The Lab Programme

A major feature of Creativity for Life was the inclusion of a programme of 14 Lab Days, or creative professional development days. This enabled the school/artist partnerships in each county to meet up relatively frequently – about twice a term during the project – to work on aspects of the project and receive various kinds of input from visiting speakers or session leaders. In both counties, the first Lab Day was reserved for teachers only. This was in fact part of the recruitment process, allowing heads and other teachers to find out more about the project in which they had already expressed an interest. In some cases, schools dropped out after this first Lab, because they realised that they couldn’t take on the project and the commitment it required. These first Labs also made it clear to CfL staff that many teachers were really starved of creative input and, in many cases, very distanced from themselves as creative people. The second pair of Lab Days were the first occasions that the artists were present, and in the majority of cases were the first opportunity for the school staff to meet their partner artists. This was not ideal: we would have preferred the artists and schools to have met before this, but time constraints were very tight. Happily, most of the school/artists partnerships got off to a very good start, which continued throughout the project. Future Labs did give the chance for any school/artist relationship issues to be discussed with CfL staff in private moments during the schedule.

Content

The Lab Days included a huge range of activities, such as:
• Evaluation and monitoring exercises
• Introducing Action Research ideas and methods
• Sharing ideas and updates of projects in progress
• Speakers giving a new insight on specific aspects of creativity, or case
studies of creative projects
• Visits to outside organisations including the local museums and the
Henry Moore Foundation
• Creative workshops such as a visit to a Gamelan at Burnt Mill School,
a session on museum collections, or a session on The Ideal School
• Planning time for teachers and artists.
Normally beginning at 9 a.m. with coffee and tea, the Labs ran until 4 p.m. and were usually absolutely exhausting for everyone concerned. CRO Ltd was very keen to make these ‘away-days’ from the normal round of work, and a decent lunch and nice cake in comfortable surroundings were imperative. This freed artists and teachers to take the time for themselves, away from school. The Labs also created the opportunity to make links with partner organisations. The local museums have been mentioned. We also made links with the Harlow Education Forum, whose venue (the Harlow Education Centre) we used for most of the Essex Labs. In Hertfordshire we worked with Building Schools for the Future. Guests were invited to observe and take part in all or part of the Lab Days, including Arts Council England personnel, local arts officers, steering group members and others.

Joint Labs

Two of the Lab Days were intended to be joint events – Essex and Hertfordshire personnel coming together for a whole day. In fact only one happened as planned: the first Joint Lab being Lab 3 for Essex and Lab 4 for Hertfordshire. It was a great success, with around 90 people exchanging project ideas and information in a ‘speed dating’ event. There was also the opportunity for the each cohort of artists and teachers to get  together separately to discuss issues of significance to each group of professionals. The second Joint Lab was merged with the final website launch. This was partly due to the problems of dates and planning in the Spring term of 2008. There was a late start to the term (most schools starting on 7th January) and an early finish, with the Herts term ending a week earlier than the Essex term.
However, there was a joint Steering Group meeting in September 07, which kept the links between the two counties strong.

Lessons Learnt

We learned a number of important lessons from the Lab programme.
• Speakers and guests: Although we had many positive experiences of speakers and guest leaders, we underestimated how much we could use the resource of the artists and teachers themselves in running their own sessions. Consequently, the Lab budget was increasingly underspent as we began gradually to book fewer expensive speakers and to create more self-run sessions, which were welcomed by the artists and teachers. (Any underspend was invested in other parts of the project.)
• Planning time: CRO Ltd did not want to include planning time in the Labs, and resisted it quite strongly. We felt that the Labs were for inspirational and creative work, and not for sitting down with diaries and planning schedules of work. Planning was supposed to be included in the time an artist spent in the school. The second Lab looked at planning techniques but did not leave enough time for artists and teachers to work together on issues such as diary dates. However, increasing pressure from the teachers for time during the Lab Day to sit down with their artist and have some
uninterrupted time led to the creation of the ‘Happy Hour’, often at the end of the day. Sometimes the artist and teacher(s) would go back to the school for this, but often it was a question of having an extra long tea break at the end of the afternoon.
• Progression: It was necessary to ensure progression from one Lab to the next. For example, a short presentation by a Museum Education officer was followed by a workshop on using museum collections, followed by a trip to the specific local museum.
Overall, the Lab programme has been a success, and we plan to use the model in future for similar projects. It clearly enabled teachers to grow in confdence and gave artist/teacher partnerships some ‘us time’ to learn from each other and work together.

Download a list of Lab Day events and sessions in Hertfordshire
Download a list of Lab Day events and sessions in Essex