Creative Partnerships Change Schools Programme Synoptic Evaluation

Authors: David Wood Consultants

Institution: David Wood Consultants

Full Reference: David Wood Consultants (2012). Creative Partnerships Change Schools Programme Synoptic Evaluation 2011. Newcastle: Creativity, Culture and Education.

Summary of key findings

In 2011, following on from the 2010 report, Creativity, Culture and Education (CCE) commissioned a survey of data from the Creative School Development Frameworks completed by schools in their final year of the Change School Programme. The Creative School Development Framework (CSDF) is a diagnostic tool to help schools analyse the ways in which they are developing effective contexts for creative learning. To do this, schools assess themselves against five areas: leadership and ethos, curriculum development and delivery, teaching and learning, staff learning and development, and environment and resources.

• The survey revealed a significant and marked acceleration in sample schools’ progress towards meeting the objectives of the Change Schools Programme during their final year of funding.
• Final CSDFs revealed that many schools had developed reflection, discussion and understanding of the concept of creativity in education, and a few even charted their three year journey from rather superficial understanding to something much more insightful.
• Specifically, 15 schools in the sample had now adopted a named model of reflection, and six schools were trialling models of monitoring and assessing pupils’ creative development.
• The majority of the CSDFs were completed with diligence and detail, indicating high levels of reflection on practice, carefully considered self-grading and a consideration of where next to take the creative learning journey.
• In final CSDFs there was also much more evidence than previously to corroborate the gains claimed through the Change School Programme. 23 schools drew explicit attention to corroborative evidence, including 10 which cited Ofsted inspection reports praising their creative work, and six which cited examination and attainment gains related to the Programme.

Methodology

The report drew on self-evaluation data from the same sample of 80 Change Schools (out of a total of 1,067 Change Schools in the Programme) from the original evaluation of the programme. Of the original sample, 61 schools submitted final CSDFs in 2011.

The mainly qualitative analysis of prose written by school staff was complemented by a statistical survey of their self-gradings.

Both the prose and the self-grades were contained in the CSDFs, a self-evaluation instrument which the sample schools uploaded onto the national Creative Partnerships Projects Database.

Read the report.