Innovation through Creative Arts

We successfully completed this exciting 2 year project enabling creative arts specialists go into schools across the 3 partner regions to up-skill teachers and develop teacher competences in the delivery of creative arts. Through active engagement, targeted training, effective support and exchange of good practice, locally and internationally, teachers in participating schools are effecting change and impacting curriculum delivery. There were four partner countries, Wales, Spain, Romania and Turkey. Coordinating partners from each region were local authorities supporting schools in raising standards through international programmes such s Erasmus+. Pupils and teachers were from primary and secondary schools in both mainstream and special education. Additional partners were from creative arts organisations supporting the work throughout and providing much of the training.Pupil voice has been an important element of this project. Pupils have been given the opportunity to share experiences and work with teachers thus contributing to the success of the outputs. In each region, we organised comprehensive training for participating teachers. The training included developing skills in embedding creativity across the curriculum aiming to raise standards in teaching and learning across the curriculum.Teachers identified areas of learning in which they hoped to see improvement. These included:Writing for purposeProblem solvingSpeaking and listeningBasic numeracyPlanning and evaluatingWorld issuesand they approached these through a wide range of creative arts including:Mixed media artworkSculpture Story tellingDanceSingingWeavingCostume designThis Creative Arts project has been an effective tool empowering students including those with additional learning needs through creativity. The impact has been extensive. Pupils have demonstrated increased competence in the 5 creative habits of mind, in wellbeing and in attendance. There has been a notable improvement in confidence in front of peers, in pupils’ own abilities and a willingness to try new things.There has been the anticipated rise in standards evidenced by a positive impact on end of year tracking and targets. Pupils have shown improvement too in application of skills by transferring their learning to real life situations.Staff too have benefitted by demonstrating a readiness to try new approaches and allowing for pupil led learning. Teachers are more confident in delivering Creative Arts based learning and in using Creative Arts to enhance the whole curriculum, tailoring creative learning for all learnersAll participating teaches have gained an understanding of developments in curricular in partner countries, have developed an understanding and can utilise, international approaches from partner countries. In this way, they have profited from specialist professional development, re-energising their teaching.