Memorandum submitted by Suzanne Markovics, Head of Music and Creative Arts, St Paul's School for Girls, Edgbaston, Birmingham

 

 

1. Executive Summary

- Use of C.P. to address teaching and learning styles at St, Paul's.

- Professional development of staff in creativity in the curriculum.

- Examples of good C. P. practice cross-curricular at St. Paul's.

- The result of having C. P. at St. Paul's.

 

2. Introduction to person submitting evidence

My name is Suzanne Markovics, Head of Music and Creative Arts at St, Paul's School for Girls, in Edgbaston, Birmingham. I have been teaching at St. Paul's, a Roman Catholic all girls school for 6 years. This school has roughly 1,000 pupils on role, and is for girls aged 11 - 18 years. In the 5 years we have worked with C. P. it rapidly developed from a method of raising the profile of the Arts in school, to involving our whole staff along with our creative practitioners, looking closely at teaching and learning styles across the curriculum. C. P. also encouraged examination of themes in our school, such as building aspirations and self-esteem of Year 9 girls, anti-bullying and other Personal and Social Education topics.

 

3. Factual Information re: Success of C. P. at St. Paul's Girls

I have enclosed information about the Geography & Dance project undertaken with Women and Theatre at St, Paul's. This includes a description of the aims and objectives of the project, photographs of the girls rehearsing their dance, examples of creative writing completed as a result of the dance exercise, and evaluations. This is one example of many projects undertaken with Creative Partnerships.

 

4. Recommendations for action by the Government

As a result of our experience of Creative Partnership at St. Paul's School for Girls I would like the select committee to consider the following recommendations:

 

- To allow schools the opportunity to continue to build links with arts practitioners. This means further funding needs to be available

- To look at, and perhaps develop accordingly, the method by which trainee teachers are prepared for the profession. Ensure creativity is as much a part of teachers' method of teaching as numeracy, literacy and use of differentiation.

- To provide support for parents to enable them to help their children develop their creativity. To bring to parental attention the importance of developing creativity in their children. Maybe a similar campaign to the literacy and numeracy one which was launched about 6 or 7 years ago, would be appropriate, showing how creativity can be included in their child's every day life.

- To encourage schools to allow creativity in the curriculum to be part of staff's Continuing Professional Development, and In-Service Training programmes to give a wider range of staff more confidence in supporting pupils' different learning needs. This will help teaching staff to find a number of different solutions to help pupils learning difficulties, and would help them to keep pupils' motivated, engaged and more willingly involved in their learning.

 

 

St. Paul's School for Girls has worked in collaboration with four other schools in the 'Firebird Cluster' as part of the Creative Partnership initiative in Birmingham. At St. Paul's, we used the Creative Partnership across the curriculum as a method in which different pupils' learning styles can be addressed; i.e. by using Art, Drama, Dance and Music across the curriculum using tasks involving visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learning styles. Activities based on these skills were found to have the effect of embedding information in a range of subjects. At St. Paul's we have used a range of arts activities to support learning from Personal and Social Education to Modern Foreign Languages to Geography.

 

Many staff at St. Paul's have undergone 'in-house' INSET training by working with creative professionals in the classroom. They have reported that this has impacted on their planning for future units of work. While perhaps they may be unable to deliver a topic in exactly the same manner as the creative professionals, they have felt that the experience of having such personnel has been beneficial enough to deem it necessary to adapt and customised ideas so that topics can be delivered in a more creative and engaging way, allowing pupils to learn information using a greater variety of learning styles. Evaluations from staff confirm that less motivated pupils are more effectively engaged, stimulated, and given greater confidence when given a range of different approaches to topics covered.

 

The implication of a curriculum shift in favour of creativity would mean the types of pupils leaving school will have a more secure range of key skills looked for by employers, as they will have practised skills such as active problem solving, discussion skills, team work skills, communication skills, creativity in a wide range of settings, the ability to try out and find a number of solutions to a given problem, development of initial ideas into the final product, listening skills and so on. Use of the arts is a way of developing the 'whole' person, a way of giving access to pupils of a broader life experience than maybe through the more tradition method of using text books. It encourages use of different areas of the mind, providing greater opportunities to find, make and understand more fully the links between different topics and subjects. There is also the element of confidence of expression which can be acquired through the arts by some of the less verbally outgoing pupils which they find more comfortable with than explaining their ideas using words to others.

 

Creative Partnerships has given us at St. Paul's School for Girls a chance...

· To broaden our view of what a successful lesson should be like.

· To extend our view of what a successful and actively engaged classroom can look like.

· To look beyond the actual classroom as a learning environment.

· To work with a range of arts professionals and to learn from them ways in which we can change our teaching in a manner we may not have considered previously.

· To adapt our view of the 'correct' way to help our pupils achieve the best they can in some subject areas, whilst allowing them to still cover essential topic matter.

· To look at creative methods of dealing with wider issues to do with pupils personal and social development, such as lack of self esteem, image, confident body image, etc.

 

 

July 2007