The Creativity Collaborative
Working with schools to enrich children's life chances by developing them into confident and creative problem-solvers.
Programme overview
In October 2021, Arts Council England launched a Creativity Collaboratives programme to build a network of schools across England focussed on developing and testing innovative approaches to teaching for creativity across the curriculum. This £2,780,000 investment funded eight collaboratives of schools, each working with a university partner over three years to develop approaches to teaching for creativity and collect evidence on the impact and value of teaching for creativity for children, schools and their communities. The University of Winchester Academy Trust (UWINAT) Creativity Collaborative is one of these collaboratives.
The collaboratives are unified by two overarching aims:
- to enable schools to establish and sustain teaching for creativity
- to understand how creative education prepares children and young people to live happy, healthy and fulfilled lives
Find out more about the programme
Our Creativity Collaborative
Our aims and objectives
Our collaborative aims to enrich children's life chances by developing them into confident and creative problem-solvers, engaging them through authentic, meaningful problems, embedded in their schools and lives. We passionately believe that creativity is a force that enables our learners to develop capabilities that will facilitate them to build successful and rewarding lives, as members of communities in an ever-changing world. We further believe that creativity must not be limited to specific curriculum subjects and that success as a learner is not defined solely by traditional academic outcomes.
A driving principle underpinning the activities of our collaborative is that change needs to be systemic and multi-level. Consequently, our project activities have included working with pre-service teachers in education, in-service teachers, headteachers and school leaders, governors and, of course, pupils.
Our activity strands
Our work has been focussed around five interleaved streams of activity:
Context for creativity focusses on identifying barriers and enablers of learning and teaching for creativity in our participating schools and their interaction with inequality & disadvantage.
Knowledge for creativity focusses on building learners’, teachers’ and leaders’ knowledge and understanding of creativity.
Agency for creativity focusses on supporting learners and teachers to develop their sense of being able to be creative and to teach for creativity.
Pedagogies for creativity focusses on developing evidence-based pedagogies to foster creativity, working with teachers, and pre-service teachers undergoing initial teacher education.
Leadership for creativity focusses on effective leadership, governance, and collaboration strategies to grow a climate for creativity and sustainable change.
Our research
To assess the impact of our project activities we have deployed a range of research tools. Questionnaires were administered, and interviews and focus groups took place, when each of our schools joined the collaborative. These are being repeated part-way through and at the end of the project, to assess whether project activities result in measurable changes in the information gathered, thereby providing evidence of project impact.
News and Events
For all the latest from our Creativity Collaborative, see our News and Events page.
Our collaborative leadership team
University team
Research Leads: Professor Paul Sowden, Dr Marnie Seymour and Dr Frances Warren
Researchers-in-Residence: Mrs Sandra Mansfield, Mrs Clare Martin and Dr Ellen Spencer
Postdoctoral Research Fellow: Dr Jean-Christophe Goulet-Pelletier
Visiting Specialist: Dr Judy Waite
Schools team
Schools Lead: Mrs Nicola Wells, Co-Executive Leader, University of Winchester Academy Trust
School Creativity Champions:
Bronte Bailey, Stoneham Park Primary Academy
Kelly Sweetnam, Awbridge Primary School
Rebecca Hellings, Barton Farm Primary Academy
Contact us
For more information on our collaborative, email us at uwinatcreativitycollaborative@winchester.ac.uk
Our partner schools
We are currently working with:
Halterworth Primary School
Awbridge Primary School
Wellow Primary School
Stoneham Park Primary Academy
Barton Farm Primary Academy
Orchard Infant School
South Baddesley CE Primary School
Droxford Junior School