It’s a familiar story. Talented individuals join the teaching profession excited to make a difference to young people’s lives only to find that after a few terms they are totally depleted from working close to 70 hours per week in a job from which it is impossible to switch off. One recent study suggested that 25% of those who qualified since 2011 had already left the profession within 5 years, exhausted from a relentless cycle of arriving in school at the crack of dawn, supporting a vast range of pupils’ needs (for which they are often insufficiently resourced), managing data, responding to emails, attending meetings, and often working late into the night to plan for the next day’s lessons. And that’s to say nothing of the constant pressure they are under to ensure pupils achieve their academic targets, the threat of the next observation or the frustration of having to adhere to short-term policies introduced by schools scrambling around for something that will tick a box for Ofsted or boost their position in the league tables.
The knock-on effect of this is that currently 20 per cent of all teacher training places remain unfilled, and there is a shortfall of 30,000 teachers overall in England (source DFE), yet with pupil numbers forecast to grow by 5 percent by 2024.
When Education Secretary Damien Hinds announced in May 2018 that he would be introducing a range of measures, such as year-long paid sabbaticals to improve retention, he only seemed to highlight the extent of the pressures on teachers’ wellbeing and mental health, and failed to explain to leaders how these measures supported his stated ambition to transform schools into ‘attractive 21st century workplaces’.
What do attractive 21st century workplaces look like? The most successful workplaces tend to value innovation and where employers unleash employee’s creativity and support them to generate new ideas and build upon each-others. How do we get schools to be more like that?
Boosting teachers’ creative confidence crops up relatively infrequently in the debate about stressed teachers or teacher retention. The most recent strategy launched in January of this year introduces more support for trainees and NQTs, as well as long overdue flexible working arrangements, yet without anything to promote a more positive, innovative, and creative culture in schools. So many agree that teaching is, in principle at least, ‘an inherently creative profession’ , as Sir Ken Robinson famously argued in his most watched TED talk of all time: ‘Do Schools Kill Creativity?’ Supporting teachers to hold on to and nurture this essential, life-enhancing skill, is a real imperative for leaders.
But what do we mean by creativity? In this context, it is much broader and more universal than the ‘artistic fields’, to mean using your imagination to create something new in the world, generating ideas, solutions, new approaches. This is important to what it means to be a teacher in 2019, charged with orchestrating classrooms full of children with very different needs, talents, and aspirations, not to mention cultural capital. When we think of creativity in schools, moreover, it is often seen as something to add sparkle to the academic rigour of ‘real learning’ or is marginalized to termly ‘enrichment days’, after-school clubs, or the last week before the summer holidays. But when creativity is valued, and embedded in schools at every level, it makes teaching more enjoyable, and less stressful. It makes teaching purposeful, empowering, and engaging for pupils. Could it also support teachers’ wellbeing and make them less likely to quit?