Creative Partnerships: creative economy and the curriculum

I was invited to take part in a debate at Bristol’s Watershed on 7th November 2007 organised by Creative Partnerships, entitled: Space to think: UK – The world’s creative hub?

The ‘Space to Think’ series is held around the country as a forum for the creative, cultural, education and business sectors to meet and discuss a broad range of issues concerning creativity and learning.

Creative Partnerships is the Government’s flagship creativity programme for schools and young people, managed by Arts Council England and funded by the DCSF and DCMS. It enables schools to work with participatory artists (visuall artists, designers, musicians, theatre etc) to devise integrated creative learning programmes and activities – and at pilot stage it has been hugely successful with national roll-out looming.

I was on a panel with two very illuminating people:

TC Jefferson - a creativity and learning consultant who has worked with Creative Partnerships and also Chew TV in Plymouth. TC expounded the failing of the curriculum as a mechanism, but also the need for continually investigating new ways of learning.

Lucy Byatt, the director of Spike Island (artist studios, galleries and design incubator) spoke about her own background crossing the rock path from education to practice, and also the story of how Spike transformed from a squatted community to a bastion of the cultural infrastructure of Bristol.

Feeling like the boring glue that sticks things together, I spoke about creative industries and the creative economy, both in the South West and nationally, with some statistics on the state of UK creativity and how this fits with Higher Education – including the shocking statistic that one year’s design undergraduates represents 50% of the commercial design industry – which is itself in rapid decline.

In a discussion, educators and creative professionals discussed how enterprise is becoming embedded, for better or worse, in curriculum, but it is a slow process. There needs to be also a sense of learning for learning’s sake with all levels of education, and also, I think, creativity for creativity’s sake.