Nurturing Creativity in Schools: St Marylebone’s Experience in the Creativity Collaborative

10 January 2025

In September 2021, St Marylebone was really proud to become one of the eight Creativity Collaboratives in England researching Teaching for Creativity, one of the key recommendations of the Durham Commission.

St Marylebone led the London Creativity Collaborative, working with 13 cross-phase schools in 10 different London Boroughs, a group of partners from the creative industries and lead project evaluators at Durham University.

The Creativity Collaboratives Project

The St Marylebone Creativity Collaborative was founded on two life-giving forces:

• Nurturing creativity can and should be part of everyday teaching and learning

• Collaboration between teachers around a common purpose drives change and improvement

Over the last three years, we deployed our Specialist Leaders in Creativity into 13 partner schools to work with teachers and leaders on what Teaching for Creativity really means in practice in their setting.

We also benefited from the input of partners from the creative industries: the V&A, the National Theatre, Jones Knowles Ritchie and A New Direction. Really importantly, our model used teacher research groups, sometimes called professional learning communities, to bring about change and development.

The collaborative nature of this work has:

• Challenged preconceptions (“but I’m not creative”)

• overcome barriers (“it’s hard to foster creativity when there’s an exam spec to follow”)

• changed attitudes (“this is worth making time for”)

• empowered and enabled (“I didn’t think I could, but I can and we did”)

• fostered the ability to evaluate (“we know it’s working because … ”)

• invested in the professional self-esteem of staff (“we are doing something really important”).

In the first year of the pilot, the teacher research groups focused on establishing the conditions, definitions and practices to research. In the second year, they went on to developing their practice, finding out what did and didn’t work. Finally in the third year, we embedded, expanded and evaluated what really had an impact on teaching practice and on students’ learning.

We have summed up our overall findings in ten points below:

1. Creativity is effectively fostered when grounded in existing knowledge, and an activity is introduced which requires students to make connections or solve problems grounded in this knowledge, which then generates more knowledge or more questions about the knowledge.
2. Creativity is not effectively fostered when the activity is fun but doesn’t really connect to the knowledge or skills being developed.
3. Learning that fosters creativity might be fun but it might not be. Not all great learning or great creativity is fun. Learning being difficult is also ok, even if students don’t realise this at the time.
4. Students can recognise how they or others are developing their creativity where they’ve been provided with language which helps express this.
5. Persistence and consistency in the teaching also fosters creativity i.e. activities which foster creativity being ones that are done regularly, with discipline, over weeks or months or years. One-off “creative” lessons may have minimal impact on learning.
6. A safe, boundaried, trusting learning environment can foster creativity. Boundaries, structure and clear instructions do not limit creativity, rather, they help students know what they have agency over and feel safe to use this agency.
7. Creativity is fostered through activities which provide the right balance of structure and boundaries with uncertainty and openness. This allows for safe mistakes.
8. Where learning can be gamified, creativity is fostered. Gamifying can take a lot of planning and organising. Any good game needs both structure and uncertainty.
9. Involving students in situations or problems to solve where there is apparently very little at stake fosters creativity; again, this is about safety and trust in the teacher.
10. Creativity is fostered when the learning starts where the students are - make sure the content, knowledge and skills are within the reach of the learners. For KS4 and KS5, this also means not moving too far from what is recognisably exam-relevant. Fostering creativity and making the learning exam-relevant are not mutually-exclusive.

Our Digital Pantry of Resources - A Toolkit for Teaching for Creativity

In the three-year project, across our 13 schools, we identified and developed the essential conditions, resources and tools which nurture students’ creative thinking. It was as if we had stocked up our pantry with the essential ingredients and equipment. Importantly, our plan was not to let it sit in the pantry unused, only coming out for fancy occasions. The idea is that Teaching for Creativity is something we’re doing daily - it’s our daily bread if you like - not only for the shiny showcase.

The St Marylebone Creativity Collaborative have shared their ideas for Teaching for Creativity and have put it in this store cupboard of creativity ingredients and equipment, so that it can be used every day.

The resources are clearly identified as to whether they are subject specific, or whether they can be used in any subject, and then listed in key stage order. We hope you find it useful.

Download the digital resource