It is 20 years since the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCCE, 1999) offered a simple if daunting definition of creativity:
I...
In the 60 years since CP Snow’s Rede Lecture of 1959, there has been a considerable narrowing in the cultural divide between science and the humanities, and onl...
What are the arts for?
Howard Gardner (1990) suggested that the arts provide three interconnected developmental pathways: helping to develop a child’s percepti...
Schools love to measure things. They like to collect these measurements up and present the numbers as an ineffable truth about a pupil’s progress. The data is e...
Why teach art?
In recent years, time pressures and focus on core subjects in the primary classroom have meant that art – and other foundation subjects – have b...
To neglect the contribution of the arts in education, either through inadequate time, resources or poorly trained teachers, is to deny children access to one of...
Disciplines and interdisciplinarity
Historically, academic disciplines were defined through the departments within which they were taught at universities, with...
Whilst there is clear intention that children should have opportunities for practical experience, this seems to be limited to performance skills, rather than co...
On 26 May 2019, a range of news sources reported on a 'crisis in music education' (Alberge, 2019), telling of how A-level and GCSE music entries are falling sha...
As the focus of Ofsted moves to a broad and balanced curriculum and ensuring that cultural capital is developed alongside knowledge, the inclusion of the perfor...
Up-skilling teachers in ‘drama for learning’
It is worth all teachers knowing some drama strategies and conventions and how to use them effectively. There are ...
The decline of the arts in education has recently gained media attention, with headlines like ‘Arts in schools: The end of an era’ (Tambling, 2019). Meanwhile, ...
Photographic education is in limbo, and the future of its impact is hanging in the balance without change (Rubinstein, 2009). The relatively new subject (in com...
We have recently seen the beginning of a decline in entry at GCSE and A-level for arts subjects (see Thinktank report: A Step Backward, 2019). It can be temptin...
The phrase ‘cultural capital’ is everywhere. In 2013, the then Education Secretary Michael Gove famously quoted Gramsci, saying
The accumulation of cultural ca...
At a time of increased focus on core subjects and shrinking school budgets (Cultural Learning Alliance, 2018), how can we make the case for taking children to m...
Curriculum studies has been in decline for some years in the UK. As an early career teacher in the 1990s, I was able to choose from a range of university Master...
Within the United Kingdom there has been a significant amount of curriculum reform since the late 1980s, but the directions taken by Scotland, England, Wales an...
Rhetoric?
Would you want to work in a school that had a narrow, unbalanced curriculum? How about one with a broad, balanced curriculum? The questions are rhet...
Ofsted’s consultation about its new education inspection framework, with its focus on the curriculum, is leading Early Years practitioners to wonder what a curr...
