Changing schools : More than a lick of paint and a well-orchestrated performance?

• Creative Partnerships aims to change the ways in which children learn and teachers teach, and to support whole school change. Our research examines how schools take up the ‘cultural offer’ made by Creative Partnerships. In this article, drawing on data from snapshot visits to 40 English schools, we suggest that it has made a difference to school culture and to its meaning-making practices. In many of the schools it has also spread beyond one-off projects to help teachers change their pedagogical approach more generally.We found a consistent trend across the schools towards cross-curricular and integrated approaches which in some cases had also produced structural shifts in the use of space, time, budgets and promotion positions.We raise some concerns about the ways in which performative regimes inhibit what some schools are able to achieve, but also point to challenges for Creative Partnerships relating to assessment, knowledge, and understandings about social justice.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences (hsv//eng)

Keyword

creativity

curriculum redesign

pedagogy

professional development

school change

pedagogik

Education

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)