Igniting Creativity in Education
Transforming Education to Engage and Inspire Students
I was taking my granddaughter to a dance competition recently that involved a few hours travelling in the car together.
As I am working to develop new approaches to education, particularly ones that seek to encourage pupils and students to be more engaged, I asked her about her current experience. She is thirteen and attending a Welsh-speaking comprehensive school in Wales, UK.
Talking about her experience was frankly depressingly familiar, in that it reminded me so much of my own memories of secondary school at her age over forty years ago.
Firstly, she talked about the morning assembly with prayers and singing, which was not of interest to her at all. That this was still compulsory surprised me because I did not think this happened in modern state schools. This was also my experience of having a daily assembly about religious ideas in which I personally had no interest at the time.
She then described her experiences of classes, where she sat with friends at desks, looking to the front of the room, with the teacher instructing pupils as has been the approach of education for decades.
My granddaughter saw her experience as not being engaging or interesting. She talked about her subject classes, such as Maths, which she is good at. It was uninspiring because she could not see any relevance between what was being taught and her life. Although she could complete the exercises, she did not take an interest in the subject despite being good at it. Again, memories of my experience of Maths came back to me.
And then we talked about the subjects she enjoyed, which were very few. She did engage with aspects of English, Drama and History, the first two of which had transformed my own school experience.
But when I asked her what she wanted to do more of at school, she asked a question which surprised me:
Why isn’t a dance in the curriculum? Why can’t I do dance at any point? In my teaching week? It is not something I can study or even take after school.
I was reminded of Sir Ken Robinson popular TED Talk, Do Schools Kill Creativity?, where he asks exactly the same question in a speech from 2006 viewed by over seventy-five million people:
Why isn’t dance taught on the curriculum in the same way as English and Maths? We all have bodies, don’t we? Did I miss a meeting? I think this is very important.
Robinson had been a Senior Education Adviser and a Professor of Education, and his talk resonates with many.
To hear my granddaughter asking that same question nearly twenty years later struck me.
What she meant was not a dance for everybody. She did not expect all pupils to be training in dance like her. She was suggesting dance as a part of learning for those who want to dance and loved to dance like her.
Why isn’t dance on the curriculum?
When we arrived at the competition where she was performing as a member of a dance group, I was staggered by how many participants there were. The event was running for a whole week with thousands of young people dancing in all sorts of different skill categories, disciplines of dance, individual competitions and collaborative group performances. Almost every type of dance was on display.
What was also evident was the enthusiasm, the energy, the commitment, and the passion for dance. There were also intergenerational performances, mixing older and younger participants together.
We do not allow young people to do the things they are passionate about and they love as a fundamental part of their educational experience.
These young people were desperate to do this activity and loved it. They had spent hours committing themselves to training, preparing for competitions and this gave them a great deal of joy and fulfilment. It was also evident that the younger children learnt from the older ones and were mentored and inspired by them.
It was clear from talking to my granddaughter, that she got none of those things from most of her school experience. And I think that was Ken Robinson’s point.
We do not allow young people to do the things they are passionate about and they love as a fundamental part of their educational experience.
We leave those things to the uncertainties of their own lives and if they are lucky enough, like my granddaughter, to be able to participate in these things and have a family who can pay for classes, then the child gets to follow that passion.
Some children find this in sports, others, like me, in drama, which was taught as a subject in school including up to A level which was unusual at the time. It became an inspiration for a career teaching these subjects.
But many families and children do not have that opportunity, because the costs can be prohibitive, or the family is not supportive of a young person.
But I do not think this was Robinson’s point. The Arts should not really be an adjunct or merely an extra-curricular activity. He was talking about the value of creativity as part of education.
How can we imbue all education with the same love, joy, and passion that these students feel when they engage with such activities? How can we put passion at the heart of the education system?
The current curriculum in schools, colleges, and universities, covering predetermined, subject-specific content, has the opposite effect for many young people, making it dull, uninspiring and irrelevant to their lives or what matters to them. Post-covid data on engagement tells us this.
Irrelevant Curriculum
We can also see this reflected in the 2024 report on UK student experience in higher education, just published. University students express the view that their curriculum lacks relevance, as Jim Dickinson has observed:
They want academic activity that is “relevant, practical, and connected to the real world” — more practical, context-specific learning through real-world examples, authentic teaching methods, and assessments to enhance engagement and employability.
All pupils and students want this, and our education systems fail to deliver these more often than they succeed. We do not give students a meaning in their learning experience equivalent to following a passion in something you love does.
I am not advocating we do not teach Maths, English or STEM subjects. We know that numeracy and literacy are important skills and for some children these are their passions. But how do we teach subjects to inspire with relevant content, connected to the person we are teaching it too?
How do we position all students as both creative individuals and group participants, at the heart of their educational experience?
Learning should be something students do for themselves, from choice and desire, not something that is entirely controlled by others.
Ask the Educated
On the way back from the dance competition I asked my granddaughter:
Okay, how could you incorporate your passion for dance into your school curriculum to make it more relevant and enjoyable?
She came up with numerous ways in which subjects including English, Maths, History, even Science could use her passion and love of dance to teach her things that she was otherwise not interested in studying because they were taught in isolation from her passions.
My granddaughter understood exactly how she could be engaged with in the subjects she needed to understand in a way that connected with her.
This was the most detailed and extensive conversation we had ever had about her schooling — which was usually summed up by her response ‘school is boring, and I wish I didn’t have to go.’ As Robinson himself says ‘talk to someone about their own education and they pin you to the wall’.
Once she was given an opportunity to imagine her own curriculum, my granddaughter was impressively insightful about how she could be engaged more effectively.
But of course, she had never been asked these questions before and didn’t see herself as someone who could be the creator of her learning, rather than the consumer of someone else’s education.
Passion is Everything
And that is the problem with our education systems. They fail to promote that passion to our young people. That is why so many of them, and so many of us, end up dissatisfied with our jobs and with our lives later in life.
It is also one of the reasons why more pupils, students and citizens suffer from mental health and wellbeing challenges than ever before.
Too often we are not experiencing joy in these environments. We are not encouraged to believe that we are people who could explore our creativity, or the things we care about and love.
As Ken Robinson said, we are being trained not just out of creativity. We are being trained out of the idea of having passion in learning.
School is so important in this respect, because for so many children it offers a rare chance to explore their creative passions because of the lack of opportunity elsewhere.
Some of them do find their personal joy, through self-sacrifice, struggle, and commitment. Others have the means to follow a life of creative pursuit without concern — but this is rare.
But even children who have these opportunities, like my granddaughter, feel that it is an extra thing. It is a secret private self that exists outside of the day-to-day world of their school life.
What are we losing in our current approaches to education at all levels?
How much are our pupils and students falling short of realising their potential and having more fulfilled lives as passionate joyful learners?
And how are we failing to deliver the educational opportunities that can enable human beings to achieve the most creative lives available to them?
Our education systems need to do much more to inspire people to realise the potential of human achievement and create positive human change for a world that desperately needs it.
Despite some exceptions, we are not delivering education systems that inspire, transform, and energise the next generation and we need to do something radical.
Eighteen years ago, Ken Robinson saw this and people understood it then, and still recognise it today.
Yet for many like my granddaughter there is so little real transformation in our educational systems for those who experience it.
