Creative Partnerships - Agent Work
The Creative Partnerships Programme ended in July 2011. From June 2008 - July 2011 Iain was a member of the Black Country Creative Partnerships team working as a Creative Agent in schools across the Black Country, Telford & Wrekin and Shropshire. Iain also worked on the Creative Agent team at Bright Space from Sept 2010 - July 2011 delivering the Creative Partnerships programme in the Birmingham, Worcestershire and Herefordshire areas.
Managed by a national organisation called Creativity, Culture and Education (CCE), Creative Partnerships (CP) is the Government’s flagship creative learning programme funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Department for Children, Schools and Families and Arts Council England. It aims to foster effective, sustainable partnerships between schools and the widest possible range of cultural and creative partners that develop young people’s learning across and beyond the formal curriculum.
The Creative Agent role involved working closely with schools to broker partnerships between staff, pupils and artists or other creative professionals. Every project was tailored to meet the school’s individual needs and followed an action research model that explored approaches to creative learning and teaching. Creative Agents supported and helped manage project delivery, encouraged reflective practice and undertook monitoring and evaluation of the impact on learning for all partners. Creative Partnerships strived to make their interventions sustainable, working with schools to recruit artists, reflect on learning, embed creativity and manage change.
2010/11
For this academic year Iain continues to work for Black Country CP with a primary school in Shropshire on their Change School programme investigating how to develop and implement a creative curriculum across the school. He is also working with 2 other primary schools, one in Cradley Heath who are looking at how to better engage pupils opinions about Assessment for Learning and another in Oldbury who are interested in developing new approaches to their use of the outdoor environment. Iain also has a secondary school in Great Barr who are looking at developing a cross-curricular project across music, art and drama to explore pupils emotional responses and how they can be communicated in different media.
For Bright Space he is working with 2 Change Schools in Kingstanding and a secondary school in Bournville who are using their enquiry project to try and develop a more creative, enquiry based approach to the Yr8 humanities curriculum.
2010
Iain started working with 4 new Enquiry schools in January this year. He has one secondary school in Wolverhampton who are planning a project around understanding and designing public art with a view to their learning informing their new school building which starts construction this year as part of Building Schools for the Future. He is also working with 3 primary schools. One school in Dudley are looking to improve literacy skills through understanding and applying theatre practice. Another school is looking to develop writing skills in Yr 4 through a digital media project and the third school are keen to see whether dance and drama can introduce new ways of approaching the literacy curriculum.
2009/10
Iain is currently working with 2 schools on the Creative Partnerhships Enquiry programme. An Infant school in Shropshire looking at cross-curricular approaches to music teaching and learning and a secondary school in Walsall exploring how the creation of a pupil led website can support the pastoral curriculum and provide opportunities for independent learning. He is also working with a primary school in Shropshire as they begin their Change School programme.
2008/09
In 2008/09 Iain worked with 4 primary schools and 1 secondary school in the Black Country, Telford and Shropshire on a range of Creative Partnerships Enquiry projects. The areas of enquiry covered cross-curricular approaches to music and engineering, creative approaches to maths, addressing the Social & Emotional Aspects of Learning in Gifted and Talented children, encouraging risk taking and problem solving and building understanding of British ethnic diversity.
