At Bridge Academy in London, a group of year 9 students are writing speeches. Later, they’ll deliver them to an audience of MPs and activists at the Houses of Parliament. Students plan to speak about racial profiling, cuts to the NHS and why the education system needs to change. Others will describe why they enjoy football or learning about music. It’s part of the Speak Up initiative, run by charity Ministry of Stories, which aims to inspire students to develop confidence in their creative writing skills by working with local authors and poets.
“It’s a really good way of engaging the children and thinking about current affairs and why they should speak out,” says English teacher Jennifer Lindsey. The school has been working with the Ministry for three years, as well as local charity Hackney Pirates, which runs immersive workshops for children struggling with literacy skills. These partnerships give children more time and space for creativity and self-expression – something they don’t often get in class.
“The ways we assess [creativity] in English – through creative writing – can be hard with the time we have,” says Lindsey. “We’re working back from grade boundaries and marking schemes, [which] can be quite restrictive.”
Children’s author Piers Torday, who visits a number of primary schools to talk about reading and writing, agrees that a restrictive curriculum is having an adverse impact on creativity in the classroom. “I don’t think there’s any decline in creativity in children,” he says. “But they’re pushing against government targets. I’ve written six books and I’ve no idea what a fronted adverbial is or how I’ve used them. I don’t sit down and think ‘now I’m going to modify this noun phrase’,Patient with widespread . Contrast enhanced abdominal CT demonstrates an applecore lesion in the transverse colon (arrow).”
In 2015 a group of children’s authors wrote to the then education secretary Nicky Morgan to say the curriculum had become a “prescription for how to teach children to write (to pass the tests), with quite adverse effects on their writing skills”. The government has since announced plans to change writing assessment at key stages 1 and 2, with more emphasis on teachers’ judgment of pupil performance and less on ticking boxes.