The CREATIVE NETWORK

Hi,

Wishing you a very merry Christmas and a highly creative New Year from everyone at Thomas Tallis School.

Hi everyone,
If all goes to plan I'll be posting pics of recent GCSE Photography work and some of our GCSE mock exam art soon.
Yours
Gary
Eltham Hill Art Department

If you haven't yet registered for this year's national Shine Week, now's as good a time to do it as any. Last year, Tallis was visited by Gordon Brown and Ed Balls and we enjoyed a massive variety of activities designed to showcase the talents of our students. It was great fun and a good excuse to be a little anarchic. On one day we had two members of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra wandering around school, in and out of lessons, playing very loud brass instruments without any warning. We're looking forward to a lot more of that kind of thing this year.

I received an email today from Rebecca Branch at A New Direction (the new name for the London office of Creative Partnerships). I had asked her if there would be any further opportunities for our partner schools to get involved in the national C P programme. This is her response:

There will be another round of applications for the Enquiry School
programme beginning around Easter next year for a September 09 start.
We have to expand to more boroughs so are currently in the process of
working out how many places there will be for Greenwich schools but I
can certainly let you know and it'd be great if you could flag it with
them as appropriate.

The other thing that we are hoping to develop in the new year (this is
as A New Direction outside the CP programme) is a kind of 'membership'
scheme - this isn't quite the right word, but the kind of thing we're
looking at is providing a mechanism to support and encourage schools to
share practice, work together on a shared/ common interest area of
research, come to a couple of events etc - do you get the idea? I've
got to work it up a bit yet...again, we can certainly feed these schools
into that.

Hope this helps.

With best wishes

Rebecca

This is encouraging news and means that some, if not all, of our partner schools will have a chance of becoming involved in Creative Partnerships. As I made clear at the meeting recently, I am more than happy to support any of you who wish to make an application and I will continue to lobby C P to offer you the chance. If you do want to get involved, it might be a good idea to start thinking about this and finding out more about Enquiry Schools as soon as possible. Let me know if you need me to help you find the necessary information. In addition, I think we should all register our interest in the "membership" scheme Rebecca mentions. Sounds like it will also be a way for us to share best practice and attarct useful interest in our shared commitment to creative learning.

Thanks to everyone who attended the Creative Community meeting today at Devonport House. It was really refreshing to work alongside colleagues from different schools who are all interested in promoting creativity and keen to share ideas about how best to do this. I will make sure that a contingent from Tallis visits you in your schools again soon to consult with you in a bit more detail about your aspirations for this year. Please feel free to use this blog as a place to share anxieties, links to online resources, requests for help, information and anything else you think is appropriate so that we can strengthen our creative community. I would like to organise another meeting shortly after Christmas so ideas about which days might be good on a postcard please.

Check back soon to see the final version of Eelyn's film of the day.

Hi. Great to meet you all at the Creative Communities Day. Here's a good link for the MPC on YouTube. This guy has some great ideas once you get past his haircut speech, also he seems to be quite prolific. Cheers Nick

In a recent lecture at the Royal Society of Arts, Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson asks how do we make change happen in education and how do we make it last? He argues that unless we address underlying cultures and attitudes, change is likely to be superficial and temporary, but to do this we need to engage with organisational dynamics and with the aspirations and motivations of the individuals who work within those organisations.

Hi Everyone

Welcome to the new blog for the Thomas Tallis Creative Network. This is a place where partners in the Thomas Tallis School specialist arts college community can share ideas, seek guidance and promote creative solutions. Hopefully, it will enable us to stay in touch and benefit from each other's innovations.