Establishing creative partnerships

‘It is exceedingly difficult for policy to change practice, especially across levels of government. Contrary to the one-to-one relationship assumed to exist between policy and practice, the nature, amount, and pace of change at school level is a product of local factors that are largely beyond the control of higher-level policy makers’
(David Hopkins, former Head of the School Standards Unit, DfES)

Creative schools are like creative learners. As institutions, they are constantly:

• questioning and challenging
• making connections and seeing relationships
• envisaging what might be
• exploring ideas, keeping options open
• reflecting critically on ideas, outcomes and outcomes.

(from QCA (2003), Creativity: find it, promote it. http://www.ncaction.org.uk/creativity/)

‘Creative schools’ should also:

• GET IT! Know how, and when, to engage with the cultural sector to sustain and transform their creative potential.
• GIVE IT! Know how, and when, to engage with the rest of the education sector to enable the system, and the schools within it, to become more creative.

 

Harnessing the power of half-formed ideas

How many light bulbs does it take to change a school? And how do we know when it’s changed, anyway? ‘Whole school change’ is a holy grail of virtually every education initiative and strategy, yet do we know it when we see it, and can we ever be sure of the factors that made it happen? Stagnation may be easier to spot than change. In my short career as a teacher in three primary schools, I never felt part of any kind of irreversible momentum, beyond the one directed by forces beyond the school walls.

Creative Partnerships has a unique opportunity to explore and demonstrate the value of creativity and partnerships for learning, and have a radical impact on the schools we work with and the whole education system. Our programmes aim both to raise achievement but also to redefine what it means to ‘achieve’. What do children need to learn, both to prepare themselves for adult life, but also to experience childhood in an exciting and empowering way?

By Summer 2008, Creative Partnerships will be working intensively in over 2,000 ‘core’ schools, and developing strategic relationships with thousands more. Although all our core schools are in areas of economic deprivation, their diversity is one of our strengths. We have a mix of primary and secondary schools, with a few early years settings, special schools and pupil referral units. Many are Artsmark schools; a few are specialist schools, and some are already high performing. But equally, we have worked with schools in ‘Special Measures’, who have used their engagement with our programme to both deal with short-term improvement issues, and to raise their sights beyond whatever OFSTED has instructed them to do.

What hopefully unites these schools is a commitment to whole-school change, which we can identify as ‘a structural change in the thinking, organisational management and ethos of a school towards creative learning’ (1) Some schools have a clear idea of the creative journey they want to embark on, and how working with professionals from the cultural sector can support this. For others, it’s merely the knowledge that their current ‘offer’ is letting down a significant number of their young people, and a hunch that maybe artists and others can help address this problem. To be honest, we don’t care what your platform is made of, as long as it’s really burning.

While our programme, in modelling the creative process, can be tolerant of ambiguity and celebrate difference, three years in we can also begin to identify some conditions of success. What are the features that schools need to demonstrate to maximise the impact of our interventions?

First, schools need a commitment to be ‘resolutely partnership-spirited’, relinquishing ego and interested in the creation of a third entity above and beyond the partner we work with at any given time. I once heard partnership defined as ‘the mutual suppression of loathing in the pursuit of money’. Certainly, many government initiatives, which promote collaboration through financial incentives, could be found guilty of promoting this expedient version of partnership. Creative Partnerships schools need to view collaboration with other cultural partners, schools, teachers and young people as a critical part of the change process. In particular, the creative practitioners need to be seen as equal partners at every stage of the process. Their lack of ‘chalk face experience’ is one of their greatest assets, enabling them to ask tricky questions about how schools operate, and often become ‘irritants in residence’. Our own, deliberately idealistic definition of partnership should perhaps be ‘a mutual suppression of scepticism in the pursuit of creativity’.

Second, effective, innovative partnerships require all partners to believe in the power of half-formed ideas. As a research and development programme, Creative Partnerships cannot fund pre-packaged products from existing arts organisations, or projects which schools have done before, and merely wish to repeat.  If you know it works, then that’s great, but we won’t fund it. Schools need to have some idea of their development needs, so that they can be matched with an appropriate partner, but at that point both partners need the collective imagination to build something new and untested. They need to make connections, ask unusual questions, and reflect critically on ideas, actions and outcomes In essence, they need to model all those skills for creativity that we want our children and young people to develop.

This willingness to take risks carries with it a responsibility to undertake what David Hargreaves has described as ‘disciplined innovation’. In all areas of life, the more radical your innovation, the more you need to understand the traditions you are breaking with. Rigour is key to success. Thus, our schools require a commitment to go beyond tick-box evaluations to genuine action research – starting with a question, rather than an objective – and demonstrating the impact on our programmes on young people’s creativity.

Finally, schools need to be enthusiastic about sharing their practice in order to change the practices of others, and find creative ways to move beyond traditional forms of dissemination, where knowledge is cascaded from one part of the education system to another, to more lateral forms of knowledge transfer. Our schools need to recognise and realise their potential as thought leaders on creative learning within the education system.

Every area of education policy, from changes to inspection and accountability, to new thinking about curricula and assessment, to the promotion of teacher-led innovation, appears to be moving in a direction which is supportive of the creativity agenda. Ultimately, however the test will be whether creativity returns from the covert margins to the noisy mainstream of teaching and learning, and stays there, withstanding fluctuating educational trends and restless political priorities. The leadership role of schools is crucial to the long-term sustainability of creative learning. The system needs creative champions spread throughout school communities: pupils, parents, governors and learning mentors, as well as teachers and heads.

These conditions for success may sound ambitious to the point of naivety. Of course, some of our schools will inevitably take the projects and run, seeing Creative Partnerships as a funding stream which can enable a one-off injection of the arts. Schools will always be faced with competing priorities and best intentions can easily be derailed. But we retain our idealism whilst recognising the systemic barriers to change. As a creative lawyer once said, ‘it is true that we cannot become visionaries until we become realists. It is also true that to become realists we must make ourselves into visionaries’. (2)

(1) This definition was created by Anna Cutler, former Director of Creative Partnerships Kent, now head of Education at the Tate.

(2) Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. False necessity: antinecessitarian social theory in the service of radical democracy. (Verso 2002).

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mr Joe Hallgarten is Learning Director at Creative Partnerships, in London, England, United Kingdom.

 

Go to top of page     Go to online discussion