Memorandum submitted by Caroline Proctor, Deputy Head, Holly Hill Methodist/Church of England Infant and Nursery School, Rednal, Birmingham

 

Summary

1. School context

2. School's vision for creativity

3. Creative Partnership projects in pursuit of school's vision

4. Impact and future hopes

 

1. I am the Creative Partnership Coordinator at Holly Hill Methodist/Church of England Infant and Nursery School. I am also the Senco and Deputy Head so am in a position to judge the effect of any initiative on all the children in the school. We were judged to be a good school with outstanding aspects in our most recent Ofsted inspection and our KS1 Sats results are above the national average despite the fact that the children enter school with low levels of achievement. We continue to strive for improvement and to look for better ways to meet the needs of our pupils. We have spent time looking at these needs and have identified that they need strong basic skills, social skills, cooperative skills and creative skills. At Holly Hill School the pupils come from an area where many families have issues with drugs and/or alcohol, where unemployment is high, where many families live in crowded accommodation and there are many single parent families. These circumstances mean that many of our pupils do not have many, if any, creative experiences outside school. They do not come into contact with traditional creative experiences such as theatre trips, dance or drama classes or holiday arts and craft sessions which are available to other children. Also for many children the nature of their home experiences mean that they do not have the sort of creative experiences that apply to all aspects of life and learning. They are not encouraged to be risk takers or to think 'outside the box'. Often the children have low self esteem and a restricted sense of aspiration. We want to change this and believe that working with artists through the Creative Partnerships is allowing us to do this.

 

 

2. We feel that in order to have dreams and aspirations and to have ways to fulfil them, our pupils need something beyond the curriculum as it has been delivered over the last decade. We therefore welcome the changes happening in the primary curriculum, the personalised learning agenda, the lead taken by Mick Waters and the QCA Futures work. We are developing our curriculum in school to allow more topics of study to come from the children and to allow all children's different learning styles to be accommodated. In order to meet these aims we see the benefits of work with organisations from outside the walls of education. Work done with the Creative Partnership has given us a powerful start to developing a better, more appropriate curriculum for our pupils.

 

 

3. Since I have been in the school I have coordinated several Creative Partnership projects. Looking back over the last academic year every single child in the school has been involved in at least one project that has included work with a professional artist.

 

· The children in year one and two have followed up work initiated last year. At the end of the summer term 2006 our school worked with several artists to create a whole school carnival. This involved the design and making of a costume by every child, making instruments and composing for them and creating chants and movement sequences. This summer (2007) the process has been repeated but it has involved all the other schools on the local estate. This meant that the resulting carnival involved children as young as five up to year ten students from the local High School. It was a fantastic spectacle and some of our children had siblings involved in other parts of the procession which was an exciting and unifying experience for them.

· The children in reception and nursery all had the opportunity to see a performance by Birmingham Rep of a play devised with a mother and toddler group. Following this the same children have all been involved in a storytelling project working with the playwright/director. Each reception of nursery class devised their own story. They created their own illustrations and once the story had been written up the pictures were added and a book produced. The children then went on to create a simple performance of the story which they performed to another class.

 

 

4. The impact of the work we have been involved in with the Creative Partnership is clearly the element upon which the success of the work will be judged. My position in school has allowed me to assess the work's impact from an objective stance. I have observed numerous opportunities for the children to work in an open ended way where each child's creative response is valued and where they can see their work lead to a real outcome e.g. a costume which is then put on public display in the carnival or a design which became part of a stained glass window the school's entrance foyer. This sense of what might and then is achieved is very important. The children who were involved with the carnival last year, and who are now in year three at the local junior school, were once again involved in the carnival this summer and the artists working with them noted how these children were not limited in their creativity by a fear that their ideas could not be realised. The children see their work valued enough to be put on public display, photographed and published and this impacts positively on their self esteem and their sense of their own power within their immediate environment. The artists who work with us through the Creative Partnership have a different relationship with our pupils and this contact is very important for the development of independent learners; children who are being prepared for contact with the world outside education. The impact of quality professional performance on our children was notable when they went to watch Birmingham Rep's touring production of a play devised by children of the same age as them. It enthralled them and even those children with a very short concentration span or behaviour difficulties watched attentively. When they were then later involved in the project to devise their own story they were able to engage at their own level and the opportunity for some children, whose behaviour can be quite challenging, to express themselves through drama was powerful. There has been a significant impact upon members of staff, empowering them to put into practice techniques they have learnt from the professional artists they have worked with. As a result of my experiences of Creative Partnership work in action I would recommend that the programme is given substantial long term funding to allow continuing work between creative organisations and schools in order to develop further the partnership element of the work that has been done so far, to continue the impact of the work and to improve the quality of experience of the children involved.

 

July 2007