Sir Michael Bichard on unlocking children's potential
An excerpt from his NEEC 2010 keynote speech …

As you all know, education is not just about the basic skills; it’s about the whole being; it’s about socialising and civilising; it’s about enabling people of all ages to realise their personal potential. The basic skills and the teaching of core knowledge are essential; but education must also be about helping children to appreciate how others have gloriously applied these basics. It’s about helping them to develop their own creativity because all human beings need to have a creative output to feel fulfilled. As David Puttnam often says, if we don’t develop the creative muscle at school, when do we? Or put another way, as Ken Robinson has, ‘If we don’t grow into creativity we grow out of it”. Sadly, too often our education system does educate people out of their creativity and that is partly because the arts – by which I mean, art, music, dance and drama – are too often still at the bottom of the list; the ‘nice to have’, the ‘add-ons’ to our system rather than central components of a rounded education. And that’s one of the reasons why some talented children spend the day in sighing and dismay. But, you know, it doesn’t have to be like that

I have been involved in two brilliant initiatives recently that illustrate that so well.  One is called Artis and the other Film Club.  

Artis is a company which I helped set up to provide, on contract, performing arts teaching in schools. I should, of course, say that I have never had any financial interest in the company. When we set it up:

•	We thought you could teach dance, drama and music in a single lesson - and you can - using properly trained performing artists.
•	We thought, via performing arts, we could help pupils to be more confident, to improve their communication skills and help them work better in teams – and you can.
•	We thought you might be able to re-engage children in education who had either ‘opted out’ or felt excluded for whatever reason – and you can.
•	We thought that children would learn best when they were having an enjoyable experience that stretches the boundaries of their minds – and they do.
•	And finally, we thought that you could create a programme of work which related children’s imaginative thinking directly to classroom thinking – and, as the 35,000 who receive lessons from Artis demonstrate, you can, with teachers and head teachers who were initially sceptical realising that the arts can provide a gateway to so much else.

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To access the complete speech, please click here.

To read about the impact of the speech in Graeme Paton’s Telegraph article "Pupils left bored by 'dour' schools" please click here.