UPCOMING — e42: Cultivating Creative Thinking in a Creativity Collaborative of Schools
Thursday, October 15, 2026
18:30-20:00 GMT (London, UK) • 1:30-3:00pm EST (North America, Eastern)
Creative thinking is increasingly recognized as an essential skill for learning, work, and well-being. Yet, despite its importance, creativity remains difficult to integrate consistently into everyday classroom teaching.
How can schools move beyond isolated creative activities to cultivate creative thinking across the curriculum? And what does it take to create lasting change in how creativity is taught and supported?
Join us for a special session of the Curious Minds Reading Club with Professor Paul Sowden, who will share research from a five-year Creativity Collaborative involving a network of schools in England.
Drawing on the experiences of pupils, teachers, and school leaders, Paul will discuss the development of the Creativity Navigator framework and explore how collaborative, evidence-based approaches can help embed creative thinking throughout the education system.
The presentation will be followed by an open Q&A and discussion. Researchers, educators, students, creative practitioners, and anyone interested in creativity and education are welcome!
Paul Sowden
Paul Sowden is Co-Director of the Centre for Real World Learning and Professor of Psychology, Cognition and Creativity at the University of Winchester, UK, Visiting Professor at the School of Psychology, University of Surrey, UK, and Executive Board member of the International Society for the Study of Creativity and Innovation. He has worked with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on international projects to foster creativity and critical thinking in education and is leading the research of an Arts Council England funded ‘Creativity Collaborative’ that has involved a network of schools engaged in a five-year programme to develop evidence-based approaches to teaching for creativity across the school curriculum. A widely published and cited author of research in cognition, creativity and education he has co-edited the Handbook of Creativity in Schools, which has just been published by Edward Elgar.
Talk Abstract
There is a growing recognition of the need to cultivate creative thinking skills throughout the school curriculum (James et al., 2019). Creative thinking has been consistently identified as one of the top five skills that are key in the workplace (World Economic Forum, 2020, 2023, 2025), an authentically human capability in the context of AI (Runco, 2023), and an enabler of wellbeing (Acar, et al., 2021). Nevertheless, concerns persist regarding the education system's ability to nurture creativity (Berliner, 2011; Kyritsi & Davis, 2021), with its incorporation into formal education remaining sporadic (Cropley, 2010; Patston et al., 2021). Moreover, some educators are reluctant to implement creativity-focused teaching methods, perceiving them as lacking structure, rigor, or as disruptive to curriculum progression (Bullard & Bahar, 2023; Davies et al., 2018). We argue that to drive change that effectively and consistently supports the development of creative thinking across the school curriculum, will require an approach that systemically addresses creativity in education at multiple levels. In accordance with this view, the Durham Commission on Creativity and Education (2019) proposed that a series of Creativity Collaboratives should be created “in which schools collaborate in establishing and sustaining the conditions required for nurturing creativity in the classroom, across the curriculum”. In the present talk I will focus on some of the work and research of the University of Winchester Academy Trust (UWINAT) Creativity Collaborative including our multi-level approach to school wide change and the development of our co-produced Creativity Navigator framework (Sowden et al., 2025) of teaching for creativity and the impacts of teaching for creativity from the perspectives of pupils, teachers, school leaders and the curriculum.