It has been ten years since the publication of All Our Futures: creativity, culture and education but it is as important – and as relevant – today as it was then, says Sir Ken Robinson, who chaired the commission of inquiry that produced it. “When the report came out there was a lot of interest in it from the [teaching] profession, in business and in the cultural sector,” he says. “I spent about a year working with groups across the country, talking about the report and promoting its arguments and recommendations.”
The government’s response, however, was more muted. “I think that they felt that the report was going further than they wanted…[education ministers] were less than enthusiastic about it because they were so focused at the time – mistakenly, in my opinion – in literacy and numeracy.” It’s not that reading and arithmetic should be marginalised in any way, he adds; simply that creativity needs to be seen as something that underpins our entire approach to education rather than some sort of add-on that can be squeezed into the tail end of the timetable. (He suspects that some education officials expected the report to recommend a “creativity hour”, perhaps with clowns).
Creativity in education
Fortunately head teachers and other school staff tend to understand the central importance of creativity in education almost intuitively. “The NAHT and other head teachers’ associations have been extremely supportive of the report because they know…that creativity isn’t some additional thing that you can ghettoise in the curriculum and say ‘let’s do some creativity now’,” he says. Instead, it is more about the ethos of the school and the approach taken by teachers to their jobs.
“Head teachers know that the success of their pupils and their schools depends on the vitality of the culture of the school itself, the creative energy of the teachers and the engagement of the pupils. You can’t depersonalise education and have it work.” This is why he is so determined to demonstrate that creativity and test results are inherently linked rather than an either/or option.
“When I hear people say ‘well we’d love to do all this but we have to raise literacy standards’ I think that they really shouldn’t be doing this job, they should go and do something else. Don’t get in the way of pupils’ education. It’s a completely false way to look at it.”
Prescriptive nature of the national curriculum
While the prescriptive nature of the national curriculum and the pressures of testing could lead some head teachers to abandon creativity in favour of a tick-box approach, the system itself does not require it, Sir Ken says. “One of the things that we argued for in the report was to look for the wriggle room, the flexibility, and to look for ways of being creative where you can. Nothing in the legislation had anything to say about timetabling or when the school should open, when it should close, what should happen at lunchtime or any of those things.”
And head teachers cannot expect their staff to teach creatively if the overall environment does not support it. “I don’t know any school that is better than the teachers and very few schools that are better than the head teacher,” he says. “You can’t help students to develop their own creative abilities without also enabling teachers to be more creative and to get more pleasure and fulfilment from the work that they do, and that means looking at the whole culture of the school.” When head teachers are prepared to take creative risks they can truly transform the nature of their school. “And the thing is that the dividends and the benefits come to everybody. Teachers feel that they are doing a better job,” he says. “Head teachers…find their jobs becoming easier and more fulfilling.”
There are any number of schools with great head teachers doing fantastic, creative things, but they need support and encouragement. It’s up to the NAHT to remind heads that they have both the power and the opportunity to think beyond and around the boundaries set by legislation, that it’s important to do what they are required to do but that they should not see that as the limit of what they can do.
Innovation tools
“The more that the NAHT and other organisations can help head teachers to develop their own sets of innovation tools, the more that they can help them to see that there is room here for creativity in the way that they run their schools and look at the curriculum,” Sir Ken says. “The more that they can encourage them to look at other models of practice and to refresh the vision for their schools then the more these ideas are likely to take root.
“And in the end this isn’t about waiting for some shift in national policy. Education for any individual child is happening today, in this school, with these teachers. It doesn’t happen in Whitehall. It happens here.”
Sir Ken now lives in the USA but he will be back in the UK later this month. On May 23 he will appear alongside Jude Kelly, David Puttnam, Lenny Henry and others from the All Our Futures committee at the Southbank Centre to review the report and discuss some of the hot topics in education today. The event is free to teachers. For further informaton, visit his website at www.sirkenrobinson.com
Carly Chynoweth is a freelance journalist
who writes about leadership and management
in both the public and private sectors.
Page Published: 06/05/2009
