The beauty of the Leading the Arts in Your School course is that it provides an oasis of time and enriching content: necessary circumstance for creative thinking about creative development. In the incredibly busy world of schools, and in my particular case, schools and performing arts, time is gold dust. Facilitated time, to support creative goals, rarer still.
However, I’m pleased to see that this is changing and courses like Leading the Arts are integral in growing the space and time forcreative and cultural learning, as well as its status. Over the time period of the course and the first phase of
Artsmark development in my setting, my role grew organically to become Director of Creative Learning and Partnerships. I remain Director of Drama and a teacher of English too, but as both Leading the Arts and my leadership of Artsmark in school progressed, the course helped me to identify purpose and ambition in my work and enabled me to articulate school and community based ambitions for arts and culture to my senior managers.
Other new arts roles, including
Arts Award co-ordinators and mentors, have been established in school since and these colleagues have also gone on to take the Leading the Arts in Your School course, ensuring quality and a breadth of staff capability and ambition as we grow our arts provision in school and our partnership work with local, regional and national schools and organisations.