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“Real change takes time and it’s the brave, bold, risk-taking outliers who do the hardest yards of shifting entrenched values and approaches.”
Too special to measure A school designed to put creativity at the heart of its curriculum won an award for its iconic building. Are the benefits of this approach to learning being recognised through our current inspection criteria? Murray Hudson finds out. In 2016, architects Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios won a RIBA South West Award for its arresting new building designed to house the Plymouth School of Creative Arts (PSCA), a four–16 mainstream, city centre, all-through school sponsored by Plymouth College of Art, in the southwest of England. This was a school designed to put creativity at the heart of all subjects; where learning by making would apply as much to English and maths as it did to art and cookery. The ethos of the school rejected the idea of art and creativity as “boundaried” subjects, instead seeing their application as the key to unlocking the entire curriculum. For example, before studying Macbeth in English, the pupils explored the landscape and weather of the moors by producing a vast mural. Drawing was seen as a process of learning in the same way that writing can be; as a way of recording, enquiring and illustrating.
