Despite the recent funding freeze to Arts Council England, one area of the gargantuan organisation is still doing okay. Creative Partnerships has had its considerable funding confirmed until 2008.
Platitudes abound for the program, with advocates in government, peak bodies, the arts and education. But what is Creative Partnerships exactly, and how much money does it spend? Often outreach or education programs are handcuffed by ludicrously small ambition or tokenistic funding, but Creative Partnerships is free from either. Its continuing success makes it a world leader, and yet it garners surprisingly little media attention. How does it all work?
In 2003, the Department for Culture Media and Sport, with the Department for Education and Skills, put forward ₤70 million to establish twenty “creative partnerships.” The goal of the program was simple: to promote creativity and culture in learning. The partnerships were to be curriculum-based – an important difference from many previous initiatives that worked outside the curriculum, effectively locking the arts out of educational outcomes – and they were to branch across its entirety. This meant that the partnerships would have to span sciences and maths, as well as the humanities.
Twenty schools selected by government ministers on a needs-based criterion. Looking at a wide variety of factors, including isolation from both urban centres and the rest of the country, they found the most “economic and socially challenged” areas in which to launch the program.
Each school worked with a creative director, and teachers were allocated time for planning, thinking about the partnerships and also evaluation. As projects began to take off, schools all over the country found themselves working with a staggering variety of arts professionals. The activities all incorporated the curriculum into creativity-centred projects, with individuals, organisations, companies and other schools in the area all involved.
Creative Partnerships was – and is – a resounding success. To date, there have been over 3000 projects run under the program, with 677 schools all over England, nearly 20 000 teacher attendances and 230 395 student attendances. For 2005/2006 the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has pledged ₤32 million and the Department for Education and Skills ₤25 million, and the program has been confirmed operational until 2008. This year and next, sixteen new partnerships will be established, with each to receive around ₤750 000. In a time where arts funding is not enjoying its once bounteous levels, this is reassuring. Creative Partnerships is popular, and it looks set to be popular for some time to come.
But what makes it so different? After all, outreach and education programs are not new – on a variety of levels – but they rarely manage to get so much, funding, resources or positive press. What is it about Creative Partnerships that makes it work, and makes it different, where so many others have gone before?
The curriculum-focussed basis of Creative Partnerships is unusual. Learning outcomes are directly related to student performance – and that is what that the public, and hence schools are interested in. When a student’s marks are bought into the equation, creativity ceases to be an interesting diversion – the teenager’s equivalent of finger-painting – and becomes instead a vital part of successful learning, as it should be. Defining themselves, Creative Partnerships says, ‘At the heart of the programme is the passionate belief that everyone is inherently creative and everyone has the right to participate in the varied and exciting culture of this country.’ This statement reflects a perception that creativity has been leeched out of education – particularly the sciences – and that this is why students are no longer interested in them. In some respects, it is a radical theory, because it calls for a systemic change to way we think about education – what we even think education is. But judging from the popularity, perhaps such a call to arms is overdue.
Something else that makes Creative Partnerships unique is the way it interacts with the schools. This is not a one-size-fits-all program; each partnership is different, based around different communities, people and desired outcomes. The results attest to this variety: one school may re-write Beowulf with an award-winning composer, whilst another uses African drumming to illustrate complex algebra. And that is only two of many.
The program is focussed on long-term, sustainable partnerships, and subject to intense evaluation. Goals and objectives are explicit and rigorously met, with self-assessment not only from teachers and other workers in the partnerships, but also the organisation itself. The National Federation of Educational Research is also evaluating the first phase of Creative Partnerships, and this means that the results of the program are accessible, well-documented and real. Creative Partnerships really does work.
So what are the criticisms? Well, they are few and far between. Some visual arts practitioners have claimed that the nature of the partnerships gives precedence to the performing arts. In terms of large group work, it’s much easier for performing arts to meet the objectives, they argue, but under analysis it doesn’t really hold. Collaborative visual art has long been established as a viable and rewarding medium for education programs and Creative Partnerships is no different.
Indeed, from an outcome perspective, no one seems to have a problem with the partnerships. But, there is one potent criticism: the cost. The Conservatives, whilst trying not to outrightly oppose the program, have drawn attention to how much money Creative Partnerships spends. It is fabulously well-funded and, the Tories say, for something that has affected only 3% of the schools in Britain, too well-funded.
Ultimately, though, this is a matter of perspective. The areas where Creative Partnerships have been initiated arguably need, some would say, all the help they can get. It also revolves around the notion of how much we are prepared to spend for creativity – for creativity that makes a real difference. The government saw a problem in schools – a nation-wide disconnection – and moved to address it. It is expensive, however Creative Partnerships is popular with artists, children, teachers, schools, parents and local governments, and there are few Government initiatives that can make such a claim.
As Paul Collard, the Director of Creative Partnerships said when defining the organisation: ‘It’s a space in which people can come when they want to take risks in terms of their self-expression. Whether it’s a young person in a school, or an artist or a teacher, they should come into that space and take risks and learn from them.’
