This month Adam Power-Annand, CEO of Speech Bubbles – a drama programme for children aged 5-7 – offers a window into the organisation’s recent research into creativity. While creativity is often viewed as intangible feature of arts education, Speech Bubbles’ work highlights how it can be formally recognised. In his blog, Power-Annand delves into why this matters for arts organisations looking to better understand the impact of their work and what more they can do to nurture young people’s creativity.
Read on to discover more about Speech Bubbles’ approach and how it could be applied in different arts settings.
Image: Adam Douglas-Bagley
Noticing what is already there: creativity, participation and the role of evaluation
Over the last two years Speech Bubbles has explored how creativity can be noticed, understood and evidenced in our drama-led work with children. Our research starts from a simple premise: children are already creative. Through storytelling, role play, improvisation and shared imagination, they show curiosity, originality, collaboration, persistence and reflection in ways adults can learn to recognise.
This framing helps us ask better questions. We do not need to prove whether a child is creative. We can be curious about the conditions that help creativity become visible, what adults can do intentionally to make space for it, and how evaluation can capture creative growth without narrowing it.
This also matters in policy. Recent curriculum thinking in England gives renewed attention to arts subjects, enrichment, oracy and critical thinking, while the Creative Industries Sector Plan identifies creativity and innovation as vital to the UK’s future workforce.
If creativity helps people adapt, collaborate and contribute throughout life, children need regular opportunities to practise and recognise it. Participatory arts organisations must therefore be ready to describe what creative learning looks like, how it is supported and how it can be evidenced without being flattened.
Starting from a strengths-based perspective
Children do not arrive at school waiting to become creative. In drama, they already tell stories, invent games, imagine worlds, explore possibilities and combine ideas in surprising ways. Musicians, dancers, visual artists and makers etc. will recognise equivalent evidence in their own forms.
This perspective shifts our focus to the cultures, relationships and environments in which creativity can flourish.
Challenge of measuring creativity
Creativity is variously associated with subjective notions of artistic talent, as well as imagination, problem-solving, curiosity, innovation and self-expression.
For arts organisations, creativity is relational and contextual: it emerges through interactions, opportunities, materials and environments, so it resists a simple score.
Yet if we avoid the subject and only evaluate associated outcomes such as confidence, wellbeing, communication, attendance or attainment, we risk implying that creativity itself is less important.
Looking for creativity in practice
Across participatory arts, creativity is visible when a participant takes an idea in an unexpected direction, a group solves a challenge together, or someone changes course when an approach does not feel right.
The common thread is creativity made visible through what people do.
Focusing on creative habits
The Creative Habits Framework developed by Bill Lucas, Guy Claxton and Ellen Spencer offers a practical model for deciding what adults might observe in children and how they could respond:
• Imaginative: Are they playing with possibilities and making new connections?
• Inquisitive: Are they wondering, questioning and exploring?
• Persistent: Are they staying with challenge and trying again?
• Collaborative: Are they listening, sharing and building ideas together?
• Disciplined: Are they reflecting, shaping and improving their work?
Originally known as the Creative Habits of the Mind Framework – the authors dropped ‘…of the Mind’ as a positive response to the growing body of evidence that cognition is “embodied,” meaning that our physical actions directly influence the way we think.
Noticing and nurturing, rather than judging
We approached this work not to judge creativity, but to notice and nurture it.
While research and evaluation often frames participants as lacking something a programme supplies, a strengths-based approach assumes creativity is already present. Evaluation can then help adults notice what is emerging and consider how their choices, structures and invitations allow it to grow.
A practitioner might notice someone sharing ideas more confidently; a teacher might see a young person approaching problems more imaginatively; participants might describe feeling freer to experiment or express themselves.
These observations show not whether creativity exists, but how it is being exercised and supported.
An invitation to observe creativity
We offer our learning not as a fixed model, but as a starting point for other arts disciplines considering how creativity becomes visible in their practice.
Speech Bubbles combined three forms of evidence, each revealing something different:
• Class teachers’ Creative Habits ratings showed patterns over time in everyday schooling, beyond Speech Bubbles sessions.
• Practitioner observations and reflections showed what creativity looked like in sessions and which facilitation choices supported it.
• Children’s voices and stories of change showed how the experience felt to them and what they believed had changed.
Other disciplines will notice creativity through different actions, materials and relationships. They can identify those signs, bring them together with participant voice and practitioner reflection, and use the evidence to improve practice—not to produce a definitive score.
A better question
The challenge is not to measure creativity perfectly; that is neither possible nor desirable. A more useful question is:
What tells us that people are exercising their creativity, and what are we doing intentionally to help it flourish?
Starting there makes evaluation less about proving value and more about learning from practice, recognising what participants already bring and strengthening the conditions in which creativity grows.
For arts organisations on this journey, perhaps it is worth checking in: have we noticed the ideas, experiences and ways of making that participants already bring, and have we reflected together on the conditions that help their creativity become visible and flourish?
Adam Power-Annand, Speech Bubbles CEO
Read the full evaluation report on Speech Bubbles’ website.
This evaluation was funded by an Arts Council England project grant that included delivery of Speech Bubbles in two Newham Primary Schools.
Visit our website: www.speechbubbles.org.uk
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