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Durham E-Theses Understanding Creative Partnerships: An examination of policy and practice WARD, SOPHIE,CLAIRE How to cite: WARD, SOPHIE,CLAIRE (2010) Understanding Creative Partnerships: An examination of policy and practice , Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/525/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 Understanding Creative Partnerships: An examination of policy and practice Sophie Claire Ward Abstract Creative Partnerships was launched in 2002 as an arts-based education programme that aimed to transform the aspirations of young people living in socially and economically deprived areas of England. The organisation was established in response to the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCCE, 1999), which offered an account of creativity as a means to foster individual self-reliance and social unity. This thesis explores how the NACCCE‟s construction of creativity enabled New Labour to appear to endorse the value of the arts in education whilst promoting the model of the self as an autonomous economic unit, and considers how Creative Partnerships was paradoxically welcomed by supporters of the arts in education who were displeased with the instrumentalism at work in much of New Labour‟s education policy. The aim of this thesis is to understand Creative Partnerships by examining the discourse that constitutes the programme, and by offering an empirical enquiry into a project that took place within a secondary school in the north of England. In so doing, this thesis critically evaluates the political motivation for the use of arts- based education as a means to develop self-reliance, and considers how successive governments have imported the free market economic model into education to promote efficiency, and the role that Creative Partnerships might be said to play in the maximisation of the total social system. Finally, this thesis considers the current limitations of Creative Partnerships, and how arts-based education might be used to develop social cohesion. 1 Understanding Creative Partnerships: An examination of policy and practice Sophie Claire Ward A thesis submitted for the degree of PhD School of Education Durham University October 2010 “The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged.” 2 Contents Acknowledgement 4 Introduction 6 Part I: Creative Partnerships in Context 1. A brief history of English education 12 2. The Rise of Creativity 33 3. Creativity and the Academy 47 4. Creative Partnerships and the Third Way 59 5. Creative Partnerships: Satisfaction and Denial 74 6. Creative Partnerships and Freedom 88 Part II: A Study of Creative Partnerships 7. The wisdom and justice of asking “what works” 105 8. Validity; Reliability; Generalisability 118 9. What sense do pupils, teachers, and artists make of Creative Partnerships? 132 SECTION A: Observation of CP training, planning and implementation 134 SECTION B: Observation of pupils‟ follow-up lessons 171 SECTION C: Interviews with pupils; creative practitioners/agent; local artist 176 SECTION D: Discussion 185 Conclusion 196 References 215 Appendices 236 3 Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisors, Professors Mike Fleming and Carl Bagley, for their guidance and encouragement. I would also like to thank my parents and my son Sam for their love and support. This research would have not have been possible without the assistance of my local Creative Partnerships and the teachers, creative practitioners and pupils at the secondary school that let me observe their project, and the individuals that kindly gave up their time to be interviewed by me. This research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. 4 For Sam 5 Introduction Creative Partnerships was launched by Tessa Jowell, Culture Secretary, at the conference on Arts and Young Offenders held in the Tate Modern in 2002. In her speech, Jowell presented Creative Partnerships as an arts-based education programme targeted at primary and secondary pupils living in areas of England blighted by „social and cultural deprivation‟, and she foregrounded the value of the arts in addressing social problems, claiming that „music workshops, Shakespeare performances and dance classes can give young people an alternative to burglary, vandalism and violence‟ (Jowell, 2002; see Appendix B). Developed and managed by the Arts Council England, and sponsored by the DCMS and the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), the £40m Creative Partnerships pilot programme ran from 2002-4, and involved 250,000 pupils, teachers, parents and community members within 16 of England‟s most deprived areas (Clancy, 2002). Estelle Morris, Education Secretary at the time of Creative Partnership‟s launch, describes the special place that the programme held in New Labour‟s political vision: The Creative Partnerships programme is key to the government‟s overall aim of giving everyone the chance to play an active part in the society we create, checked only by the limits of their talent and ambition. We need to value creativity – we know it can transform young people‟s aspirations. Some may go on to make their living from culture, utilising their vision, talent and understanding of creative processes to seek new ways of problem solving. Others will go on to work in other fields: manufacturing, teaching, engineering, medicine and politics. Whatever they choose to do, they will need to be creative and innovative. (Morris, 2003) The strength of New Labour‟s faith in the transformative properties of the arts and creativity was made evident by its decision to invest a further £70m in Creative Partnerships during 2004-6, a decision which was announced before the end of the pilot programme (Morris, 2003). In spite of the government‟s firm endorsement of creativity, when the Arts Council England commissioned a survey of the core concept of creativity operating within Creative Partnerships, the ensuing report, The rhetorics of creativity (Banaji et al, 2006) identified nine different, and contradictory, „rhetorics‟ of creativity that emerged from the context of academia, policy and practice. Although Banaji et al (2006) explained that these rhetorics, or 6 claims, about creativity had developed independently of one another, with some dating back to antiquity and others emerging more recently in response to developments in areas such as computer technology, they did not explain how or why such diverse claims about the nature and value of creativity came to be embodied, simultaneously, in Creative Partnerships. The remarks made by Jowell and Morris indicate that New Labour viewed Creative Partnerships as a vehicle for social and economic regeneration, and that the government‟s interest in creativity was linked with employability, rather than “art for art‟s sake”, yet the report by Banaji et al (2006) showed that the government‟s chosen definition of creativity was based upon a history of ideas about human thought and behaviour that did not support any definite application of that concept, making the government‟s use of “creativity” problematic. The aim of this thesis is to attempt to understand Creative Partnerships by examining its policy and practice, in order to uncover how, and why, an arts-based programme that was founded upon disparate accounts of human creative thought and behaviour came to be posited as a means to „transform young people‟s aspirations‟ (Morris, 2003). Morris‟ (2003) account of Creative Partnerships suggests that New Labour did not intend the programme to be understood in isolation from its commitment to economic and social renewal. Therefore, in addition to exploring the rhetoric of creativity, this thesis considers New Labour‟s allegiance to the neoliberal belief that the free market model is the most efficient means of ordering society (Neelands et al, 2006: 99), and how it sought, under the „Third Way‟, to eliminate material and cultural inequalities through a limited re-distribution of various forms of existing capital, (identified by Bourdieu (1986) as economic capital; cultural capital and social capital) without attempting to restructure the relations of production, which Marxian forms of socialism posit as fundamental to the elimination of inequalities (Neelands el al, 2006: 99), and this thesis considers the role of education in New Labour‟s economic plan. Creative Partnerships is not, perhaps, the most obvious choice of programme to illustrate how New Labour blended economics and education: in The Education Debate, Stephen Ball (2010: 185) offers an analysis of New Labour‟s academies programme, and claims that academies are intended to „blur welfare state demarcations between state and market, public