Working in partnership opens up schools, enabling them to become more risk taking environments. By bringing people from different worlds to work together, each with their own language and set of assumptions, new and exciting ways of working emerge.

       
Effectively planned and resourced, partnerships between schools and external individuals and organisations can

• support a wide range of learning opportunities for pupils
• impact on the curriculum
• make a valuable contribution to staff development
• strengthen the school’s relationship with its community

• open the school to different perspectives

CAPE UK Partnerships

Central to CAPE partnerships is the commissioning of an external creative professional to work, long-term, alongside a school co-ordinator in the development of a strategy for change and innovation within the school.

Each partnership will evolve differently within its own particular context as each school has different aims in setting up a CAPE partnership. Some see the involvement of the local community and local primary schools as the highest priority, some focus on the needs of disaffected older pupils and are keen to establish or develop links with local businesses and the youth service, others want to influence the teaching and learning programmes in specific departments.

Defining Partnership

Partnership is not only about working with other people, it is about agreeing joint aims then planning, managing and reviewing activity together. It also involves a sharing of decision-making power. The purpose of CAPE partnerships is to place that decision making at the heart of a school, in the management and delivery of all teaching and learning. CAPE has demonstrated that this can happen, however it has not always happened.

What makes successful partnerships?

Most of the partnerships that have produced successful programmes have gone through similar stages of development.

• A formal setting up phase
• An action phase leading to practical outcomes
• A consolidation phase building long term working relationships
• A review phase seeking to extend partnerships and take advantage of new opportunities

Long term partnerships move back and forth between the phases, with review leading to further action or consolidation, or unexpected outcomes requiring a formal resetting of the next practical phase.

In forming partnerships it was essential to get the core conditions right.

• the support and enthusiasm of staff
• the support of the school Senior Management Team
• the support and efforts of the school-based coordinator
• effective communication between all partners

A number of negative factors have inhibited some partnerships.

• the bureaucracy or overload of paperwork associated with the initiative
• a lack of time for planning
• a sense of ‘initiative overload’ within schools
• school limitations due to timetable, examinations, relocations, inspections, etc.

It is not always easy at the outset to know if the core conditions are going to be in place in any one school. The best indicator is a school having a history of running effective development programmes, especially those with external partners. CAPE included a wide range of schools, some with a history of innovation and some without. Some of those without such a history have formed successful partnerships.

What has become clear is that partnerships in which the partners had a great deal of autonomy to manage their own affairs are the most successful, and this works best where there is already experience of managing externally funded projects. To this must be added other highly significant factors. They included:

• The skill and experience of the coordinator and the breadth of their ‘vision’
• The coordinator’s skills as an ‘animator’, gaining commitment from other members of staff
• The presence of a group of staff willing to commit to the programme
• The skills and understanding of the ‘lead creative professional’

Other partnerships needed more support and one of the lessons learnt is that we have to recognise this need earlier.

The success of a partnership has to be judged by its impact on teaching and learning for both teachers and young people . NFER (National Foundation for Education Research) evaluation of previous CAPE partnerships identified four further conditions that were deemed to be conducive to this:

• the presence of a high level of trust between pupils, teachers and creative professionals
• the presence of professional mobility - the sharing, or changing of roles between the teachers and the creative professionals
• attaching a high value to learning outcomes – a focus on experiencing challenging activities rather than control
• engaging pupils as active participants in the learning process

Check-list of issues to consider when establishing a creative partnership

• Make sure that your partner has the right approach, skills and experience for what you are intending to do. Successfully matching the partner to the project is essential.
• Agree a common set of aims and objectives and spend time in joint planning of what you want to do. If you shape the content together, you are more likely to succeed.
• Put children and young people at the centre of the process. Try to find ways in which they can be actively involved in leading or developing the project.
• Be clear about roles and responsibilities. Successful partnerships draw on the strengths of all concerned, but also define what is expected of each partner.
• Be clear about what your partners can and can’t do. For example, creative practitioners may be good at transferring skills, but may be less confident as facilitators of discussion.
• Don’t assume that your partner will automatically understand the constraints you are working under, for example other pressures on your time, resource issues, etc.

“the best CAPE artists are those who come in with their art and, after a period of time working in school, are not quite sure whether they are really still artists or teachers. Their role changes through the process of doing it and we are quite happy for that to happen. They don’t lose any of the intensity of their art, but they gain from the experience of communicating creativity to the teachers and the kids.” – Co-ordinator.