The Creativity Collaborative

Working with schools to enrich children's life chances by developing them into confident and creative problem-solvers.

Programme overview

In October 2021, Arts Council England launched a Creativity Collaboratives programme to build a network of schools across England focussed on developing and testing innovative approaches to teaching for creativity across the curriculum. This £2,780,000 investment has funded eight collaboratives of schools, each with a focus that reflects their specific contexts and needs. Each collaborative is working with a university partner to collect evidence on the impact and value of teaching for creativity for children, schools and their communities.

The collaboratives are unified by two overarching aims:

to enable schools to establish and sustain teaching for creativity
to understand how creative education prepares children and young people to live happy, healthy and fulfilled lives

Find out more about the programme

Read about the work of some of the collaboratives and the different approaches to teaching and learning for creativity.

Latest news

July 2024: Wild Hampshire Project

The Wild Hampshire Project, a collaboration between the Creativity Collaborative and The Grange Festival Learning showcased Professor Paul Sowden’s investigation into nurturing creativity across primary education. The project saw 350 children from 11 primary school groups exploring sustainability and environmental challenges on their doorstep, from woodlands and grasslands to the Solent coastline and our unique chalk streams. They discussed and debated the environmental challenges using music, creative writing, design and dance as vehicles for expression, and shared their opinions, emotions and ideas for a more sustainable future.

25 Jan. 2024: Creativity - what it is, why it matters and what you can do to cultivate it in schools

This event, a collaboration with the University’s Centre for Real-World Learning, brought together four key researchers and educators from the University of Winchester and school leaders and teachers from schools across Hampshire to explore:

Creativity in schools across the world
The Creativity Collaboratives in England
University researchers and schools working together
The leadership of creativity in schools

Our Creativity Collaborative

Our aims and objectives

Our collaborative aims to enrich children's life chances by developing them into confident and creative problem-solvers, engaging them through authentic, meaningful problems, embedded in their schools and lives. We passionately believe that creativity is a force that enables our learners to develop capabilities that will facilitate them to build successful and rewarding lives, as members of communities in an ever-changing world. We further believe that creativity must not be limited to specific curriculum subjects and that success as a learner is not defined solely by traditional academic outcomes.

A driving principle underpinning the activities of our collaborative is that change needs to be systemic and multi-level. Consequently, our project activities have included working with pre-service teachers in education, in-service teachers, headteachers and school leaders, governors and, of course, pupils.

Our activity strands

Our work has been focussed around five interleaved streams of activity:

Context for creativity focusses on identifying barriers and enablers of learning and teaching for creativity in our participating schools and their interaction with inequality & disadvantage.

Knowledge for creativity focusses on building learners’, teachers’ and leaders’ knowledge and understanding of creativity.

Agency for creativity focusses on supporting learners and teachers to develop their sense of being able to be creative and to teach for creativity.

Pedagogies for creativity focusses on developing evidence-based pedagogies to foster creativity, working with teachers, and pre-service teachers undergoing initial teacher education.

Leadership for creativity focusses on effective leadership, governance, and collaboration strategies to grow a climate for creativity and sustainable change.

Our research

To assess the impact of our project activities we have deployed a range of research tools. Questionnaires were administered, and interviews and focus groups took place, when each of our schools joined the collaborative. These are being repeated part-way through and at the end of the project, to assess whether project activities result in measurable changes in the information gathered, thereby providing evidence of project impact.

Read our first report Context, Knowledge, Agency, Pedagogies and Leadership for Creativity in Schools, which contains some of our initial findings.