Creating the Creatives

Speaking / Singing at the Tees Valley Business Club last night and I was short on time! It was much more important that the close on 80 intergenerational voices and musicians of Yarm School and Infant Hercules were heard – bellowing out songs to commemorate this weekend’s bicentenary of the passenger railway – many of their ancestors being responsible for engineering and building it.

The theme of the evening was ‘educating for enterprise’. I wanted – as you’d likely to expect to fly the flag for creativity and the creative arts and suggest an urgent need to re-visit where they sit in the education of young people in 21st Century Britain.

A quick google search ‘5 things an employer is looking for’ indicated, on the whole a common set of themes when it comes to employability – and its bedfellow ‘enterprise’: Communication; Teamwork; Flexibility; Interpersonal skills and Organisation. There are variations on a theme – risk taking; independent working; time-management… but also a general assertion that many young people are not arriving for employment ‘work-ready’.

https://career-advice.jobs.ac.uk/jobseeking-and-interview-tips/what-are-employers-looking-for/

The vast majority of children take their subject ‘options’ in Year 9 – around the age of 14 – it’s what has always happened – or at least over the past 30 / 40 years. Often these ‘options’ are managed… the core subjects of mathematics and english are – perhaps rightly a ‘given’. Pupils are then often expected or ‘encouraged’ to select one or more of the sciences and a modern foreign language. Their timetable is also pre-populated by compulsory PE and PSHE classes – healthy body, healthy citizen rhetoric. They are then left with blocks they are able to fill with the likes of history, geography, vocational qualifications and – correct me if I’m wrong – in the vast majority of schools the arts subjects IF they show a particular flair or, as is often the case, they at least engage with a specific teacher. Either way, the arts and creative subjects are, generally speaking, the ‘filler’ options. And that, to me is where we are failing our young people. Their creative nurturing journey grinds to a halt at the age of 14.

Recap: Communication; Teamwork; Flexibility; Interpersonal skills and Organisation are the skills that employers are wanting to see – and NOT seeing in their prospective workforce. And yet they are the very skillset that underpins every arts subject. We expect 18+ year olds to be work ready – let alone ‘creative thinkers’ and yet over 80% of their younger selves don’t take – or are likely encouraged to take up the creative subjects that will nurture those skills – even less so at a post 16 level.

I am generalising of course – and other subjects – particularly those with a vocational bias would still support the development of those core skills. Ironically, I would argue, that mathematics and english are the least focused on their development… but in comparison to the arts – the fact is that in most of the core subject cases knowledge (memory) is king – its what you do (remember) not the way that you do it…

I don’t know what the answer is – but I do know that reducing the nurturing of the creative parts of the brain in school and college is evidently restricting the employment, enterprise and life skills of our young people. Their core and secondary subjects are delivered in the style of an exam success factory chicken farm – Remember this; Understand this; Present it… Repeat. We TELL them the theories behind PHSE and expect them to apply them and we provide some physical exercise because its the right thing to do and who doesn’t love an annual blast of cross country?

But the arts – they ‘do their thing’ for the minority. They ‘add value’ – but are often undervalued other than at Christmas and end of year celebrations. They are more often than not the in house entertainers. Who has ever seen a well looking music teacher at Christmas?

We need to explore ways that the energy, engagement and inspiration provided by the arts – coupled with their inherent development of communication, teamwork, flexibility, interpersonal skills and organisation can be extended in the learning lives of young people. I’ve long advocated using them to deliver PHSE – applying that curriculum using the creative subjects – bringing dry theory and ‘dos and don’t’s’ – because throughout history it has been the arts that have been used most effectively in social modelling and thinking – from Ancient Greece to Hip Hop to Mr Bates vs the Post Office. The arts can provide a rich curriculum that can enable young people to think about – and more importantly to become the community they want to be. And as they learn – those crucial skills – communication; teamwork; flexibility; interpersonal skills and organisation will become a matter of course – they will develop without even having to articulate them.

Thinking and ruminating is easy of course – applying the shift less so. But if we truly believe that education is the ‘kindling of a flame – not the filling of a vessel’ we must find ways to ensure that the unique spark provided by creative education is given the oxygen and the respect to become the furnace where lives are forged.

‘We have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, and it’s impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.’ Sir Ken Robinson