Creativity Money Love - Introduction
November 2011
The revolution is being televised: every day in the news we see radical changes being enacted around the world. It is also being digitised, and people are finding new ways of doing things for themselves. Two areas where change is happening at a frenetic pace are in the education system...
Piloting chaos with integrity and inspiration
November 2011
What did you and your colleagues want to achieve with this education? We have often considered the KaosPilots as a positive answer to youth unemployment but, to many, it has meant more than that: influenced human potential, moved boundaries etc. The KaosPilots was our vision of a fantasy education, one...
Creativity Money Love
November 2011
In his recent MacTaggart lecture the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, spoke of the energy and inventiveness of Victorian Britain as ‘… a time when the same people wrote poetry and built bridges’. Most of us want that kind of richness and diversity to run through our communities. We all...
Freedom, fire and facts
November 2011
W. B. Yeats’s quote about education is well known: ‘Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire.’ Richard Layard, in his landmark 2009 report for The Children’s Society, A Good Childhood, turns to Yeats when he writes that schools ‘should expand the powers of...
Another way in
November 2011
I don’t think many people in the cultural sector expected the newly-formed Creative & Cultural Skills to make apprenticeships a key skills priority in 2006. Employers weren’t crying out for them; most said that they’d like to have apprenticeships for graduates rather than engage with younger people. However, as we...
One size fits all, fits nobody
November 2011
How do you see the education and skills sector in relation to the creative industries as a whole but also your business? One of the problems with the music business is that we’re seen as a ‘sexy’ business and we’ve never been short of people wanting to work with us....
Making a solar system
November 2011
Some time back in the 1980s when I worked in a local education authority, I remember visiting a struggling boys’ school. I was shepherded down a dingy corridor to the room where the meeting was to take place. The paint on the ceiling peeled, the blinds hung off the wall,...
Every school should be a creative school
November 2011
Having worked with the creative industries in school through creative partnerships what I was struck by that the creative industries are outcome drive, the successful people in those industries are able to combine the self motivation, and discipline to work to a brief with a set outcome in mind and...
The dangers of the discourse of skills
November 2011
In 2005 I became Warden of Goldsmiths, University of London, a higher education institution renowned for its creative buzz, for graduates who were dynamic, imaginative and at times difficult. Many of them fit well into the creative and cultural economy. The sector skills council Skillset was establishing Media Academies, recognizing...
Reading, Wroughting, Arithmetic
November 2011
The Russell Group of universities has recently announced that the more practical subjects at A-level and GCSE will not in future be considered ‘challenging’ enough to count as prerequisites for entry to the top institutions of higher education. Meanwhile, the Secretary of State has publicly differentiated between the serious subjects...
Creative engineers
November 2011
When technology and working practices are changing so fast, is there enough emphasis on learning to learn rather than teaching kids stuff? Young people are pretty clever! And talented! They grow up with the technology of the day and have always been natural early adopters. Be it pen, pencil, print,...
Bedroom shredders
November 2011
Over the last three years we’ve been showing clients like Glyndebourne, the Barbican and the English National Opera YouTube clips of a young Spanish man, Achokarlos, sitting alone in his bedroom playing along to extreme heavy metal by the likes of Meshuggah and Deicide. http://www.youtube.com/user/achokarlos Now really, why would we...
Designing the future
November 2011
Design and Technology was introduced as a statutory subject for all pupils from ages 5 to 16 in the first National Curriculum in 1989. It was a visionary move taken by the then Secretary of State, Kenneth Baker, and, in the 22 years since then, a huge amount has been...
The human operating system
November 2011
Creativity is the way our mental and physical selves run for the realisation of our ideas. It is with this human operating system that we have evolved from cavemen pointing at mammoths to astronauts pointing at earth. Our fundamental instinct makes us determined to survive. The realization that collaboration improved...
Making and measuring difference
November 2011
If creative learning is the creation of one’s own ideas, or learning to create one’s own ideas – or even understanding that learning is the creation of new ideas – and if every human has the capacity to do this, then we are talking about something very significant and complex....
Can creativity be taught?
November 2011
Creativity is today’s ultimate black box, or perhaps a Rorschach blot onto which there are projected innumerable meanings. When academic Richard Green reviewed the literature recently, he found so much variation that he concluded the field was ‘so attenuated, extenuated, or misunderstood that operationalising of the key concepts is missing...
Courses for horses – the creative mix
November 2011
It is not wise to speculate on possible interventions in creative education with assumptions based on a single type of person wishing to engage in the creative or cultural sector as a way of life. Neither is it necessary to avoid such speculation. Rather, one can create a graph relating...
From a ripple to a tsunami
November 2011
20 or 30 years ago, specialist disability programmes such as BBC’s From the Edge or ITV’s Link provided practically the only route into the media for disabled people. In these somewhat protected environments, virtually any access issue could be surmounted with the right support and adaptation. I still remember The...
The digital economy can thrive with a very affordable investment of 5p.
October 2011
The first P is for Pounds The digital creative industries in particular need access to finance in order to scale up to serve and monetise global markets. Investors must learn to understand the value of creativity and digital content. The second P is for People You can’t build a digital...