North East Creativity Collaborative
From pockets of best practice to sustained system change
We know that beacons of excellent teaching for creativity exist in many schools. But often these pockets of brilliant practice are isolated – there’s no simple way to share and lead innovation across whole systems. That means it’s difficult, if not impossible, to tip these pockets of creative thinking and teaching into whole-scale system change.
From 2021 to 2024, we supported the North-East Creativity Collaborative, helping them evolve into a confident community that experiments and shares approaches to teaching for creativity across 12 schools. We played a strategic mentoring role, becoming a ‘curious friend’ to extend learning and sharing, as well as offering co-ordination assistance. We designed and facilitated twice-termly learning meetings, moving towards a co-creation and co-facilitation role as confidence increased.
Support from our collaborators – Emeritus Professor Louise Stoll, Professor Bill Lucas and Dr David Parker – helped create a theory of change and introduced new research and thinking. This helped us focus our work on the conditions which support the building of capabilities, including leadership. We also supported community members to engage with university partners to study individual themes, and helped introduce members to schools outside the collaborative.
The school team’s confidence around creative thinking
Do we feel more confident about the justification for creative thinking and how to promote it?
The school team as leaders of creative thinking in their school
How is creative thinking being modelled in our leadership?
School conditions to support creative thinking
What’s now part of ‘the way we do things around here?’
The professional learning community
Are we connecting more with other schools in the collaborative? How are we sharing and supporting others?
Teachers’ beliefs, knowledge and skills around creative thinking
How are we as a team influencing teachers’ practice in our schools?
Pupils’ creative thinking
What difference is this work making to pupils? How do we know? How can Young Creativity Champions support our goals?
Collaboration in action – Young Creativity Champions
Helping schools explore how children and young people can become part of the change process and champions of creativity.
Over the past three years we’ve learnt that staff understanding of creativity and how this aligns with a school’s ethos/vision is key when working towards system-wide organisational change.
This initial phase takes time and space: time for staff to understand the inter-disciplinary nature of the creative habits of mind; time to reflect and share with colleagues; time for staff to try out pedagogical approaches in their own classrooms; time to feedback and learn from one another.
For this to happen, staff require access to quality research and resources to support their creativity journey as well as the support of senior leadership to ‘try things out’ and permission ‘to give it a go’.