Transforming Education to Close the Creativity Gap

“Education should equip young people to shape an uncertain future so they can live more successful lives, on their own terms and together. They need the confidence and the capabilities to make their world together, in the face of tightening constraints on resources, rising aspirations, exploding opportunities for collaboration and pervasive institutional upheaval. They need an education that prepares them to be collaborative agents of change rather than atomised victims of change, to respond to frustration with creativity and innovation.”

—Leadbeater, C., Learning to Make a Difference: School as a Creative Community (2014)

The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacturing, and Commerce (RSA) proposes that we live in an unprecedented time of rapid social, political, and technological change, with increased access to the tools and networks that generate potential for many more people to realize their ideas and aspirations. This is our “Power to Create” approach. And yet, much of this creative opportunity is untapped, leading to a “creativity gap” where inequalities of wealth and skills and differing levels of confidence mean not all can access the resources required.

The stakes are high when it comes to tapping into this potential, as we face immense and complex global challenges that require innovative and collaborative solutions. At the RSA, we believe that public, professional, and political attitudes toward creativity need to be rethought in order to prioritize the development of creative capacities in schools and educational institutions. This is both an end in itself and an economic and social imperative if young people are to thrive and flourish in the 21st century.

As such, when approached by the Roosevelt Institute to identify, through an educational lens, the trends and challenges that will affect our economy in the next 25 years, we saw an opportunity to collaborate with a like-minded organization on exploring the issue of closing the creativity gap. In contributing to the Roosevelt’s Next American Economy project, we were given the space to reflect on more long-term considerations of redesign and reform—something from which the education sector itself could benefit.

Our thought brief examines how school systems could be designed to maximize students’ creative capacities such that learning is geared more clearly toward equipping students to meet the demand for creativity. It presents the trends, challenges, and potential solutions to the problems faced by our current education system in this regard, arguing that there is an increasingly strong economic rationale for schools to prioritize fostering creative capacities to ensure a future creative workforce. We conclude by outlining 12 design principles with related case studies, intended for use by school leaders, teachers, and systems to inform policy ideas within their particular context.

Having avoided prescriptive policy recommendations, we aim to stimulate conversation and debate around our 12 principles on creative learners, creative educators, and creative institutions from which a vision of school systems that would best equip young people for the 21st century can be realized.