ull Time Based Arts has never believed that art should be the sole preserve of galleries. With commissions like last year's Voice Over sculpture and the annual ROOT festival, it regularly brings challenging new art to the heart of the community.

The High Street-based organisation has now gone one better by using art to try to boost achievement in city schools. As HTBA's education projects coordinator, Ade Powell is responsible for managing educational activities that are designed to enrich all areas of the curriculum. He explained: "Our aim is to bring creativity to learning environments, which is something that teachers are not always able to do because they are restricted to a certain extent by the requirements of the National Curriculum.

"Hull Time Based Arts can help with this by getting professional creative people involved." In one recent project, HTBA helped to enliven one potentially dull part of the primary maths curriculum - shape recognition - by giving children the chance to learn about 20th century art. Mr Powell said: "The children have to be able to recognise 18 different mathematical shapes.

How they normally do that is by sitting in the classroom and playing around with blocks. "It's not very tactile and involves a lot of writing, which could alienate a lot of children. "We got the kids in here, connected the computer up to the Internet and let them have a look at cubist art and architecture, which contains all the shapes in the National Curriculum and about 5,000 others!"

After painting pictures in the style of a cubist artist, the children then learned to manipulate the images on a computer, experimenting with different colours and textures. "I guarantee if you went to that school and gave them a test on shapes they would score higher than children who had just learned in the classroom," added Mr Powell. HTBA has applied this creative approach to learning to many other subjects, including children using images and music to describe their environment, and dance to explain how atoms move, for example.

The organisation is also working the City Council's City Arts Unit to provide a performance artist in residence for Kingswood Secondary School, who is involved both in curriculum enrichment and providing students with practical advice about careers in the arts. HTBA closely monitors the educational value of all these activities to make sure that they fit the National Curriculum.

Mr Powell said that creative techniques were not intended as a substitute for traditional learning skills, like reading and writing, but as a complement. "In one project, we got children to make books," he said. "A children might have only written two sentences in their lives but because they have made a book and it's their own story, they are much more motivated."

He added: "There is strong evidence to suggest that we learn in many different ways. We can learn by writing or reading and we can also learn by dancing. Art opens up many other educational experiences. "Does the creative process nurture learning? It works a treat."