Despite figures that show the benefits of creativity in learning, arts projects are facing deep funding cuts.

“Seven years ago, of the 203 new school places we had in year 7, only 43 of them chose us as their first choice,” says Andy O’Brien, deputy headteacher of Accrington Academy. “Back then, only 17% of kids got five GCSEs at A* to C grades. Now, 78% of them do and we’re totally oversubscribed.” O’Brien is explaining the startling transformation his school has undergone. Giving a tour of the bright, airy and bubble-like new extension to a building in one of the most socially deprived areas in Lancashire, he’s enthusiastic. “It’s an exciting time,” he says. Talking to some of the pupils, I believe him.

Established 18 months ago, Accrington Academy sits on the site of the previously failing Moorhead High School. According to Farooq Choudhary, a taxi driver whose eldest two children went to Moorhead: “It was a total dump. You’d never want to send your kids there if you had a choice.” Choudhary drove his younger son to Blackburn every day to avoid it. “I wouldn’t now. I’d send him [to Accrington Academy]. It’d be easier because it’s changed, hasn’t it? It’s got a good reputation.”

The Academy’s achievement is remarkable. Shiny new classrooms, of course, help – but the pride is palpable. O’Brien is keen to emphasise that while a strong leadership team has steered the change, crucially, it was the involvement of the Creative Partnerships scheme in 2005 “that really got the ball rolling”.

An arts education programme set up a decade ago by Arts Council England (Ace), and taken over by a relatively new national charity – Creativity, Culture & Education (CCE) – 18 months ago, Creative Partnerships was born from the legacy of All Our Futures, a 1999 inquiry into creativity, education and the economy led by the then Professor (now Sir) Ken Robinson. The idea of the partnerships was to embed “creative learning” within schools, to radically overhaul teaching methods across all subjects by bringing in visual artists, writers, poets, musicians and the like – dubbed “creative agents” – into schools, to inspire teachers to work in a new way to raise standards, attainment and attendance. As the results in a report published today and shown exclusively to Education Guardian show, they’re clearly working.

Auditors at PricewaterhouseCoopers have conducted an economic and social impact study into the long-term effects of Creative Partnerships, analysing 10 years of data ahead of the government’s comprehensive spending review. The report, commissioned by CCE, reveals a pretty high return on investment at a time when bang for buck seems to make the weightiest case for survival.

According to the research, for every £1 invested, Creative Partnerships delivers £15.30 of benefits to the national economy, generating a projected £4bn. The figure, the study shows, is based on “the earnings premium associated with gaining five ‘good’ GCSEs, estimated to be around £93,000 over a person’s lifetime.” That effect on attainment is difficult to dispute: evidence shows that young people involved with Creative Partnerships activities achieve, on average, 2.5 grades better at GCSE than their peers in similar schools. It’s compelling stuff.

Ten years since his report shook up the sector, Robinson warns that we still face a crisis in our national economy unless creativity in education is taken seriously. “Creativity is not an exotic extra for education,” he says. “Like literacy, it should be at the heart of national educational priorities. The best schools know this already and the best Creative Partnerships programmes have shown how this works.”

But the future of that work is under threat: Ace, which funds £38m of CCE’s annual £50m budget, has warned the charity that it is likely to face much deeper cuts than the rest of the arts sector. Political pressure is on Ace to make sure money is granted directly to artists and organisations making art, not so-called delivery agencies that facilitate it.

Paul Collard, CCE’s chief executive, is worried: “The frustrating thing is that the Treasury really ‘get it’; and I understand the Arts Council’s position is a tricky one … but even just from the economic perspective, as our report shows, creativity in education is essential for growth. The figures speak for themselves.”

Robinson says that it is a credit to Ace’s vision that the Creative Partnerships programme exists at all, but like everyone else asked, is curious that, overall, it is the Department of Culture, Sport and Media and not the Department for Education that provides the cash for the programme. “The real responsibility for promoting creativity in schools should lie with [the Department for Education],” he says, “but how these programmes are funded is less important than that they are funded. The experience of Creative Partnerships is a gift that [the Department for Education] should accept, and embrace at the centre of its mission for education.”

The challenge, says Jez Dolan, the “creative agent” assigned to Accrington Academy, is changing the common perception of creativity: “It’s nonsense to have it described as fluffy or easy. If it’s easy, you’re doing it wrong.” Dolan has been with the school since its inception, setting up everything from a history time machine for year 7s to a youth expedition to the Arctic. “I have 20 days in a year to organise and facilitate projects, bringing in dozens of other artists, to do work that has to be robustly planned, coordinated, evaluated and assessed.”

Alison Peacock, head of Wroxham Primary School in Potters Bar, agrees that applying creativity in education can’t be a woolly or vague notion but must be rigorous. Sparking the imagination of pupils and teachers “isn’t about taking £20,000, then going round and telling a teacher to ‘be creative’,” she says. “And it isn’t about how beautiful the artwork is or how wonderful the musicians are, but about sharpening your thinking in order to be creative – that’s what allows the innovation.” She admits “it seems a contradiction in terms to say structure enables freedom”, but it’s the only way she can expect her teachers to take a fresh, even radical, approach in the classroom and consequently benefit from a school full of kids actually excited about learning. It’s an anomaly that the school’s last Ofsted report backs up: Wroxham Primary, which is a specialist Creative Partnerships school of creativity, went from being in “special measures” to an “outstanding” assessment in every category within three years.

Chris May, the chief executive of Curious Minds, a social enterprise based in Lancashire that facilitates Creative Partnerships under CCE’s umbrella, explains that the programme isn’t about “one-off arts projects that do interesting things, it’s about embedding the work of a Creative Partnership in the way the school works”. The upside being that when the CCE grant comes to an end, a sustainable creative legacy will endure.

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A Peaceful Economy would end all educational and creativity funding cuts worldwide.

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A report on how “free” education is still unaffordable for children in Tanzania.  A Peaceful Economy would provide the solution.

MOSHI, Tanzania – To Josiah Mchome, a veteran teacher, nothing is more disheartening than the scene at the start of the school year.

Early in the morning, he sees children fill this vibrant, crowded city at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro, proudly sporting colorful, though tattered, uniforms. Some have walked miles to school.

By midmorning, many reappear along the dirt roads, making the same journey in reverse. They’ve been sent home because they can’t pay the fees.
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EDITOR’S NOTE – As a U.N. summit gathers in New York to measure progress toward its Millennium Development Goals of dramatically easing the health, income and education woes of the world’s poor, The Associated Press begins a series of reports with Justin Pope’s assessment of education in East Africa, where the hunger for education is overwhelming, yet millions are too poor to afford even primary school.
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Like many primary school systems in East Africa, Tanzania’s is supposed to be free. But in practice, schools have replaced tuition with fees for everything from textbooks to toilets, making education unaffordable to many.

To Mchome, that throng of disappointed youngsters is a vivid display of both the hunger for education in a country building schools by the thousands, and the still-huge gap between dream and reality.

“Often, they just go back to school and try to sneak back into class,” sighs Mchome, who works with a small charity for destitute students.

With 60 or more students per class, the strategy sometimes works. But the children milling around this city of 150,000 during the school day – ranging from 6 or so to their early 20s – and the steady stream seeking Mchome’s help, show that for many, sneak-back-in hasn’t worked.

And even if primary school is now at least within reach of many Tanzanians, fees shoot up in secondary school, which increasingly is viewed as essential but is often still hopelessly out of reach.

Flora Mrema is a rarity. She recently finished secondary school with help from Mchome’s group. She hopes to go on to university and become a lawyer. She coped with numerous interruptions, including one of five months for failure to pay fees.

“It’s just a slogan that the government offers free education,” said Mrema, 22.

Ten years ago, the U.N. set eight “Millennium Development Goals” to tackle the world’s most pressing humanitarian problems by halving rates of affliction in such areas as disease, poverty and lack of basic education by 2015, compared to where they stood in 1990. A summit to review progress is set for Sept. 20-22 in New York.

In universal primary education, there has been much progress – 90 percent in South Asia, 92 percent in the Middle East and North Africa, 95 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean. Worldwide, said a U.N. report in June, the number of children not in school has dropped from 106 million in 1999 to 69 million in 2008.

Sub-Saharan Africa has also made gains; in 1999, 58 percent of its children were enrolled in primary school. By 2008 the figure was 76 percent, though it remains the lowest in the world, accounting for almost half of the unenrolled.

Over the last decade, donor countries and international groups have pushed for abolition of tuition fees, and in 2002 Tanzania followed East African neighbors like Malawi, Kenya and Uganda and made the first seven years of school free of charge.

The effect on school attendance has been striking, especially in Tanzania. A decade ago primary school enrollment was around 50 percent. Today, according to government statistics at least, attendance nears 100 percent.

Neighboring Kenya has seen primary school enrollment rise from 66 percent in 2000 to 82 percent in 2008, according to the World Bank. Enrollment in Rwanda rose from 76 percent to 96 percent; in Zambia from 69 percent to 97 percent.

But those figures mask a disappointing reality: many thousands of students who show up for the first day of class drop in and out over the course of the year because they cannot pay the fees that have sprouted up to replace the abolished tuition charges.

Another problem: The surge in enrollment has compounded classroom overcrowding to an average teacher-student ratio of 53-to-1, according to recent figures. Some believe it diminishes quality; when attendance goes up, completion rates go down. In Madagascar, primary enrollment rocketed from 68 percent in 2000 to 99 percent in 2008. But the World Bank noted that 80 percent don’t finish primary school.

Some teachers and students question whether the trade-off is worth it if top students are dragged down by spending to include everyone. Tanzanians joke that the 1997 Universal Primary Education Program (UPE), “Ualimu Pasipo Elimu” in Swahili, actually stands for “teaching without education.”

In short, it has proved much easier to declare a universal right to education and even build schools than to build sustainable education systems.

“The schools mushroomed in every corner of the country,” said Mchome. Politicians “wanted to please their bosses – ‘we have a school here, we have a school there.’ But the facilities and teachers were just not there.”

Sygifrid Saweru, the principal of a newly built secondary school in Moshi, agrees the expansion has been implemented poorly. He is deeply pessimistic about how his students will do on upcoming exams. Many can’t write even in Swahili, let alone English, which the curriculum switches to in secondary school.

“We forced many to go to school, some capable, some not,” Saweru said. In a decade, perhaps, the resources will be in place. But for now, he said: “I’m worried they will leave without anything.”

Government funding has risen, but lags behind demand and population growth. A 2008 study of the Kilimanjaro region estimated that the real cost of primary school has doubled in the years since fees were “abolished.”

To educate several million more students, the old tuition charges have morphed into fees. In government primary schools, these may not seem like much – around $25 dollars per year in Kilimanjaro – but they are still beyond reach for many in Tanzania, where the average woman has around five children to support.

And in secondary school, they jump considerably: perhaps $20 per year for uniforms, another $20 for a “building fund,” $50 for food, plus charges for desks even if students bring their own, to give examples Mchome calls typical. Most demoralizing is a common fee for supposedly “supplemental” tutoring where teachers actually cover essential material. Students who can’t pay must leave the classroom.

Those burdens come to life in the office of Mchome’s charity, called “Watu,” Swahili for “people.” The group supports about 120 students per year, but turns away seven in eight applicants.

A recent visitor was 71-year-old Anthony Assenga. A retired irrigation engineer with no pension, he carries a dignified smile but also the sadness of a man who cannot provide for his three grandchildren whom he adopted after their parents died of AIDS.

“Education is the only way for a child in the future,” Assenga says. Without it, “he is going to be a thief.” He worries most for 12-year-old granddaughter Irine, who won’t find a job or a good marriage without more schooling.

For now, Irine has gotten a reprieve from the headmaster, but still must find about $80 to stay enrolled.

“I feel very sorry, but what can I do?” Assenga says, adding he has hit up friends and his pastor but is still well short. “I have nothing to give.”

Salum Geofrey is a bright-eyed 20-year-old who says he wants to become a journalist to expose corruption. Money problems got him kicked out of the government school in his home village, so he traveled 12 hours by bus to Moshi because he heard there were schools here. It’s critical that he sit national exams this fall.

“If I don’t take the exam, my life and ambition will be very badly destroyed,” said Geofrey. If Mchome cannot help him, “I will try to find another way … but I don’t think I will succeed. There is not enough time left.”

Geofrey shares a home with friends on the outskirts of Moshi, at the end of a dirt path through a maize field beside a prison farm. His small room is covered with newspaper photos of soccer stars and Barack Obama. On his desk sits an Oxford dictionary and old textbooks he borrowed from housemates. In the afternoon, when his housemates return from school, he asks them to repeat the day’s lessons for him.

He blames Tanzania’s government for his predicament.

“When they go outside the country, they say we have invested very much, we have free education,” Geoffrey says. “When you come here, you see it is vice versa. All that money, I don’t know where it goes.”

Repeated phone calls and e-mails to Tanzanian government officials went unanswered.

Undoubtedly, Tanzania’s sclerotic bureaucracy is part of the problem. But there is also a feeble tax base built on almost impossible demographic arithmetic: Because of AIDS deaths and a high birth rate, half of Tanzania’s 42 million people are 18 or under.

Many schoolmasters try hard to avoid sending students home. Some play hardball, cracking down on fee collections just before all-or-nothing national exams.

The law says students can’t be sent home for nonpayment, but it routinely happens through verbal finesse.

“They don’t say ‘go home because you haven’t paid your fees,’” Mchome explains. “They say ‘go home and bring the fees.’”

But overall, he and even hard-pressed students like Mrema and Geofrey are sympathetic to the school administrators’ bind.

Msaranga Secondary School is one of about a dozen new secondary schools in Moshi, with 624 students in a cluster of half-finished buildings. There are 11 teachers, including headmaster Saweru who teaches 18 classes a week; his one lone math teacher teaches 50. Desks fill the dirt-floored classrooms wall-to-wall, each shared by two or three students. Others sit on the floor.

In a closet-like office, Saweru shows off his meticulous records. The government, he says, has promised him about $13 per student per year. But for the first six months of 2010 he got less than $1 per student.

As a secondary school, Msaranga is allowed to charge about $13 per year in tuition, but only half its students have managed to pay. So it imposes fees: $3.25 per year for security, $6.50 for supplemental teaching, $3.25 for an ID card, $40 for food. About half can afford lunch, and sometimes they share the food with those who can’t buy their own.

“We don’t want to tell students to go back home,” Saweru says. Warning letters are sent. But “when it becomes very hard and we cannot run the school, we have to tell them today you will not come to school unless you come with money.

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Jessica M Hewitt “thinks” that we need to challenge our minds.

“To live is to have problems and to solve problems is to grow intellectually” — J.P. Guilford.

It is certain that life is full of problematic situations. Unfortunately, some individuals find it difficult to manage those problems and resort to their comfort zone, expecting peers, teachers, parents, colleagues, and even technology to provide a resolution to those troubles.

We live in a society that is driven by instant gratification where thinking is no longer valued or required. Everything is but a mere keystroke away.

However, when faced with a problem that has no immediate solution, individuals find themselves in a labyrinth, lost and confused, for there are no specific guidelines or instructions to advise one on how to think critically.

Consequently, this is affecting our children, students, workers, businesses, economy, and future.

Failing to expose individuals to identify, probe, and seek problems and solutions hinders their ability to exercise their critical thinking skills. According to Emeritus Professor of Education Arthur L. Costa, critical thinking is “performed in response to questions and problems the answers to which are not immediately known — challenging conditions to resolve a complex problem.”

Falling short of encouraging individuals, in every facet of life, to utilize, expand, and nurture their critical thinking skills is cause for great concern, for this has become not only self-destructive, socially destructive, but globally destructive.

It is evident at school when a student sits at his desk staring at a blank sheet of paper because he is unable to formulate his own ideas and too easily says, “I don’t know what to write about.”

It is evident in the medical field when a doctor misdiagnoses a patient with gastritis, and keeps that patient at home suffering, when in reality the patient needs her gallbladder removed, failing to seek all possibilities before that final diagnosis.

It is evident in the world where British Petroleum (BP) neglected to think critically about the mass destruction it would bring if their oil rig exploded, and now find themselves with blood on their hands amidst one of the greatest oil spills in U.S. history, relentlessly contaminating our ocean water, while adding pain and burden to an already struggling economy.

Providing individuals, regardless of who they are, immediate answers to their questions instead of guiding them toward inquiry is the easy way out.

Parents must deviate from giving instant answers and as an alternative instill questioning by asking, “Why do you think” or “How do you think …” questions to awaken curiosity and motivate their children to search for answers.

Teachers of all disciplines and grade levels must develop their curriculum to advance students’ critical thinking skills not only inside, but outside of the classroom, making it relevant to their daily lives.

Businesses and entrepreneurs must develop their trainings to present ongoing opportunities for employees to develop and exercise these skills so that they can attain more customers rather than lose them.

We must strive to cultivate great minds like those who have preceded us: Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Jane Austen, and Bill Gates. These individuals utilized their critical thinking skills to not only grow intellectually but to transform our world.

We must all leave our comfort zones, welcome uncertainty, delve into the realm of discovery, and challenge our minds, “for apart from inquiry individuals cannot be truly human.”

It is our responsibility as individuals of this nation, regardless of age, gender, race, or profession to become inquirers and seekers searching for solutions to problems that will forever pervade our daily lives.

Jessica M. Hewitt is a teacher at Ysleta High School (USA) and a teacher consultant for the West Texas Writing Project.

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Peaceful Creativity + Peaceful Diet + Peaceful Economy + Peaceful Interaction + Peaceful Living
The Peaceful Planet
It’s Time For Change