This paper disseminates some of the findings from the EsméeFairbairn funded three-year project investigating The Understanding and Implementation of State Guidance and Policy on Creativity by intending and recently qualified teachers’.

The aim of the project is to investigate the understanding and implementation of state guidance and policy on creativity by intending and recently qualified teachers and to make recommendations for the improvement of creative teaching. The main research questions are:

1.     What do trainee, newly, and recently qualified teachers understand by the (English) national policy and guidelines on creativity?

2.     Does this understanding and perception change over time, and if so in what ways?

3.     How do trainee, newly and recently qualified teachers enact creative practices in the classroom?

4.     What are the institutional (schools and training providers) conditions necessary to ensure trainee, newly and recently qualified teachers can be creative in their classroom teaching?

5.     What steps do schools and training colleges need to take to ensure creative practices are sustained?

In this presentation we explore some of the more striking findings emerging from the effects of a turbulent period in English government's education policy, and in particular the evidential omission of guidance and policy for creativity in the classroom. We consider evidence of the influence of former government policy, the effects of creative practices on concepts of professional identity, and compare this with personal constructions of creativity, and its impact in the classroom. All of this is contextualised by the local school attitudes and conditions within which these new teachers practice.

In looking at the confidence and attitudes of these teachers towards creativity this research is valuable as it charts a shift in practice over the past three years since the project began. We found that the new teachers were increasingly focused on day-to-day requirements of their school and external inspecting bodies, determined mainly by their local context, and distancing themselves from central government policy. We consider the possibility that this has been brought about by the coalition government’s public disdain for the previous administration’s resources and structures, and the withdrawal or destruction of previously widely available resources, and with them the values that underpinned creative practices. This inward-facing tendency may be producing a new kind of localism, albeit fragmented, that is emerging in the face of the increasingly centralised control of education.

These research findings are further contextualised by comparing the changing policies of creativity in England with those of Scotland, the USA, S. Korea and Finland. In each of these latter cases we found that creativity is held in much higher regard at state level, albeit in the service of the economy in some instances.

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