Sir Ken's Vision

Monday night was an extraordinary evening where, among many others, I was fortunate to hear Sir Ken Robinson talk about creativity in education, immediately after receiving the Benjamin Franklin Medal at the RSA. Sir Ken is a perfect and wonderful recipient of this honour, one that the RSA gives with great thought and consideration.

Sir Ken spoke, as always, with enormous humour and charm, describing amusing details from his personal life, including his second wedding to his wife at the Elvis Chapel in Las Vegas. The talk will be available to view on the new RSA Vision format on their website shortly, but in the meantime you can listen online by clicking here.

Having had a few days to digest the talk and the audience discussion following it, I think the most important message for me, was that there are many different ways of engaging and stimulating children and young people to develop. The first example that Sir Ken highlighted was the work of Dance United and their programmes with young offenders. The second example was The University Park Campus School in Massachusetts, US.

There are so many projects which depend on individual's vision, energies and leadership. All diverse and inspiring and making a difference to young people all over the world. While we often try to design formats and models so that they can be duplicated easily and widely, Sir Ken's talk re-enforced very strongly my belief that it is often the act of creating a new type of project, developing new ideas collaboratively with others, which leads to their success. And lets teachers some space and trust to be innovative....

The RSA medal is a fantastic achievement... well done Sir Ken!

And thank you also to all the lovely people I met with through Monday and into the evening - it was enriching and fantastic FUN! (Laura, Laura, Katherine, Dan, Andy, Libby, Graeme, Ian, Ruth, Elly, Michael, Jerry, Andy, Matthew, Philip, Ian, Jonathan, Tony.....)