Creativity and whole school change: An investigation of English headteacher practices

Abstract

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

Reinterpreting the authority of heads

“…Hammersley-Fletcher (2015) has discussed heads’ continuing dilemmas about their moral and professional autonomy in the face of accelerating quasi-market reforms in education in England: …neo-liberal agendas have, through the constant bombardment of new initiatives, undermined the spaces within which head teachers are able to think and are able to challenge these dominant ideologies. Consequently the importance of space for building dialogue and trust between school staff is emphasized by Thompson and Sanders (2009). Such spaces, they argue, enable staff to manage the tensions between performance regimes and creative endeavour.…”

Arts, health & wellbeing: reflections on a national seminar series and building a UK research network

“…The arts have also been drawn on to address organisational practices and cultures that in turn impact upon health and wellbeing. The best known intervention of this kind is the government-funded Creative Partnerships programme which aimed to impact on learning environments and cultures of practice (Thomson & Sanders, 2010). Whilst ultimately an education and pedagogy intervention, specific programmes often had social and emotional wellbeing as central concerns.…”

Arts curriculum implementation: “Adopt and adapt” as policy translation

“…Examples from medicine (Bhoo-Pathy et al 2013), management (Frigo and Anderson 2014), and cultural studies (Grodach 2013) use this terminology to identify the translation of one idea into action. It is used across education generally (Adams et al 2006, Thomson andSanders 2010), and also in other Australian education settings as a translation of policy from its written to enacted context. This approach of 'adopting and adapting' appears in the Queensland government's Curriculum into the Classroom 2013 (Queensland Government 2013), and the terminology features heavily in the Western Australian rhetoric for the implementation of the Australian Curriculum.…”