Impress Ofsted with your creativity

Creative approaches to learning do not conflict with national standards in core subjects. It’s about changing how you teach, not what you teach, says Paul Collard...

It is a sunny afternoon, the children have gone and I am sitting in a primary school classroom talking to an energised and excited teacher. She is telling me how, though Creative Partnerships, she worked with a sound artist to revolutionise her approach to literacy.

Her children were struggling to connect written letters with their sounds, and this was holding back their reading and writing. “The problem was they were not listening,” she explains. “If they listened hard, the artist told me, they would hear the letters in their environment and then their letters would come quickly.”

Persuaded at least to give it a try, they began by getting the children to lie on the floor and listen to their school. Once they had stopped talking and started to listen, the children were amazed at what they could hear.

The children and their teacher then set out around town, visiting different locations and listening to the sounds they encountered. Then, using the letters of the alphabet, they had to invent words that captured the ounds they were hearing. They captured the sounds of trains entering stations and of shopping in an indoor market. They visited the local university and sat in on a Turkish language lecture, even though none of them were Turkish or had ever spoken Turkish before. Coming back into the classroom hey worked in small groups, comparing the words they had come up with and crafting and improving them until they had definitive list.

“The impact was dramatic,” reflects the teacher. “I had never seen them concentrate for so long on their letters, exploring and combining them in new ways to capture the sounds they heard. Not only did the quality of their writing improve, but their enthusiasm for writing increased enormously. Literacy became their favourite subject.”

There are two important things to note about this example of a Creative Partnerships project. Creative Partnerships was designed to help teachers explore how they might teach differently, not what they would teach differently. It enables them to make even the dullest part of the curriculum come alive and enthuse their children.

The second important point is that the project took place in a small town in Lithuania early in 2012. Since the withdrawal of Government funding in the UK in 2011, Creativity, Culture and Education (CCE), the international not-for-profit NGO, has been exporting the model abroad,where there is increasing demand for more creative approaches to education.

Good teaching is good teaching

What has been most interesting about the transfer of this approach to different countries and cultures is how easily it translates. While what is taught in schools varies enormously, the basic interaction between a child and teacher remains remarkable constant. It is true that in the Asia Pacific region, silent, unquestioning deference is what society expects of children in class, but teachers increasingly realise this is not conducive to a good learning environment.

Take curiosity, for instance. The teachers CCE has encountered in every country accept that curiosity – which includes the ability to wonder and question, to challenge assumptions and to make connections – is fundamental to effective learning. However, when asked to assess over a period of a couple of weeks how curious their pupils are, most teachers are forced to admit that it is hard to tell, because the school day, as it is planned, allows little time for curiosity. As Creative Partnerships has so often shown, allowing curiosity to play a greater part in the classroom is a change in how you teach, not what you teach. It can be designed into almost any curriculum. The Lithuanian project is a good example. It allows children to explore how the world sounds, which encourages their curiosity, while getting them to learn how their letters work, which the curriculum requires.

The legacy of Creative Partnerships

So what is the prognosis for English schools now the Creative Partnerships programme no longer operates here? In recent weeks, CCE has been arranging for visitors from other countries to visit schools in England that used to be in the Creative Partnerships programme. There have been delegations of journalists from Taiwan, educationalists from Sweden and science teachers from Korea. In all the schools we visited, CCE found that Creative Partnerships had been embedded in the school’s ethos and practice. Much of this required no additional funding, but where creative practitioners were still being brought in or additional training required, schools budgets were being flexed to meet the cost.

At Starbank Primary School in Birmingham, for example, their Creative Partnership programme enabled them to establish a school radio station, bringing in a professional from the BBC Asian Network to train pupils and staff in presenting, recording and producing techniques. Children across all years were encouraged to make programmes that captured and enhanced their learning across the curriculum. A subsequent visit revealed not only was ‘Rocket Radio’, as it is called, going strong, but that the school continues to employ the presenter from the BBC Asian Network station to support staff and pupils in their work.

In this context, the new primary school curriculum is neutral in its effect. Creative approaches to teaching and learning are applicable across the curriculum and since the considerable evidence generated by the extensive research into Creative Partnerships shows so clearly that these approaches improve attainment, motivation, confidence and attendance, there is nothing to be feared from Ofsted by encouraging them to flourish in the classroom. Creative Partnerships was itself twice inspected by Ofsted and with very positive results.

So the problem in England is not for those 20 per cent of schools who were able to participate in the Creative Partnerships programme. For the majority of them, the evidence suggests the impact was powerful and the practice has been embedded. The problem lies with the 80 per cent of schools who weren’t able to join in.

One impressive approach that could hold the answer for many primary schools is being pioneered by the excellent Birches Head High school in Stoke. It turned a school with real challenges into a highly successful learning environment by using what staff at Birches had previously leant through Creative Partnerships. Now Birches Head has gone on to established a co-operative Foundation Trust with no external sponsor, bringing 10 primary schools into the group so they can share their learning and expertise. Such structures have the capacity to create a bulwark to support creative approaches to teaching and learning and ensure that children and young people can access the high quality education they deserve.

In the meantime, CCE remains determined to continue to provide support to schools in England with an interest in adopting similar approaches. Schools wanting to know more should contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

OFSTED AND CREATIVITY

TWICE INSPECTED BY OFSTED, CREATIVE
PARTNERSHIPS WAS HIGHLY PRAISED:

“There is not a conflict between the National Curriculum, national standards in core subjects and creative approaches to learning. In the schools which were visited for this survey, careful planning had ensured that the prescribed curriculum content for each subject was covered within a broad and flexible framework and key skills were developed. These examples were accompanied by better than average achievement and standards or a marked upward trend.”