Creativity, Arts & Culture in Schools | Speakers for Schools

Fostering Creativity and Cultural Engagement in State Schools

This campaign was launched in 2016 in partnership with the Creative Industries Federation and Arts Council England to celebrate the wealth of opportunity attached to arts and culture as well as a call from industry to widely encourage state school students in pursuing them to help the UK continue to have a world-class, thriving creative sector and economy. The Creative Industry Federationā€™s Creative Education Agenda report detailed that there are 2.5 million jobs in arts, culture and the creative industries, with this number expected to double by 2020. The report also argues that creative subjects in schools and in tertiary education support important innovation and enterprise skills in sectors such as engineering and computer science.

Three main messages of the campaign included:

  • The range and breadth opportunity in these sectors, and demystifying them for young people
  • The need for diversity in the arts, and that they are for anyone regardless of background
  • The transferable benefit of these subjects regardless of ambitious, helping build personal faculties like creativity and problem-solving

This national campaign featured a series of talks over 25 from the industriesā€™ leading figures, practitioners and performers, giving their personal point of view on these themes with an aim of inspiring students to harness the wealth of opportunities and skills that come with studying the arts and culture in preparing young people for their future.

These ambassador speakers, along with 25+ others, encouraged the next generation of innovators and creators by helping students embrace arts subjects in education and remove the misconceptions or stigma about who arts and culture are for. Through personal stories and industry insights they also aim to convey these subjectsā€™ capacity to build transferable personal-professional faculties such as problem solving, ingenuity and resilience. This theme is now an ongoing subject that existing and new speakers continue to focus on in their S4S talks.