Developing a Culture of Teaching for Creativity: Seven Imperatives from School Leaders and Teachers in a Creativity Collaborative of Schools

The cultivation of creativity in schools is becoming a global imperative, yet embedding teaching for creativity (TfC) in everyday practice remains challenging. We report findings from a ‘Creativity Collaborative’ of primary schools that developed TfC through a multi-component ecosystem including the context, leadership, professional learning, knowledge, agency and pedagogies for creativity, underpinned by a co-produced ‘Creativity Navigator’ framework of TfC. Drawing on qualitative interviews with headteachers and teachers, two studies explore how ecosystem components interact to support cultural change. Findings from school leaders highlight the importance of values-led leadership, distributed agency for change, strategic coherence and sustained implementation. Teacher data show shifts in conceptions of creativity towards understanding creativity as a teachable, cross-curricular and systematic process, enabled through structured autonomy, purposeful task-design and shared language. We synthesise our findings into seven imperatives for developing a culture of TfC in schools, offering practical and theoretical insights for leaders, teachers and researchers.