Schools in England have been required to adopt and adapt an ongoing series of policy initiatives: some however are offered on an 'opt-in' basis. This paper examines one such 'offer,' that of Creative Partnerships, a programme which provides schools in designated deprived areas the opportunity to work with creative practitioners in order to change both classroom practice and whole schools. We report here on the snapshot phase of a national study, using a corpus of multimethod qualitative data from 40 schools. We suggest that headteachers saw different opportunities in the CP offer but what actually happened in the school related to three interwoven strands: the situatedness of the school, the headteacher's stance towards change, and the architecture of change management. Our analysis, which highlights the ways in which many of the schools were unable to 'spread and embed' the pedagogical changes supported through CP, suggests that the majority of heads could benefit from involvement in explicit discussion about 'unofficial'-and more democratic-approaches to leading and managing change.Keywords Creativity Á Change management Á Leadership Á EnglandIn an effort to maintain the impetus for, and pace of, educational change the English New Labour government has produced a continuing flow of initiatives. As Ball (2008, p. 3) puts it, ''policy is currently experienced as a constant flow of new requirements, changes, exhortations, responsibilities and expectations.'' This policy churn has left many schools and headteachers suffering profound reform enervation. But there is relentless pressure on English schools to continually improve. This is embodied in the expectation of OfSTED and Local Authorities that schools produce
Creative Partnerships aims to change the ways in which children learn and teachers teach, and to support whole school change. Our research examines how schools take up the 'cultural offer' made by Creative Partnerships. In this article, drawing on data from snapshot visits to 40 English schools, we suggest that it has made a difference to school culture and to its meaning-making practices. In many of the schools it has also spread beyond one-off projects to help teachers change their pedagogical approach more generally. We found a consistent trend across the schools towards cross-curricular and integrated approaches which in some cases had also produced structural shifts in the use of space, time, budgets and promotion positions. We raise some concerns about the ways in which performative regimes inhibit what some schools are able to achieve, but also point to challenges for Creative Partnerships relating to assessment, knowledge, and understandings about social justice.
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