Old Basford School, Creativity is Blossoming
Creativity Collaboratives Vignette: More Than Just A Project
Jayne Thomas, the Creativity Collaboratives Lead Teacher at Old Basford, uses horticultural images to discuss how teaching for creativity has taken root in her school. The seeds were scattered in the first year (2022) when they worked with a creative practitioner (CP) on a digital music project. The residency went well; pupils and teachers enjoyed using the technology to make and perform music. But when they discussed the project after it had finished, the staff involved said that they still didn’t feel confident about using the technology with the children and anyway the resources the CP had used were not available in school. Reflecting on this, Jayne decided that, if they wanted to gain real long-term benefit from the CPs’ residencies, they needed to take a different approach to sustainability. They needed something more than one-off projects.
A practical first step was to adjust the budget for the second residency that was beginning in May 2023, and invest in the resources the school would need to repeat and develop the work with children. But other seeds had also been scattered in that first year. At one of the CC Community of Practice meetings, school-centric maps of different areas of Nottingham were shared. These representations of schools at the heart – and in the centre – of their localities were powerful. In Old Basford School, work began on developing their own map; children and community members were encouraged to add to it, to identify places that were significant to them, to think about the assets that already existed in Old Basford and more widely in the city of Nottingham.
Another seed that had been sown and had been germinating gently over the year was the Creative Habits of Mind Wheel, a tool that had been introduced through the national network of collaboratives and the local community of practice meetings. In July 2023, convinced that specifying the dispositions and behaviours they were looking for in the children would help embed and sustain teaching for creativity, Jayne took the Creative Habits of Mind Wheel to Old Basford’s senior leadership team. The response was enthusiastic. The school’s vision statement was reworked to align with the creativity wheel and by the start of the 23-24 school year the staff had agreed that all lesson plans would include explicit reference to one or more of the habits.
Get in Touch Today
With thanks to Prof Chris Hall and Jayne Thomas for this 'vignette' - a powerful description of the impact the Creativity Collaboratives programme has had for children and teachers at Old Basford School.
For more information on the national Creativity Collaboratives programme go to creativityexchange.org.uk.
For more on our Nottingham programme and the 12 schools involved, click below!
The roots were spreading. Teaching for creativity was now part of Old Basford’s vision for all its children. At the CC conference in September 2023 Jayne spoke to an audience of 500+ teachers, teaching assistants and Creative Practitioners from the stage of Nottingham Playhouse, explaining how the wheel had helped them develop their ideas about the importance of creativity in their school. The speech, and the INSET sessions that followed on from it, were very warmly received. Later Jayne said that ‘going public’ confirmed for her that what they had done so far at Old Basford was right. Articulating the vision and the reasoning behind it strengthened her confidence in her own beliefs but, importantly, it also inspired other teachers and nudged other schools to think about the approach that would work best for them.
Back at Old Basford the work on teaching for creativity continued. They embarked on a whole school oracy project. Discussions about the links between creativity and play led to an ambitious rethink of playtimes, playground rules, equipment and games. Ofsted came, approved of what they were doing, and went. To keep up the momentum, the school devoted its February INSET day to teaching for creativity workshops. Jayne, with other members of the senior leadership team, supported and scaffolded new approaches, working to build staff confidence and keep channels of communication open. Following on from the whole school INSET, during the second half of the Spring term, creativity became the focus of the school’s monitoring cycle. Staff meeting time was given to reflective coaching, where people could discuss with their colleagues any issues (usually time and resources) that they had encountered with teaching for creativity, solutions could be offered and peers could share best practice. The expectation from SLT was that lessons should be delivered more creatively with a focus on the ‘habits of learning’ and oracy. To ensure that this expectation was being met, and to what degree of success, SLT dropped in to lessons and then fed back to all. Overwhelmingly, Jayne and SLT found that children were more active, more engaged and discussing more, using sentence stems as support.
So, when two new creative practitioners began their residencies in the third and final year of the CC project, the ground was well prepared. School staff were clear about the value of allocating enough time to joint planning; they thought hard about using resources that were sustainable and easy to source; they made sure there were opportunities for the creative practitioners – an engineer and a drama specialist – to share key knowledge with the staff involved. The creativity wheel provided them with a framework for assessing the impact of the projects and they had mechanisms in place for building the new ideas and approaches into the school’s curriculum.
These carefully considered practical steps have ensured that teaching for creativity has taken root and is blossoming at Old Basford. And – looking forward – Jayne and her colleagues can see there’s still plenty of fertile ground for more growth.
