Memorandum submitted by Rod Wright, Worldwide Director of Development, TBWA\

 

 

1. 0 Executive Summary

1.1 TBWA\Group has around 740 employees in the UK. They are all in 'creative' businesses. Compared to ten years ago, we face increased competition for recruiting top talent with high creative skills. Yet the quality of the potential pool seems to be more limited. The skills they are learning at school are not enough for what we seek.

1.2 Creativity is about intellectual curiosity. It is about a willingness to take risk, in ideas and emotions. It is about an ability to express. It is about seeing, understanding and questioning context. These skills do not come from a traditional curriculum. We have to open people's minds when they come to work for us. Few are equipped with what we need.

1.3 Our competition for hiring creative people now comes from all industry sectors. The ability to compete successfully in business is about doing things differently and better than other companies, about finding new offers that consumers want. This can be at the level of a Farmers' Market or in the City. All of this requires creativity. Teaching creativity is not vital solely for the 'creative' industries but for the whole economy.

1.4 The ability to question without boundaries or judging is vital to creativity. Yet the classroom is all about being controlled and judged. The need to fulfil a full curriculum within time constraints makes open exploration of ideas almost impossible. Exams, the need to complete curricula and teacher training have all created an environment of control and limitations.

1.5 In 2002 Caol Primary School near Fort William won £20,000 for the individual and school Barbie Prize for art. It is a run-down primary school of 180 students in the Western Highlands of Scotland. The ten- and eleven-year old children have moved on from this experience to speak at public gatherings, make documentaries for Channel Four, exhibit at major art galleries and to win over £200,000 of further funding for their studio network from NESTA. They run their own studio, called Room 13, in the school, including employing their own artist-in-residence. Yet they see themselves as no different from any other children. [TBWA\ is helping take this concept of Room 13 around the world. In South Africa we have gained support from the Mandela Children's Fund, from the Ministry of Culture and from private business for the initiative there and will expand from two pilot studios to fifteen in the next year.]

1.6 The extreme experience of Room 13 studio - which is now in seven schools in the UK, four in Scotland and three in England - demonstrates what can be achieved by intense exposure to creative opportunity and a space where adult judgement is suspended. It is not just that they work with an artist, but that they have an emotionally safe environment to take intellectual risk and where children can set their own agenda. They are given responsibility and grasp it completely. Sir Nicholas Serota described Room 13 as "the most important model for artistic teaching we have in the UK". (Introductory words to National Children's' Art Day Conference - Tate Modern 2004)

1.7 The fact that Room 13 uses art is incidental. There are music and thinking studios as well within the Room 13 network. Art is a means to explore thinking and expression. It is the easiest medium for creative development but not the only one.

1.8 One critical factor in change will be the culture of teaching. Creativity is, by definition, an uncontrolled process. Opening up the freedom to challenge and question will have implications for other aspects of teaching. However the offer of greater freedom of thought to students often results in a feeling of greater responsibility.

1.9 In a recent film one child described her experience of Room 13 as being the "total opposite of a text book". [Film supplied] That is partly a sad indictment of textbooks but also revealing that the philosophy of teaching creativity is very different to conventional teaching practice. In many documented examples the children who have experienced Room13 have come out more articulate, more responsible, more emotionally capable and more artfully expressive than their peers. (See NESTA Room 13 Case Study Report - December 2006)

1.10 Room 13 as a concept has received enormous moral and some financial support from Creative Partnerships over the past five years. In reality it is not feasible to establish fully funded Room 13's throughout the educational system in the UK. CP has understood that creativity needs to be a complete system of learning together with teaching approaches that are not currently available within the current curriculum, to build new models of teaching and learning. This work needs to be continued and expanded so that there is a spine of creativity within the whole education system. Only then can education provide the stream of creative skills that an effective economy needs to compete.

 

 

 

2. 0 Introduction to Rod Wright

2.1 I am Worldwide Director of Development for TBWA\, an international advertising agency network. My primary responsibility is for training and development of the more than 12,000 people in our company. This includes understanding the profile of skills for recruitment, the skills that we need to teach and the delivery of training.

2.2 I am also responsible for our Social Responsibility programme, which is to establish a worldwide network of Room 13 art studios.

2.3 TBWA\ is a worldwide network of marketing services business. It operates in 65 countries through 272 companies. Key clients are Apple, Sony Playstation, Nissan Motors, Beiersdorf, Henkel, Pernod Ricard, McDonalds and Absolut. It is part of Omnicom Group Inc.

2.4 Room 13 is a network of art studios established inside primary schools where the children work with an established artist as equals. What is different about Room 13 is that the children actively manage the business of the art studio, including the financing of the artist and materials. [An information sheet produced by one studio is attached.]

3.0 Factual information

 

3.1 NESTA Case Study Report on Room 13 [Dec 2006]

"At least as remarkable as the children's active, practical engagement in Room 13 is their talk. Classroom talk has been the focus of a number of recent observation studies, in which researchers have recorded students' use of spoken language during the Literacy Hour, a DfEE initiative in English primary schools with the aims of 'high quality oral work' and 'interactive teaching (where) pupils' contributions are encouraged, expected and extended.' (DfEE 1998). In one such study, English et al (2002) examined the length of pupil utterances during the Literacy Hour in a sample of 30 classrooms in 15 schools; two Literacy Hours were observed in each class. They found that only 10% of the observations included children's responses of more than three words; only 5% were longer than 10 words. Or, put it another way, "nine out of ten pupil contributions are of less than three words" (English et al 2002:24), and, indeed, 19 out of 20 utterances are less than 10 words long.

"In Room 13, there are conversations going on all the time, in every corner of the room; the children's talk is complex, spontaneous, elaborated, extended. The sheer volume of talk ("these children talk in paragraphs" I wrote in my notebook) the breath and depth of their talk, are characteristics of Room 13 Hareclive that are completely at odds with the findings of empirical studies of classroom talk reaching back over many years, to the work of the ORACLE project in 1976, for example, (Galton et al 1980) and, more recently, the seminal cross-cultural study of Alexander (2000); in all these studies, children's talk is restricted, limited, constrained by the teacher's directives and choice of topic."

3.2 Danielle Souness - Managing Director Room 13 Caol 2002/03:
from Social & Critical Practices in Art Education; ed. D.Atkinson & P.Dash 2005

"Every teacher and every pupil knows that in any class there are people with different skills and interests. We (the students) know that we are all good at something but all we are judged on is our ability to fill in workbooks. Some people are really good at it, some even buy similar sorts of things to fill in time on the bus and train journeys - quiz and game books and that sort of thing. Some people are really bad at it. Some people find it very boring. But we all have to do it. However I don't think it really helps you to learn. Anybody can look at the examples given on each page and work out the answer required, and those who struggle are often just bored by the whole idea. It teaches you how to think about how to answer questions but it doesn't tell you why the question exists.

"Most people my age want to learn. We want to do things. (OK there are one or two who don't but most of us do.) What Room 13 does is allow us to take control of our learning. We can use the studio whenever we want with the only rule being that we must never fall behind with our class work - in our workbooks.

"Picasso made some of the greatest works of the last century. They are beautiful and tell me a lot about what it is like to be an old man but even Picasso could never paint what it is like to be an eleven-year-old girl. I am not comparing myself to Picasso, but I can make art about being an eleven-year-old girl. Your problem as an adult is that you look at my work in a different way to the way you look at late Picasso. This I think is the biggest difference between Room 13 and other ways of working. It teaches us how to think, it treats our ideas, our dreams and thoughts seriously and, perhaps even more importantly, it allows us to find ways of expressing them."

3.3 Jennifer Catternach, Head teacher, Caol Primary School, Fort William, Scotland

"The self-confidence that children get from what they do there is unbelievable. Kids who struggle in other areas no longer feel failures, and they feel able to have a go at difficult areas of the curriculum that they would otherwise decide were hard and boring. Through Room 13 we get to see the whole personality of the child, not just the bit that performs academically."

 

 

July 2007