Established in 2003, Creative Partnerships was established to bring professional artists together with disadvantaged schools all over Britain.
However, the emphasis was not merely on nurturing approaches to culture in the classroom, but in developing creative approaches to teaching in all aspects of the curriculum, by employing artists to work with students on project-based curricular tasks. As its comprehensive website explains, Creative Partnerships speaks to "the creativity of young people, raising their aspirations and achievements" and "the skills of teachers and their ability to work with creative practitioners".
But Creative Partnerships is also committed to the professional integrity of the artists it works with, and to the development of the "skills, capacity and sustainability of the creative industries".
It is through integrating the arts at a core curricular level - as an integrated approach to learning in all subjects, rather than as a separate modular strand - that Creative Partnerships has found its work to be most effective. As well as making learning more enjoyable, Creative Partnerships focuses on the use of the arts as a means of developing different types of intelligence in the classroom (the multiple intelligence model) and accommodating learning difficulties. A three-pronged approach is used, which includes visualising ideas (imagining and originality), auditory learning (discussion and description through language) and kinaesthetic engagement (the act of doing).
The results of the Creative Partnership initiative are convincingly set out in a series of reports commissioned by the organisation to provide quantitative as well as qualitative research in the area of the arts and learning. Its 2006 study of 13,000 pupils found that participants outperformed non-participants to a statistically significant extent in English, maths and science, both within their own educational demographic and at national level. "Since Creative Partnerships is focused on improving education in the most challenged communities in England, this is a highly significant result."
On a broader level of engagement than examination results, teachers recorded a 92 per cent improvement in confidence, a 91 per cent improvement in communication skills, and an 87 per cent improvement in motivation among participating pupils, as well as improvements in enjoyment of school, behaviour, and the ability to learn independently. The art-based learning initiative was considered to have made a contribution to raising educational standards in schools, to attainment and attendance, and to bringing a stronger focus on student progress beyond exam results.
The benefits were seen to accrue to teachers too, and the organisation is now a major resource for teachers and artists working in the educational sector in the UK, with a mass of research and case studies of success in arts-based learning that spans the art forms as well as curricular subjects.
[ www.creative-partnerships.comOpens in new window ]
Case Study 2: Creative Engagement
In 2003, Derek West, retired secondary school principal and arts and education activist, was instrumental in the organisation of Creative Engagement, fuelled by a belief that "the arts should be more central to post-primary education".
"It is unbelievable," West says, "to think that you can go through post-primary education without contact with the arts. At primary level there are compulsory elements on the curriculum and there are advisers to assist teachers to deliver it, but all that stops at the age of 12."
Supported by the arts and culture committee of the National Association for Principals and Deputy Principals, Creative Engagement is dedicated to providing high-quality participatory arts experiences to second-level students.
"We will be waiting forever for an enlightened policy on [the arts in schools]," he says. "Creative Engagement lets pockets of excellence go ahead, though, through one-off projects."
With financial support from the Department of Arts and the Department of Education, Creative Engagement invites schools to apply for grants to subsidise professional artists working with students and teachers on particular projects. Having just completed its third full year of operation, the initiative has sponsored more than 100 schools in a wide variety of projects, from film-making to stonemasonry.
"Most of the education system is about teaching to the requirements of an exam," West explains. "But the fundamental thing about Creative Engagement is that the students become involved in a creative project as opposed to just learning about arts, that they are involved in the experience of it as a personal process. The gains are self-confidence and pride - they can do something that they didn't think they could do at the beginning."
When this purpose is in alignment with the requirements of the education system, the results can be profound, West explains in relation to one particular project, which involved Leaving Certificate Applied (LCA) students in a school in Co Donegal.
"The LCA has modules on media and personal development, and the students were able to integrate all that into the film that they made. There was a huge pleasure for them in that project, but they were picking up credit as well," he says. "That was an imaginative application of the project to the LCA curriculum, and is a good example of what the arts can do for youngsters. Because we have so many subjects, we have little time to learn by doing. But we need to learn by our mistakes, by our experiences, as much as our achievements."
