Not an add-on

Creative Partnerships (CP) has been one of the largest arts and creativity programmes in the world, but Government funding for the work ends this summer. Creativity, Culture and Education (CCE) is keen to share what it has learnt from managing it, in particular the Change Schools strand of the programme that ran 2008–2011 in almost 1,000 schools around England. Change Schools were supported by a local delivery organisation to develop a creative programme funded jointly by CCE (approximately £15,000 per year) and the school (approximately £5,000 per year). A key part of this support was the Creative Agent, a role designed to support a school’s leadership to analyse their needs, and then help them find the right creative practitioners to meet those needs in their schools.

The programme epitomised the efforts that CCE made to draw on the research of the earlier years of CP, to shape the practice we funded. This responded, in part, to a challenge set by Ofsted: to make the best work happen more consistently across the whole programme. The challenge came when CP was expanded to cover the whole country. Scaling up the programme had other challenges, particularly in how it would continue to work on a local level. One finding from research (Nottingham University and Keele University looking at creative school change) was that policies aiming to change schools go through a process of ‘vernacularisation’ – i.e. teachers, pupils and parents need to make sense of any change and then act – so taking the time to understand how that works on a local level would always be essential.

The new programme design for Change Schools aimed to meet these challenges. First, a Change School would be taken through a Creative School Development Framework (CSDF) to look at the school’s needs and devise particular activities in response, with the support of artists and other creative practitioners. An emphasis was placed on planning and reflection, using an evaluation framework which incorporated what we’d identified as the most important elements of CP practice to date: pupil voice; positive relationships between teachers, pupils and practitioners; nine elements of creative learning; and the particular contribution that an external creative practitioner can bring to the project.

The national evaluation by David Wood Consulting (DWC) found that CP was a “a focus for positive change” which “encourages participation through co-ownership, risk taking or challenge, reflection, learning new knowledge and skills, and provides opportunities to meet and work with different people both inside and out of school”.

One example is the Leicester ARC (Assessment and Reintegration Centre) for primary pupils at risk of exclusion. School staff were keen to boost pupil engagement to aid their return to mainstream primary education, by focusing on pupils’ understanding of their own creative behaviours and abilities. The creative agent supported the school to recruit artists. Working with music and visual artists, pupils explored their creative behaviours through music and recycled materials. An emphasis was placed on pupils being able to describe the processes they were working on and changes in their behaviours and approaches to learning. There are thousands more examples of CP projects that we have ambitions to maintain in an archive so we can better understand the impact of this work.

In addition to the positive findings, DWC highlighted limitations. The first was that despite being described as a “transformational” process, the change achieved was more incremental. The other important point was a critique of evidence collecting, saying that: “Only a small minority of reports … drew on… evidence to support and validate positive claims, despite the clear requirement [from] CP to produce evidence”. It also criticised the lack of sustained and rigorous dialogue about creativity, including about the research literature, which limited the pace of change. If the programme were to continue we would take steps to address these challenges.

With the Change School programme (and the rest of CP), CCE took understanding impact in realistic ways that had potential use for policymakers, researchers and practitioners very seriously. Doing this took time, effort and expertise, which took real investment that is now fast disappearing. At a time when arts in education is being considered as part of Henley’s cultural education review, it is important to get past simplistic views of artists’ work in schools. We need to avoid it being seen as one-off ‘fun’ experiences that counterbalance the main business of school, rather than as a crucial part of it. Unless people keep talking about the importance of the kinds of efforts that it takes, the particular qualities of artists’ work in schools, and develop more sophisticated description of outcomes, we are in danger of losing the kind of opportunities described at Leicester ARC for young people in school today and in the future.