Opportunities

Are you interested in testing out innovative approaches, in reflecting on your own practices and working collaboratively with teachers, children and young people? 

Creativity Collaboratives Nottingham is looking for expressions of interest from creative practitioners from the arts, design, science, engineering or digital technology fields, who are excited to work in collaboration with highly skilled and experienced teachers to investigate how we embed creativity and curiosity in our schools. 

Creativity Collaboratives Nottingham, led by Welbeck Primary School, is a 3 year project supported using public funding by Arts Council England, and by Freelands Foundation. We are a network of 12 Nottingham schools with an overarching research question of ‘How do we nurture our children’s innate creative capacities and sustain their curiosity about the world.’ The project will provide a whole series of opportunities for children, teachers and creative practitioners to work collaboratively to explore what it means to be creative in this rapidly changing world and share its findings.  

From the expressions of interest, we will select up to 20 creative practitioners who will be part of our pool for this year’s projects. The selected creative practitioner/s will be invited to our launch event on 21st April, where they will be able to meet representatives from each school. They will also be invited to join our community of practice and be actively involved in critical evaluation of the work. 

We hope that becoming part of Creativity Collaboratives Nottingham will support and extend your practice and give you opportunities to network, test out ideas or gain insights of teaching for creativity within our community of practice.  Each year, our network schools will support a residency with a creative practitioner/collective. Schools will start to design their residencies from identifying areas they would like to develop in response to our research question, plus ideas gathered from the dialogue with creative practitioners at the launch event. Schools will then identify creative practitioners in our pool, that they would welcome working with in the residencies. Residencies in year 1 are expected to be 8 days during the summer term. This is made up of 6 x days delivery in school, 1 x half day attending the community of practice meeting, 1 x half day for planning and reflection time with lead teacher in school, 1 x day preparation. Creative practitioners in residence will be contracted by Welbeck Primary School with payment of £2000 on completion of work. 

How to apply: Please submit up to 2 sides of A4, including up to three examples of existing work, initial ideas of how you would respond to our research question and how you envisage the Creativity Collaboratives programme to further your own creative practice and thinking. You may include photographs, illustrations, examples or links to previous work. You will also be required to provide a DBS certificate, or we can facilitate this. 

Deadline: Proposals should be emailed to alice.elsmore@welbeck.nottingham.sch.uk by 1pm on 25th March 2022.  The selected creative practitioners will be notified by Friday 1st April 2022.  

There will be further opportunities to join the pool when it reopens in 2022/23 and again in 2023/24. All information will be stored according to the GDPR policies of Welbeck as lead school acting on behalf of Creativity Collaboratives Nottingham. We are particularly interested to hear from a diverse range of creative practitioners and will ensure that these opportunities are widely advertised. 

For further information contact: alice.elsmore@welbeck.nottingham.sch.uk