All people have creative abilities and we all have them differently. When individuals find their creative strengths, it can have an enormous impact on self-esteem and on overall achievement.’ This also triggers group problem solving and shared learning that gives them a feeling of togetherness. Stone, M. K., & Barlow, Z. (2010). Social learning in the STRAW project. In A. E. J. Wals (Ed.), Social learning towards a sustainable world (pp. 405–418). The Netherlands: Wageningen Academic.

Davies, D., Jindal-Snape, D., Collier, C., Digby, R., Hay, P., & Howe, A. (2013). Creative learning environments in education: A systematic literature review. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 8, 80–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2012.07.004. Beghetto, R. A. (2019a). Structured uncertainty: How creativity thrives under constraints and uncertainty. In C. A. Mullen (Ed.), Creativity under duress in education? (Vol. 3, pp. 27–40). Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90272-2_2. Karwowski, M., Lebuda, I., & Beghetto, R. A. (2019). Creative self-beliefs. In J. C. Kaufman & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of creativity (2nd ed., pp. 396–418). New York: Cambridge University Press. Creativity can be thought of as the colour that brings Curriculum for Excellence to life. The four core creativity skills run throughout the four capacities and are integral to the meta skills which are increasingly important in today’s workplace.

Assessing Creativity

Beghetto, R. A. (2016). Creative learning: A fresh look. Journal of Cognitive Education and Psychology, 15, 6–23. We are all creative people, whether you think of yourself as creative or not. It takes creative thinking to paint a picture, but it also takes creative thinking to figure out the right formula to use in a spreadsheet, to invent a twist on a chocolate chip cookie recipe, or to plan a birthday party. But some people are more practiced and comfortable in the creative process than others. The latest Ofsted Education Inspection Framework has a greater emphasis on offering a broad curriculum. School leaders are required to describe the quality of the education they are offering young people in terms of ‘Intent’ (what they are trying to achieve), ‘Implementation’ (how it will be taught and assessed) and ‘Impact’ (the effect on pupils). Prisma’s curriculum was inspired by Seymour Papert, a mathematician and computer scientist who was a pioneer in the field of educational technology. Papert believed technology could be used to promote creativity and empower students to learn in new and innovative ways. He also believed creativity was a key component of the learning process, and that students should be given the freedom to explore and experiment to develop their creative thinking skills. His philosophy that learners learn most when engaged in a process of “ hard fun” inspired the design of Prisma’s engaging curriculum themes & creative projects. Creativity in an educational context is often thought of in terms of creative subjects such as music, art, and drama. These subjects certainly nurture creativity, but creativity is an integral part of teaching and learning across all subjects. It involves an active curiosity when seeing something for the first time and how we react to it. Sometimes this involves an element of risk-taking, which can be developed in the safe environment of learning.

In a rapidly evolving world with increasing automation, the ability to think creatively and come up with innovative solutions to problems is critical. This is particularly true in education, where fostering creativity can help students develop important critical thinking skills, as well as prepare them for the 21st-century workforce. To build the form of creativity that leads to innovative thinking, learners need complex, interesting problems to solve. Education needs to figure out ways to design these kinds of authentic problems to prepare learners to succeed. Fun team building activities can be organized so as to promote creative thinking in groups and helping them to learn about accepting others’ ideas. Beghetto, R. A. (2018a). Taking beautiful risks in education. Educational Leadership, 76(4), 18–24. If schools puts creativity at the heart of their curriculum intent with teaching for creativity as the mechanism for how that intent is implemented, the impact can be an outstanding learning environment where significant and sustained progress is evident in all aspects of school life.

Despite recognition of the importance of these skills, funding, policy and provision in the UK has not yet caught up. We are commissioning new research on social and emotional skills to develop an understanding of ‘what works’ in building these skills, and we're exploring new approaches to bridge the gap between labour market demand and supply of skills. We are also funding low-cost, high-quality interventions which will support provision in schools. Finally, teachers can use academic subject matter in at least two different ways to support opportunities for creative learning in their classroom (Beghetto Kaufman, & Baer, 2015). The first and most common way is to position subject matter learning as a means to its own end (e.g., we are learning about this technique so that you understand it). Creativity learning can still operate in this formulation by providing students with opportunities to learn about a topic by meeting goals in unique and different ways, which are still in the service of ultimately understanding the academic subject area. However, the added value in doing so also allows opportunities for students to develop their creative confidence and competence in that particularly subject area.