A couple of years ago, when @TeacherToolkit director Ross McGill was looking for a fresh face to blow the roof off the TeachMeet London event he was organising at his then school, Quintin Kynaston School, I proposed an old colleague of mine.

And I told my friend that her keynote talk would need to be good, not least because QK’s stage would surely have once hosted its alma mater, Camden’s finest and self-declared waster, Suggs, speaking about his journey of creative self-expression. 

We had reconnected after I’d seen her give an impassioned talk about her phonics work, having not seen each other since working together on the Microsoft stand at ed-tech trade show Bett in the mid-1990s. So imagine my surprise when she took to that north London stage to say, boldly, that she had decided not to give the talk she had meticulously planned, but to “aim for epic failure” and say what she really wanted to say.

She wanted to thank the handful of teachers who had literally saved, and then made, her life.

She told how she had had half a dozen siblings, all with different fathers; how she had been raped and prostituted in her early teens; literally blagged her way into college; and then ended up on The Apprentice, only to be fired by Sir Alan in the first episode.

The rest is history. The film we made of that talk went viral and the teacher in question, Jaz Ampaw-Farr, has given one of the most popular UK TEDx talks on record, has a multi-book deal and is one of the most in-demand education and corporate speakers for her story of honesty, vulnerability and determination. What some might call 21st century skills.

So how sad to see our schools minister, Nick Gibb, failing live on ITV’s Good Morning Britain yesterday morning. But Mr Gibb, who was launching the new times-table tests, didn’t fail having tried, but having refused to try at all. He refused to give an answer to the simplest question: “What’s 9x8?”

When challenged by the flabbergasted presenters, he simply admitted to not being prepared to be seen to get it wrong. They soon pointed out the irony between this and the high-stakes testing that our children are subjected to, and which drive nearly every conversation between schools and parents.

Gibb went on to say that he felt it unreasonable to ask him to do it live on TV, as no eight-year-old would be expected to do that.

Which took me back to a live broadcast from Parklands Primary in Leeds one morning on BBC Breakfast last year, when a six-year-old boy, Tyler, not only answered times-table questions on demand, but recited the three-times-table faster than a Tesla Roadster heading for Mars.

An outstanding education

Like all good schools, Tyler’s school (recently rated outstanding by Ofsted, and a 2017 Tes Schools Awards winner) appreciates the value of a good educational foundation: numeracy, literacy and behaviour.

But Parklands, which is in one of the most challenged settings in the UK, under its leader Chris Dyson, also has a focus on what many call critical skills, such as resilience, creativity, collaboration and empathy - skills seen as key to ensuring our children not only survive, but thrive in the impending Fourth Industrial Revolution.

No prizes for guessing who said that “creativity is now as important as literacy”, which causes much consternation in various EduTwitter echo chambers, particularly among the short-sighted who think it devalues literacy. As if.

How timely, then, for Bill Gates to announce yesterday that a UK schoolteacher had been named as one of 10 shortlisted for the Global Teacher Prize.

She, too, works in one of the most challenged settings amid challenges of gangs and poverty in north-west London, and has completely redesigned the curriculum to make it accessible for its young people.

The secret of her success? Her subject of choice? Andria Zafirakou is an art and textiles teacher at Alperton Community School, and says that “they are powerful tools to help students unlock their language barriers”.

No doubt she would agree with marketing guru Seth Godin when he said: “Art is what we call it when what we do might connect us.”

Nick Corston is co-founder of Steam Co

Nick Corston is curating #Artconnects - a “festival of creative schools, work and lives” - in King’s Cross, 24 Feb, in partnership with many organisations including Tes.

The event will:

• Help parents understand the skills their kids will need to thrive against the robots and artificial intelligence.
• Share ideas and CPD for teachers on how to teach creativity and to teach creatively.
• Shine a light on the UK’s world-class creatives and creative industries as career pathways for our children.

Friday evening sees a screening, in conjunction with the UCL Institute of Education, at the British Library of the award-winning Creative Education film Most Likely to Succeed, featuring Sir Ken Robinson, Salman Khan and IBM’s Big Blue.

Saturday will feature a day of short talks, workshops and performances, including Lord Andrew Adonis on community collaboration; Mathew Taylor, CEO of The RSA, on the power to create; and Mark Earls (“Britain’s Malcolm Gladwell on Speed” - The Guardian) on his co-created, crowdfunded book, Creative Super Powers.  

The Tes “Creative schools debate” will be chaired be Tes editor Ann Mroz and will feature Geoff Barton, among others, looking at all aspects of creativity in our education system and whether it is now as important as literacy.

Free tickets are available here