Opening the gates: how arts-rich primary schools open up to their parents and communities

English primary schools are required to be secure, access-controlled sites: safeguarding inspections expect locked gates, vetted visitors and actively managed boundaries. This safe-guarding policy sits in tension with the equally established expectation that schools engage the parents and communities they serve. This paper is the third in a series on how arts-rich primary schools ‘open up’ In a system that pushes them to close down. We examine how these schools open their gates to families and neighborhoods. Drawing on case-study data from the Researching Arts-rich Primary Schools (RAPS) project, a mixed-methods study of arts-rich primary schools across England, we identify five strategies through which artistic practices keep school boundaries permeable: teaching beyond institutional walls, opening buildings as community cultural venues, positioning children as community cultural leaders, sustaining partnerships with cultural organizations, and building place-based curriculum that treats local history and families as a necessity rather than as serendipity or a pedagogical preference. Arts-rich education depends on specialist spaces, professional practitioners, authentic audiences and place-based knowledge that lie beyond the gate. Crucially, openness and safeguarding are not opposed: these schools configure differentiated permeability while complying with safeguarding policy. The analysis has implications for international readers managing the same tensions between safety and openness.