Leadership Likes: Dr Phil Purvis

Creativity Matters

The Spanish painter Pablo Picasso famously said that ‘the chief enemy of creativity is good sense.’ History supports this viewpoint. In 1878, for example, the ‘good sense’ of a parliamentary committee in the House of Commons found that Thomas Edison’s invention the lightbulb may ‘have been good enough for our Transatlantic friends, but it is unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men.’ The fear of novelty and the disruptive potential of inventions makes the backlash against creators and innovators especially fervent. And yet, when people have the confidence to be creative and to innovate, the results— which are often as much a consequence of chance as anything else—can be incredibly lucrative. The inventor Dr John Pemberton, for instance, wanted to create something that would help him counter a morphine addiction that he had developed while receiving treatment for an injury sustained in the battle of Columbus. He did not quite get there in terms of finding a successful treatment. But on the way—and quite by accident—he created a product we all know, Coca-Cola.

Imagine a world without creativity.  It would be a world without lightbulbs and without Coca-Cola for a start! Without any original ideas, there would be no advances in science and medicine. There would be no new products or services; there would be no solutions to emerging world problems, such as COVID-19.  Creativity matters in every aspect of our lives, and so, as Darren Henley notes, ‘it is bizarre that we so often take it for granted.’ In the public mind, he continues, ‘creativity is often epitomised by the arts. But this can lead to a very narrow impression of what creativity is.’ People tend to think that artists, Henley posits, ‘spend their days performing a kind of magic to pull out a work of genius’. However, the truth is rarely so dramatic. This perception can lead us to think of the arts as abstract and unrelated to the concrete linear sciences or maths.  In fact, they are inextricably intertwined.  Experimental thought would be impossible without creative scientists imagining new hypotheses. Furthermore, the arts would be infinitely poorer without practitioners who can think methodically, who can think numerically and who can apply technological advances to their work.

Given the crucial importance of creativity in every area of our lives, its presence in the education system is of paramount importance. Nearly 10 years ago, academic and educationalist Sir Ken Robinson (who sadly died a few weeks ago) gave a now-famous Ted Talk which explored creativity in schools. If you have not watched it, I would urge you to do so not least because Robinson is a gifted and humorous storyteller. His talk is rather provocatively titled: ‘Do schools kill creativity?’ It starts from the premise that one of the reasons that education is so important to us is because it is education that is meant to take us into a future that we cannot yet grasp. Our Year 7 cohort who started senior school a few weeks ago, for example, will be retiring from the workforce towards the end of this century. Nobody has a clue what the world will look like in five years’ time, let alone what it will look like in 65 years. Indeed, at this very moment in our COVID-19 infused history, we do not know what the world will look like in five days!

And here is the rub of the relationship between education and the future: teachers are meant to be educating the next generation of the workforce for a future that is mostly unknown. Sure, we can predict what that future might be, but how accurate can we be given the speed and unpredictability of technological and societal change? Education, then, must be able to prepare our pupils for every possible eventuality in a myriad of different fields and futures. What a weight of responsibility; it is something we take very seriously.

The future may be unpredictable but one thing all teachers at Croydon High School do know, however, is that our pupils have talents which are as tremendous as they are numerous. But Ken Robinson would argue that even in a school such as ours—which frequently platforms creativity as we did with our Arts’ Week last academic year—that we  are in danger of squandering some of those talents. The fault is not ours, but rather that of an education system which favours future-proofing pupils’ knowledge and skills. And, alas, creativity comes relatively far down the list of the skills that pupils are tested on in our assessment system.

By nature, most young people are not risk averse. They will take chances, in part due to the development of the adolescent brain, and in part as a result of a lack of an inbuilt fear of getting things wrong that unfortunately increases with age. Now, being wrong is not necessarily the same thing as being creative. But if pupils are not prepared to be wrong, they will never come up with anything original. And, yet, by the time they get to be young adults, Robinson argues that most children have lost their youthful creative capacity because they have become frightened of being wrong. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that we tend to stigmatise mistakes rather than celebrate them. We are now heavily wedded to an education system which views mistakes as the worst thing you can make. Mistakes mean lower grades and lower grades mean fewer opportunities, or so the story goes. Against this backdrop, it is not hard to see when creativity ‘suffers’ in education. Following this line of thinking, it seems to me, at least, that we do not grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it. I am not sure this is the fault of schools, though, as Robinson contends. It appears to me, at least, that it is the assessment systems of GCSE and A levels, which have been the focus of much ire recently, that shackles youthful creativity.

Notwithstanding the fraught relationship between creativity and our education system, creativity is something prized in our society. LinkedIn recently studied hundreds of thousands of job postings to find out what companies are looking for most. According to their results, the number one soft skill companies wanted more than any other in 2019 was, you guessed it: creativity. Another global study by Adobe found that businesses which invest in the creativity of its workforce have increased employee productivity, they have satisfied customers and they produce a better customer experience. Having creative employees, then, fosters innovation which, in turn, leads to greater financial success.

There is a tension between an education system which limits creativity and the job sector which needs it. Robinson makes a compelling assertion that the demands of the real world for creative employees mean that we should think again about our creativity-deficient education system. Indeed, Robinson’s verdict on GCSEs and A levels is damning. Our education system, he says, has ‘mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth for its resources’. The ‘commodity’ in the case of formal education is the ability to retain and recall knowledge and skills under pressure. And for the future, the argument goes, that sort of approach will not serve the workforce well. As such, Robinson’s plea is that we must rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating children.

Exams are imperfect precisely because they invite comparisons in a way which often overlooks our essential differences, and which seeks to impose limits on our natural flair for creativity: the very things which make us unique. These are usually the same things which we need to be championing. If he had been in school today, I wonder if Shakespeare would be told by his English teacher to tone down his verbosity or to learn to punctuate correctly if he wanted the highest grades? I wonder if David Hockney would be told by his art teacher that his sense of perspective or use of colour was wrong, so he could not have more than a grade B? I wonder if Stormzy would be told by his music teacher that his compositions were a tad repetitive and, therefore, they would not score highly against the GCSE exam board criteria? I wonder if David Attenborough would be told by his A level Geography teacher that his answers had too much description and not enough application for the highest marks at A level?

An independent school can choose the qualifications they wish to teach, such as IGCSEs, where they feel they are better for their pupils. While imperfect, IGCSEs and A levels are still the best qualifications we have presently. This blog post is not, therefore, a precursor to an announcement that we are pulling out of GCSEs or A levels! So, the question becomes, what can we do to rehabilitate creativity in the way we approach these qualifications? Well, as I mentioned in my assembly on this topic recently, our pupils should not neglect the subjects which hone their creativity. I encouraged our school community to invest time in nurturing them instead: the payoff will be worth it as these creative skills will be vitally important as pupils enter the world of work. Secondly, we should not assume that creativity is limited to the creative arts; one can be just as creative in science, geography and Latin, to mention only three subjects. Thirdly, pupils and teachers alike should not worry about making mistakes or trying something new in case things go wrong. Creativity frequently demands that it must go wrong. Importantly, we can learn a lot when things do go wrong, and one of us might end up creating the next world-dominating fizzy drink on the way! Finally—and perhaps most importantly—I made the point that each one of our pupils possesses a tremendous capacity for creativity in one field or another. Just because it might not be tested in some of the formal examinations we currently have, or that it does not score highly against an assessment objective, does not mean that creativity is worth any less.

We may well be seeing the nascent signs of rehabilitating creativity in the heart of our formal GCSE and A level system under the auspices of the Rethinking Assessment movement. However, the pace of any changes will be slow, as well it should be given the widespread implications. Indeed, we know all too well from the events of this summer, what happens when education changes are rushed and ill thought through. We think there is much we already do as a school to nurture the creative capacities of our community while, in tandem, ensuring our pupils have the skills and knowledge they need for examination success. Our bespoke approach to Enterprise Technology is one such example. But we want to do more. To that endpoint, we are just about to embark on a review of our Lower School curriculum, following on from similar exercises at A level and GCSE last academic year. We are committed to placing creativity at the heart of the experience of pupils in Years 7-9. Indeed, our guiding mantra—penned by Mrs Pattison for this review—is working towards a curriculum which encourages pupils to be ‘independent and creative problem-solvers with excellent communication skills.’

We will keep you apprised of our work. For now, I will leave the final words to Picasso, who I turned to at the beginning of this blog. As he neared the end of his life, Picasso famously stated that ‘all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.’ We cannot stop our pupils—your children and grandchildren—growing up, and nor should we. But we can help them to hold on to their creativity as they do so.

Dr Purvis

Deputy Head – Academic