A plan to Enable the Creative Potential of Every Child and Young Person.
An Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, T.D., together with the Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Ms. Josepha Madigan, T.D., the Minister for Education and Skills, Mr. Richard Bruton T.D., and Minister for Finance and Public Expenditure and Reform Paschal Donohoe T.D., have today (7th December) launched Creative Ireland’s comprehensive Creative Youth plan.
Creative Youth, which was launched in St Laurence O’Toole’s Girls National School, Seville Place, sets out measures to deliver on one of the key goals of the extensive Creative Ireland Programme, to ensure that every child in Ireland has practical access to tuition, experience and participation in music, drama, art and coding by 2022. At this plan’s core is a firm belief that creativity and culture should be at the heart of education for all our young people. While there is a very broad range of cultural activities currently available to children and young people, the plan aims to build on what already exists as well as simultaneously develop new projects and initiatives.
Creative Youth’s four long-term strategic objectives:
- Supporting collaboration between formal and non-formal approaches to creativity in education;
- Extending the range of creative activities for our young people;
- Embedding the creative process by developing programmes that will enable teachers to help young people learn and apply creative skills and capacities;
- Continuing Professional Development (CPD) for teachers working in Early Years, Primary and Post Primary Schools.
Creative Youth’s first implementation stage
The first implementation stage of this five-year plan involves a number of important actions for 2018-2019. These include piloting Scoileanna Ildánaca/Creative Schools, an initiative that brings artists into the classroom; piloting a Creative Clusters Schools Scheme to generate creative cultural and artistic projects; developing creativity programmes for young people in disadvantaged communities; developing an Early Years CPD project and mainstreaming existing primary schools’ and post-primary schools’ CPD projects too.
The plan also aims to introduce increased opportunities for students to learn coding and computational thinking; to expand opportunities to participate in drama/theatre outside of school and to introduce a strategy that develops and extends choral singing. Last year’s hugely popular Cruinniú na Cásca will be redesigned and developed as Cruinniú – a national creativity day for children and young people in consultation with the Local Authorities. While Local Creative Youth Partnerships will be established on a pilot basis and additional elements of the Arts in Education Charter will also be supported.
To find out more about Creative Youth, read the plan in full here (plan updated as of March 2018)
Read the full press release here.
