No Boundaries debate: ‘If the arts were in charge of education…’

Over 10 years ago I approached two ministers that were in government, Chris Smith,  who was then Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, and David Blunkett  who was Secretary of State for Education, and said we absolutely have to bring these two departments together to discuss creativity in schools, not just arts education but creativity wholesale, that we're not really giving our children an  opportunity not just to have an academic ladder but to have a creative ladder and unless we do that we're squandering the talent of young people, squandering the opportunity to use the creativity of all subjects and we aren't using the Arts as an ingredient in creativity i.e. not just arts education but the role of Arts in helping unlock subjects of all kinds, from geography through to political science. Out of that came an agreement to form a committee, which I helped form – I asked Ken Robinson if he would chair it – and we created a report called "All our futures" which really was a radical look at how education from nursery straight through to tertiary could use the arts and creativity in a very, very specific, fundamental way changing the way that schools thought and operated.