and beauty of the language. I felt as if a door had opened somewhere, beyond which there were limitless things to discover, to learn, and to understand. We went on to delve into this amazing literary epic in the weeks to come. I wrote about the poem, thought endlessly about its intricacies and depths. I will still never understand parts of it – but therein lies its great power and mystery. It was the starting point for my choosing to study English Literature at university and to my life-long love of reading.

When I was very young we moved as a family from Belfast to Rugby. By the time I was at secondary school I was used to being called Spud or Paddy. Irish jokes were common so I was sometimes their target. We often visited the then Ulster Museum. But it was a history teacher at my school who truly began my cultural education. I learnt that the past has a relationship to the present and that relationship can be controversial. He organised trips to see the historic landscape and he took us to museums. I still remember the moment where I saw my memorable object – an Irish elk, the skeleton towered above mere humans. Its antler span alone was some 11 feet. It was huge, and it was Irish. “Bring on the English elk”, I thought. This was the experience that crystallised my identity, as well as an unarticulated sense of cultural loss. I have never forgotten it – or the power that it revealed to me of objects to move us

My first memorable cultural experience was at 10 years of age when I saw live theatre. I attended a travelling performance of Twelfth Night in a nearby secondary school hall with no stage or lighting, with cut out orange trees providing the backdrop to Tudor costumes of cross-garters and cross-dressing. Suddenly the dry text pages made sense as they were given life, meaning in action and movement. I joined the drama society, was in school and house plays, and sat my Guildhall exams – as well as gaining the school English prize. My second cultural experience was in the 1st form at grammar school when taken to a visiting symphony orchestra playing I know not what at the Palace Theatre in Newark – but sat on red plush seats, next to my best friend Ro. Did those musicians really have to do boring piano and squealy violin practice or were they born like that? I learned that I love music – but didn't have the patience to perfect the art. Ro did and she still is my friend.

As a young child my most important cultural experience was being taken to the library twice a week. Books were a route into different worlds. I was particularly entranced by a series of books on the childhood of famous people – the young Elizabeth Barratt Browning; the young Elizabeth Fry. Drawn from diaries and memoirs they gave a surprisingly accurate (I discovered later) account of the childhoods of famous women – and it was only the women I was interested in. I think they showed me that the world I was growing up in was not necessarily the world I had to stay in for the whole of my life. I knew from a very young age that I wanted something more than seemed to be on offer in the town in which I lived – books and collections helped me to understand more about what I wanted and how to get it.

I vividly remember visiting the Tate in the early '60s (aged 10 or 11) and spending time with the contemporary kinetic works in the collection. I found the optical illusions fascinating, and was very taken with how these works caused the eye to be deceived about line, space and colour. This was a new world for me, and matched with the wider popular excitement at contemporary discoveries – from hovercraft to space travel. I must have realised that the worlds of art and science were not totally separate and that creativity could span every part of human activity. I didn't think of any of this as learning – simply enchantment. My parents encouraged me to be very open to contemporary and modern art, and that this was not incompatible with being devoted to traditional skills. My father is a talented amateur watercolourist and I was lucky to have his encouragement in making art as well as looking at it. This idea – that we can all make things – has remained important to me.

As a boy of 12, on the cusp of adolescence, I joined the school play. What I remember about that play is not the performances so much, but the rehearsals. It was intensely social. Collaborating closely with kids, often older kids, that I would never otherwise mix with; getting to know teachers, not as the lecturing voice of a school subject, but as people. And I realised those people cared about their students and wanted them to know drama as a way of becoming, of exploring who they were and who they could be. Most of all it was the skills of making mistakes, looking daft, and helping others out as we got to know a good script and how to perform it well. It was a powerful experience and I still carry with me the memories of it and the gratitude for it.

Aged about 14 I was taken by my school art teacher to the local (not very good) gallery. We were asked to identify the work we liked best. I chose a drawing of Abbeville Cathedral by John Ruskin and when asked why, I said that I admired the detail in the drawing. The response was an immediate put down: 'Beware detail, young Steers'. I thought 'you can think what you like, I want to draw as well as that'. I've been trying to do so ever since for the last fifty years!

To write and draw in a school magazine that I also had the opportunity to edit was significant; but probably even more significant, with hindsight, was to appear in school Shakespeare productions. It was not so much the parts but the sense of that whole experience; of identifying with characters, sensing mood, pace, emphasis, contrast, even though I was probably doing quite a lot of this fairly unconsciously. All this was part of my art education, the preparation for being an illustrator. Illustration for me is very much the theatre of the page, and so I have spent years, as it were, producing texts; acting the characters, controlling the pace, the mood, the emphasis, rehearsing effects. It’s what turns drawing into illustration.

Two events which occurred on the same day in 1968 stand out in my mind. Having arrived in Istanbul courtesy of an ancient Morris Minor, I was sitting in a crowded early morning dolmus en route to the Hagia Sophia when the seat next to was taken by a dancing bear en route with his owner to entertain the crowds of tourists waiting to go in. A few minutes later I was standing beneath the magnificent dome which, from its construction in 532AD, was the largest in the world for over a thousand years, towering over first the Christian practices of the Orthodox Church and then the Muslim ceremonies of the conquering Ottoman army from 1453. In those few short moments I underatood for the first time that my own cultural perspective was not the “right” one. From that time on, I have tried to be open to alternatives.

My cultural learning was somewhat eclectic, but formative and powerful. Growing up on a farm in the Peak District meant access to a metropolitan cultural experience was limited. As a young child being taken to the ‘Nutcracker’ ballet created a sense of awe and excitement that is explicit in live performance. As a youngster the sense of atmosphere and collective experience will never leave me. The power of performance conveying powerful messages has always been addictive. Whether it be seeing Glenda Jackson in ‘Mother Courage’, Ian McKellen in ‘Bent’ or the West End production of ‘Billy Elliott’. As a teenager seeing bands like Specials, Madness and The Jam live communicating energy and passion to a committed audience. I love to see the power of the arts when my students produce their own creative work – whether it's visual or performance based. Powerful arts experiences make you think, trigger emotions and above all unleash creative talents which we all possess.

As a child I remember overhearing the music teacher at school rehearse a performance of the most ravishing song I had ever heard. I was 12 years old and I had no idea what it was, but something in the way the tune worked on my emotions made me fall in love with the girl I happened to be looking at across the classroom. I was in love with her for at least a week, and I have never forgotten the way the afternoon sunlight fell across her brown hair. I later learned that the music was the aria Voi che sapete from Mozart's ‘The Marriage of Figaro’, which is of course about exactly the experience I was undergoing (though at the time I couldn’t hear the words). What I learned from that was that the most intense and important experiences we have at school go on outside the curriculum, and almost always without the knowledge of the teachers. Consequently any attempts to regulate education by government, or anyone else, will miss the point and fail. It taught me no ‘skills’ at all.