The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Seoul Agenda for Arts Education (2010) calls for ensuring equitable access to arts education for all, strengthening the quality of arts education and harnessing its potential to contribute to resolving social and cultural challenges. In both South Africa and Denmark, a practice–policy gap exists between what the curricula prescribe in the area of arts education and what is experienced to be happening in the everyday life at schools. This gap contributes to creating inequality in terms of access to arts education. It is therefore important to find ways that might give access to arts education to a broader range of children, and to find out how their participation might contribute to advancing their future opportunities. This paper explores how arts education policies can be enacted within schools in both Denmark and South Africa. It takes as its point of departure a project that investigates the potential of an educational practice that integrates dance with visual arts and involves multicultural groups of children, teachers and artists in two school classes in South Africa and Denmark. It focuses on what importance arts education might have, especially to those children in the two classes who are ‘at risk’, by illuminating their experiences and opportunities for learning through integration of dance and visual arts. In this study, a phenomenologically inspired concept of learning, which includes enhanced awareness, theories of multi-modal experience in the arts and Todres’ concept of ‘soulful space’ contribute to illuminate educational potential of the artistic-educational approaches that were developed in the project. Through a hermeneutic phenomenological methodology, children’s experiences were elicited through reflective group dialogues involving ‘stimulated recall’ based on photographs of them engaged in different activities and drawings that they had created, which reflected their experiences.