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Emma: Welcome to our latest Nesta Talks To, our conversational event series with today's most exciting thinkers on the big topics related to our mission and innovation methods. We are Nesta, the UK's innovation agency for social good. We design, test, and scale solutions to society's biggest problems. Our three missions are to help people live healthy lives, create a sustainable future where the economy works for both people and planet, and give every child a fair start.

My name is Emma McFarland, and I'm the Design Lead in the Fairer Start mission, which aims to narrow the development gap and outcomes gap between young children growing up in poverty and their peers who are not. I work to embed innovation in design practise in the work we do so it's inclusive, innovative, and impactful and involves families in the design and creation of solutions.

Prior to joining Nesta, I worked for over 20 years in the arts and cultural sector, across creative, producing, and innovation roles, in a diverse range of organisations, from the National Gallery and Studio Wayne McGregor to smaller regional dance companies, festivals, and artists working across arts and social justice.

And my work often involved creating and producing work with and for children, families, and vulnerable groups, So I'm incredibly excited to be in conversation here today with Dr. Penny Hay. Penny is a Reader in creative teaching and learning, Senior Lecturer in arts education, and a Research Fellow in the Research Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries at Bath Spa University.

She is also Director of Research for House of Imagination, an arts-based charity devoted to researching imagination and creativity alongside children and young people. Penny has dedicated her professional life to exploring how we can nurture artistic expression and create the educational, family, and community environments in which humans, and children in particular, can realise their full potential, countering social, environmental, and racial injustice in more vulnerable communities.

Her list of achievements in advisory and professional roles is vast, but alongside those, I think it's important to mention Penny's work as an artist and teacher in schools, work which underpins all of her research. In May, Penny's book, Children are Artists Supporting Children's Learning Identity as Artist is published by Routledge, and this draws on Penny's PhD research in this same area.

Before we start, I want to highlight that Nesta and Penny actually go back a long way. 20 years ago, Nesta were one of the first funders of Penny's 5 by 5 by 5 project, which involved five artists, five early years settings, and five cultural centres, working in partnership to support young children in their exploration, communication, and expression of creative ideas. And it's a project which laid the foundations for her PhD and morphed into her House and Imagination initiative today.

But before we dive into our conversation with Penny, some housekeeping. In the first part of this session, Penny and I will be in conversation, but please do join the conversation in the comments box on the right-hand side of your screen and please post your questions for Penny. And in the second half of the session, I'll be putting some of those questions to her. And lastly, closed captions can be accessed via the LinkedIn livestream.

So after that, it feels like quite a long intro, and without further delay, I'd like to welcome Penny to this Nesta Talks To conversation.

Penny: Thank you, Emma.

Emma: Hello, Penny.

Penny: Thank you so much for inviting me.

Emma: So Penny, your CV and achievements are vast. They span teaching, research, and thought leadership across arts, education, creativity, child development, and social justice, to name just a few. So to kick off today for those listening, could you sum up in a few sentences-- and this is going to be a difficult one-- the key themes which unite your work across these areas?

Penny: Yes, sorry, Emma. I was just saying thank you so much for inviting me. Yes, of course, and just to say a big thank you to Nesta as one of the first believers in our work. And you planted the seeds that have grown our amazing charity, now working closely in partnership with our university.

So yes, on a daily basis, I work with students, educators, artists, and creative professionals alongside communities and set up experimental sites of hopefully pedagogical innovation, so spaces of imaginative inquiry, reimagining learning in education, and especially to embed the arts and creativity and imagination in everything we do.

So our purpose at Bath Spa University is to challenge and co-create with our students and staff, to realise how we can flourish and for our own benefit for the wider good. And by doing this, we will think and make the world better.

So everything we do together is about empowering children and young people's imagination to save the planet, especially now in the face of the ecological emergency, and to make the world a better place. So innovation follows imagination, and hopefully it will change the world.

I think the key themes around our work align with Nesta's mission, as you say, and I think the investment in the early years is absolutely vital for our future society-- future societies, plural. I strongly believe that art is a human right and that all schools should be art schools, to borrow a few phrases from Bob and Roberta Smith.

And in fact, in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 31 is about every child having the right to participate freely in cultural life in the arts. So to sum it up, I think arts, the arts art makes visible our human creative potential. I think creativity is in everything, not just the arts. I think we learn in and about and through the arts to imagine possibilities and explore ideas and express our personal, social, and cultural identities.

Art invites us to make sense of the world and to make meaning. So creativity, as I said, is in everything, and it's a way of being in the world. I often say that art is in everything. It isn't just a subject at school. And what art does is manifest that creativity and imagination daily.

And central to our methodology at House of Imagination and at the university is the belief in everybody's human capacity to be creative, to be an artist. So the charity, House of imagination, which was good, 5x5, which you helped grow, we create spaces for young people to imagine and build a better future.

You work alongside artists and educators, cultural creative professionals. We co-create spaces to develop children's imagination and creativity and thinking about how we can prioritise the four Cs. So I'll pause there, and I'll tell you about our signature projects in a minute, which are School Without Walls, co-founded with the Egg theatre, and Forest of Imagination, co-founded with Andrew Grant, who's famous for the Supertrees in Singapore.

Emma: Amazing. I'm going to seek from that. I'm looking forward to hearing more about those and the four Cs. But can you tell us a little bit-- I mean, you've covered so many different areas, and you've already mentioned a few names, but can you tell me a little bit about your biggest influences and inspiration in your work in terms of that crucial role of creativity, not just in terms of art, but in terms of the fulfilment of human potential and the role it can play in children's development, and particularly, with more vulnerable groups?

Penny: Absolutely. So I think our mantra is inviting everyone to have the freedom to follow our fascinations and actually Researching Children, Researching the World, which is our first book together, and that really puts imagination at the heart of learning. And I think I've learnt so much alongside children and people and students, as well as colleagues and peers and educators across the world.

And I think the important thing is the kind of co-design and the co-learning. So in partnership with Bath Spa University, I work alongside students and professionals to co-design a creative reflective pedagogy, using the city or the village or the town, wherever we are across the world, as a campus for learning, as an experimental pedagogical site.

So as I said, School Without Walls, for instance, was co-founded with the Egg Theatre, a Theatre for children and young people in Bath and working alongside us as we co-design the curriculum based on creative inquiry, embedding the arts at the heart, and that's thanks to long-term funding from Paul Hamlyn, but we're thinking about next stages now.

I think children are active citizens, so their voices and their ideas, their agency, are really important. And similarly, Forest of imagination, School Without Walls is in its 12th year now, and we've worked across twelve schools across the local landscape. But Forest of imagination is celebrating its 10th year now, and again, we're learning together. We're creating. We're manifesting that learning community, that community of practise, and that puts imagination at the heart.

And we're inviting the whole community to have a conversation about the importance of nature and creativity, especially our collective imagination in the face of the polycrisis that we're witnessing-- the war, the pandemic, and the climate emergency, as I said.

And I think that what Forest of Imagination does really well is make these processes visible and that we can explore new ways of learning together. If you have a look at our recent film on our website, it is a living classroom. Every classroom should be a work of art, and we elicited the children's ideas how they might be invited in to this kind of imaginative learning space that prioritises social, environmental, racial, disability, justice in everything, very important around social justice.

So in terms of big influences, definitely children. When I was a primary teacher early years, I specialised in early years primary and special needs, worked with many children with English as a second language and refugee families. And my interest was always in marginalised communities, so working with, particularly, school refusers and re-engaging the children through their arts.

And so I would say, what would you like to do? What's your ideas? How do you want to state them? How do you want to share them? And I suppose in that context I was very influenced by the practise in Reggio Emilia in northern Italy, where everything you need to know from children is alongside them, to borrow a quote from Loris Malaguzzi.

And I think that if we allow children to express their ideas and their thoughts and feelings and we make sense of the world together that it's a shared inquiry in the way that-- I'm very influenced by a colleague, a friend, our patron also, Iram Siraj. You may know her work at the University of Oxford. She talks about sustained shared thinking and really respecting the children's ideas, and that's the starting point for the learning framework.

Emma: That speaks beautifully, Penny, and the next question I was going to ask, which is around-- you worked with Sir Ken Robinson, of course, and he advocated for a revolution in our systems of education along the lines you're talking about in the way we run our organisations and structure our wider society so they bring out the best in everyone and fulfil human potential. And of course, he was a fierce advocate for the role of creativity and imagination in helping us to do this.

And you've touched on this already, in the current educational system that we're living in, how do we go about nurturing creativity and imagination when there's this false demarcation between the arts and sciences, the separation of subjects into STEM, STEAM, and various other acronyms. How do we actually go about doing this? What role can artists play? What would you like to see change, I guess, in the education system? What could help that process along?

Penny: In the same way, I've been very lucky in my career to work with amazing people like Dennis Atkinson at Goldsmiths and obviously Anna Craft, who was my PhD supervisor. And Sir Ken, we met, gosh, in 1989, and I worked with him all the way through the '90s. And he really inspired me, and now we're lucky to work with his daughter, Kate Robinson.

Ken was our patron for 20 years with our charity, and we're doing a lot of work in his legacy together. And obviously, teaching for creativity and teaching creatively is so important. And I think that's what I learned from my PhD, that at the core of children's own self-concept of becoming, being an artist, being creative, is children's agency and their interest, their intrinsic motivation.

So you can follow your fascinations and go anywhere. I think I was also influenced by the way that, if I can say it right, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the importance of flow-- it's useful being dyslexic, sometimes-- and the freedom to follow these interests. And also Andrew Brewerton talks about making learning, thinking through making, poesis, creating something out of nothing. We're making learning as we're moving through.

And this is where teaching creatively but also teaching for creativity is really important. And I think that focus on opening up new spaces of possibility, especially civic spaces for learning so that pedagogy becomes public pedagogy. You can see. You manifest that possibility. You have these spaces of imagination, and in our case with Forest of Imagination, reflection in nature.

I think Forest of Imagination also shines a light on the importance of global forests and conservation, but I think, importantly, how we can have a metaphorical-- if I can say it-- a metaphorical framing for an organic education system. Then it's nurtured, and children are-- well, he says "free range" and not the product of a factory model.

I'm doing a plug for Kate's book, but Kate finished Ken's manifesto, Imagine If, and there's a beautiful quote. "The lesson we most need to learn is there's more to life on Earth than human beings, and more to being human than self-interest. Our futures all depend on learning this lesson by heart."

And I think, importantly, reimagining the education system, it is broken in some countries, I think. In England, it needs reimagining, and I think that we can do this together. I think the creativity exchange work with the Arts Council, I think every authority needs creativity collaboratives.

And I think importantly-- probably the most important thing and I'll pause then-- is that I've been hugely influenced by Nora Bateson's work, the daughter of Gregory Bateson, who wrote Steps to an Ecology of Mind. So she said on a call the other day-- I'm hugely excited to be working with her and Alf Coles at University of Bristol-- that to learn like a meadow, to learn like a forest, everything is connected in kind of mutual learning.

Learning is a living system. We can learn how to learn. And we are part of nature. She says it so beautifully. And I think that schools are part of this ecosystem and that we can invite that kind of response to thinking about imagination as our superpower, which is a quote from our wonderful VC, Sue Rigby. And together, we're working on that concept with the students and the local schools, and Bath is a city of imagination. So yeah, I'll pause there.

Emma: That's beautiful plays with words, learning as a meadow, and that's such a fantastic, inspirational, visual metaphor. I feel like I want to make an image which represents that and have it here, I think, and that's just such a wonderful way you've described that holistic system coming together.

And that involves the arts and the cultural community. It involves schools. It involves community organisations. It involves parents. It involves the whole holistic system around a child, doesn't it? And that's what we, in Fairer Start, we're trying to think about increasingly, as the child as the centre of this whole ecosystem and how we can work with that ecosystem to create that positive change. That was a really lovely, lovely way summing that up.

I just wanted to touch on something you just mentioned then, which is teaching for creativity and teaching creatively. And perhaps you could just sum up quickly what you think are the key differences between those two concepts.

Penny: Well, I think you put in the call that my book that came out last year is called Teaching Art Creatively. It's part of Teresa Cremin's series, Teaching Creatively. And of course, I joked with her and said, well, why wouldn't we teach art creatively? But actually, it does need teaching creatively rather than having a kind of packaged prescriptive set of objectives that immediately close down children's ideas. We need to open up the ideas and invite that sense of possibility.

So I always talk to my students about it's about possibilities, not prescriptions, and I think that teaching creatively and teaching for creativity, we're nurturing, then, the children's creative dispositions for learning. So thinking about, going back to your previous point about art and creativity is in everything, there isn't a division between the arts and sciences. We are not in a silo-based, we shouldn't be in a silo-based, delivered, packaged curriculum. We should be inviting connections with everything, like the forest.

And I think that's what my brilliant Co-chair of Trustees, Doug Laughlen, who trained in art and engineering, he talks a lot about arts and hearing and that you can't create something without imagining in all disciplines. So for instance, he said, when I was talking to him the other day, there is influence across all the kind of transdisciplinary contexts, and that beauty and intellect matters in great solutions.

So this is growing this kind of sense of imagination and creativity and innovation in our youngest children. If we invest in the early years, it's much more important, then, that we'll have better opportunities and more aspirations for better lives later, no matter what the child's background or circumstance.

So I think that supporting learning and growing this kind of habit of mind with imagination right at the forefront, we're working together with the Institute of Imagination in London with our university and our charity, in partnership with Vlad Glaveanu at City University in Dublin.

We're really exploring this kind of space of imagination, so thinking about how we can remove these barriers such as silos and mix, as Doug says, mix the art and sciences to make magic. I think it's really important that proves that imagination has real, tangible, investable value.

Emma: Thank you, Penny. I'm going to continue this on now to think more specifically about younger children. So our mission has a particular focus on children from birth to two years, that crucial 1,001 days of life when so much neurological development happens and the interactions, the crucial interactions, between parents and children during this phase.

So obviously, during that period of naught-two, the family and the home environment have far more impacts on children's development than schools and preschool settings. It's all about the family and that community, as well, around the child. So I'd like to find out more about how you think arts, the arts and cultural sector, artists, can support nurturing home learning environments, particularly in more vulnerable families.

Penny: Yes, I know. That's absolutely right at the heart of all the work that you do, Emma, at Nesta, and I think that whole focus on co-creation is so important. So if you think about the home learning environment, you're thinking about the principles underpin the early years from birth-- well, pre-birth, even-- from birth, the first 1,000 hours, first 1,000 days, first 2,000 days.

The first three years are so important, and I think that focus on creative values, creative dispositions, creative environments, and creative relationships, which are the four strands of research in our work with the charity and university, so focusing on how, then, do we nurture a unique and a strong child with capabilities from moment of birth? How do we make sure that it's about holistic development, the whole child, not just their cognitive development but their affective development, to create an enabling environments that are creative?

In Reggio, they talk about the environment as the third teacher so that you're optimising the creative environment for the children, and the adult is, then, a companion alongside the children. So these relationships then empower the children to take risks in their learning and play and learn how to learn.

At our University we've framed our PGCE, actually, so some of the students are specialising in very young children and right through to-- well, I teach on the early years primary, and my guest lecture on the secondary course as well. But all of our works around the 4 Cs.

So keeping those in your kind of back pocket, you can pull them out when you need them. You've got that as a framework that creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, care. And I would go beyond that, compassion, curiosity, climate, hundreds of Cs. And that's where teaching creatively is really important, but in the home, that sense of exploration and inquiry and wonder and playing alongside the child.

We had an amazing project with Bristol local authority working in three areas of socioeconomic deprivation, and we were thinking about how we could then bring those parents and practitioners on our learning journey with us, so building their capacities and capabilities and taking pressure off them to be the best parent.

It's about learning together and joining your child on that journey in their learning. And imaginative learning, whether they have special needs or English as a second language or neurodiversity, being playful and welcoming.

So children having agency is really important so that they can decide what they want to play and follow in their curiosity, and that, finding their own voice, they transform materials and say what they want to say to make meaning.

I'll pause on that because we have a lovely phrase that came out of our research together from our wonderful colleague at Harker, who happened to be a student of mine at the Institute of Education, and then we've worked together many years, and he was our chair of trustees. He said, what children are doing, and we're noticing their patterns and their schemas, is we're playing alongside children, where he talked about magical objects of transformation.

So we're really responding to the way that they-- I know my daughter was totally obsessed with enveloping herself with materials and making dens for her animals, and so on. So yes, I'll pause there because I could come back to that.

Emma: Thank you, Penny. I think finding those ways in which we can, particularly in more vulnerable communities, can find more creative spaces for parents and children to come into and to explore and develop their playful interactions. It's so important, isn't it, and I know that's a focus of Nesta's work in this mission, and the crucial role that artists can play in that as well. I know there are a lot of arts organisations involved in that age group and in that work.

And I'm going to follow up now. You've touched on your work in Bristol, and there's a fantastic report called "Sense of Place." And really in that work in children's centres, particularly, you've highlighted the role of co-creation and how important that was.

And that really spoke to me because in my innovation practise, creating those meaningful spaces for families to co-design and co-create with professionals as equal and valued members of the innovation design team is really important. So I'd be really interested to hear more about how you approached co-creation with parents in those projects in Bristol, and how you create those meaningful, equitable spaces where lived experience is given the same value as professional experience.

Penny: Yes, absolutely. I think sharing the kind of principles of the learning around you, if you think about the key characteristics of learning, not just in the early years but being active, being creative, playing, exploring, imagining, et cetera, and I think it is really important that the work in all of our work is co-created so that communities are involved and that it's co-designed.

We use in "Sense of Place," obviously, we elicit the ideas from the children but also alongside the parents and carers and the educators working alongside them. So the artist's voice, as lenders of tools and processes, is also so important.

I think, in terms of the thinking about the kind of pedagogical approach of co-production and co-creation, I think we-- I co-authored the Creative Pedagogies Impact case study with Professor Bamgbose Yinka at Bath Spa University. And we looked at this notion of involving teachers and professionals to re-conceptualise creativity and professional art practise and to co-design pedagogical models that focused on relationships and agency, collaboration and co-inquiry.

So the idea that we are-- our university has just turned itself into a social enterprise, the Social Enterprise Gold Mark. it's a really brilliant concept that we're working alongside the community, in service to the community. We're not doing things to do them. The important kind of framing around equity and diversity and inclusion, it's not, to borrow a phrase from Claire Thurman, it's not the illusion of inclusion, it's genuine invitation to everybody to be involved, to work together.

So think about reimagining learning, and redesign these pedagogical approaches so that people feel that they belong and they can have agency in that process. So yeah, absolutely, absolutely vital.

Emma: There's so much. If we get time, we'll touch on it later, but there was so much that I think overlaps in terms of the more I've been reading about your work and teaching for creativity and your approaches that overlaps with design-based innovation practise. There's so many parallels in terms of the work we're trying to do in organisations or in schools with children. Yeah, I feel like we need a whole session just to explore that alone.

But I'm going to move us on, and I want to ask a question. Now, we do increasingly live in a world, unfortunately, where if it can't be measured, it isn't given value. I think a lot of us struggle with that in a lot of our working lives, particularly in areas like the arts or creativity, where it's much more intangible and challenging to measure.

But can you tell us how you've gone about evaluating the impact of creativity on children's development and outcomes and your thoughts on the value of this kind of measurement?

Penny: Yes, absolutely. This kind of standing joke with our trustees the other day was we're using science to invest in art, in that sense that, for instance, our sense of place research that I've just mentioned, it's multimodal. It's integrated. It's creative. It's evaluating alongside the community.

Iram Siraj was our mentor in that process. We worked very closely with the communities. And Katherine Evans, who was doing her PhD with us at the time she's written beautifully on school readiness. I might mention that in a minute. She's now teaching at Plymouth University.

But I think the idea that-- and in fact, at our university, we're also looking at multimodal assessment to integrate live projects and think about how our students can take responsibility and co-design alongside each other with peer assessment and co-assessment as well.

So for instance, I run the arts specialism on the postgraduate certificate for education course, and it's very much around keeping a portfolio, keeping a reflective journal, having an exhibition, making presentations, sharing with each other, having skills to share sessions, bringing artists in, learning about their habits of mind, how artists work alongside children.

I was very lucky to work at Tate Modern before it opened on the learning policy and co-design, the arts as teacher scheme, so that taught me a lot about evaluation. I worked with Emily Pringle, who's head of research. I think she just might have left, but I might call her up.

But the idea that we're thinking about the actual art process informing evaluation. We have a brilliant impact, case impact research fellow at Bath Spa University, Astrid Breel. We work closely with the National Centre for Academic and Cultural Exchange, and so we've really been thinking about multimodal, shiny case studies that really show how you can make creativity visible.

And in fact, the research we're doing-- we've just written up a case study that I can share with everyone with the Living Tree exhibition at the Egg Theatre last year. During COVID, Kate Cross, the director, rang me up and said, help. We have an empty Theatre. What can we do?

So we invited children to inform that co-design, and we created a beautiful installation that brought a real forest into the Egg Theatre, but also we had a conversation with children about what it is to be responding to our hopeful futures with the climate emergency.

And that has been documented and evaluated alongside our team, and we're just about to bring in some colleagues from Oxford University to think about a multimodal case study with Forest of Imagination this year. We're going to be at the Assembly Rooms in Bath, working with the National Trust in partnership, so that's really exciting.

And I think in a way, just to kind of summarise, I would just suggest that in a way, it's like an artwork. I'm very impressed with the work that Joanna Choukeir and John McMahon and the team doing at the RSA around collective futures and all of that. It's a beautiful set up case that is on their website.

Have a look around the kind of people, place, planet, all the Ps, possibility, just that notion that you can see how people are collecting these stories and then sharing them together so you can think about more hopeful more regenerative futures.

Emma: That's a beautiful way to think about evaluation. And I think that that focus on really enhancing the qualitative, the value of the qualitative research and work that we can do, and looking at that in different ways, as you've just highlighted, it's really important.

And I'm just conscious of time. I'm going to move us on. I know there's a couple of things we still want to touch on. You'll get a chance, but I really want to at this point just bring in some of the questions. We've been getting some questions through, so thank you so much to all those who've been commentating and joining in the conversation online.

I'm just going to take a little moment. We've got a few questions that have come in from people. I think the first one I'm going to ask yous is going back to, I think, that demarcation between the arts and sciences that we spoke about earlier, Philip Noble has asked the question, "How involved are you at primary level in the art of science and science in art?"

Penny: That's a very good question. I think I would come back to the notion that art is in everything and inquiry is in everything. So the way that we find out and discover in a scientific context is very similar to the way that artists pursue their interests in the world.

And I think if we could have that framing around learning like a meadow, then we would see how everything is connected. And I think obviously the way that we can learn how to learn is then applicable in every context, whether you have an aspiration to be an artist, a professional artist or a scientist.

At any one time, children are curious artists. They are curious scientists. They're curious and creative mathematicians. They can play with language. Think about the lovely way Michael Rosen uses language in such a creative way. And I think that I wouldn't want to of divide the two. I'd want to borrow from each and have them in that mutual space of learning.

Emma: Thank you. I'm going to move us on now to another question. This comes from Sam Glazer, who says that they share this belief that our work needs to be available to groups and individuals who are marginalised and hard to reach, and this is at the heart of their work. But how can we articulate and embrace this aim whilst negotiating the culturally patronising assumptions that seem embedded in that language?

Penny: Well, that's a question for a several-hour conversation. I think it's time that we use a different kind of language around education and around learning, and I think that we can do that together. I'm working with a brilliant group of people, Professor Saville Kushner, Chris Bagley, and Bea Herbert from States of Mind, big education team, Scott Boldt from Belfast.

We're thinking together about what are the better questions we can ask of education-- oh, and the Edge Foundation-- I mustn't forget Olly, and Cassie-- that whole focus about thinking, OK, well, these are quite delivered and packaged concepts of education. Maybe in the early years, we need to start by thinking about more of the school as a system.

Scott uses a lovely phrase because he talks about-- we don't really need the word curriculum. The curriculum is the child. Start with the child, and then the community is the school, and then the parents and carers and guardians are part of that system of relationships, as colleagues in Reggio Emilia talk, that everything affects something else. And I think if we can think about the language being much more respectful and generous and kind so that it isn't about a kind of punitive--

There's a brilliant organisation called More Than a School. Children are more than a school. My daughter said to me when she was doing her GCSEs, I will not be defined by my grades, mum. And I think-- she did really well, despite-- she went to a brilliant state school, luckily.

But I think it's really important that we really think about the language we're using. And it's not a deficit model. I didn't like, in COVID, I didn't like the phrase catch-up curriculum. I didn't like the phrase-- closing the gap, even, has some of its problems because it divides the community. And actually we are together in a community, and we need to support each other.

And it doesn't matter your background or circumstances. Everybody can be in part of this conversation. And I think "Reimagining All Our Futures Together," the UNESCO report last year, year before now, was really powerful, and we've done quite a lot of work with Noah Sobe, who's spoken at our university a couple of times. And watch this space. We will be thinking about that, the Arts in Schools project, but I'll pause there.

Emma: It's a really good point about-- there are several good points, but the point about the separation of people. And yes, of course, we have to acknowledge that there were groups of people who experience a number of situations which make lives more challenging.

And not to take away from that, but this concept of additionality is something that in the design team we were introduced to by a fantastic early years resident, Donna Gaywood in Leicester, and the idea that actually all of us have different aspects that we bring, or experiences we bring, to our lives and identifying, actually highlighting those and understanding them, that there are things that have been positive, there are things that have been negative in everyone's lives.

And actually, that can help you to really see the world in a much more holistic way and this sort of-- it avoids the separation of groups. I'll stop there because I'm probably waffling now, but it just made me think about that positionality.

The next question comes from, I, think it's Jamie Eliot Harris, or it might be Milly Butters. Maybe their name is somewhat different on the thread that's come through. And they say that some of their work entails tabletop gaming, role playing with children, which they find is a great way to encourage creative thinking and problem-solving in a shared imaginative setting. And they'd love to hear you speak more to the power and potential of gamifying learning or similar kinds of child-led activities which focus on giving children agency in a safe space.

Penny: That's really interesting. I've done a lot of work in playful pedagogies, using playful pedagogies. In fact, we've got a lovely conversation going on with the RSA about the relationship between play and creative learning, so watch this space.

But the idea that gamifying, I wouldn't use that phrase myself. It's not my expertise necessarily, but what I can bring to this conversation is the kind of focus on children's agency and creativity and imagination, so giving children a time in the space, wherever they are, the freedom to follow their fascinations and interests and think about how the playfulness, experimentation, exploration-- we talk about exploring and playing and creating and sharing and learning, and all of those ideas that learning is in motion.

In Reggio Emilia, they talk about the [ITALIAN], the project moving forward-- not a literal translation-- but it gives the idea that it's about inquiry. and that's at the heart of School Without Walls, that it's about co-inquiry, really listening carefully to what the children are interested in, to then offer them the appropriate tools and materials to then express what they want to say.

So you can still have a structure, a context, but then allowing that space between, and that's how I kind of think about-- at the moment we've got a national curriculum, but moving in the spaces in between. And I think that's where that kind of playful gamifying could come in.

So I think whatever the creative environment, play and disruption and everyday creative activism, I think this is where artists can be role models because they are playing all the time with ideas and making learning, as Andrew said, Andrew Brewerton. So yeah, I hope that answers you.

Emma: Yeah, thank you. And another question here from Kate Mason, who says, "Children learn like a forest--" she's quoting you, children learn like a forest-- and asks, "What might be learned from other cultures about reimagining learning and pedagogy, and how does this connect with the climate emergency, compassion, and community of care?

Penny: Well, Kate, that's a really good question, and I have to declare that Kate is one of the most brilliant trustees that we have in our charity. But I haven't been primed with that question, so I will-- yes, and Kate knows that we talked about our-- so I think in the pandemic, nature saved me and creativity saved me. It's a real lifeline, and I've learnt so much.

I worked with this wonderful PhD student. She's got a placement year in Ecuador, and she's learning from the Indigenous wisdom of the forest. And her name is Livia Filotico, and I met her through the-- we've got a lovely project. You must look at it because it might not be time to share it, but it's called the Rabbit Holes Collective.

And in the first lockdown, my amazing line manager, Kate Ballinger, said, would you like to apply for the expanded performance cohort, which is part of the Bristol and Bath Creative R&D Project? And in that context, I met this wonderful-- and I think Ian's title is the Chief Firestarter for BBC Creative R&D. And together, we had a conversation about imagination.

Anyway, long story short, I met Liv. Liv then became part of the Rabbit Holes Collective. Then Liv has a fully funded PhD at McGill University in Montreal, and her placement year is in the forest. So she's working with Shimaka, which is learning the forest and co-designing a creative learning framework.

The word curriculum is not quite right. It's about starting with ideas. And in my PhD, I fell down that rabbit hole. Maybe that's where the idea came from. But I fell down a rabbit hole, and I met Deleuze and Guattari and the idea of their kind of philosophy, and thinking around lines of flight and rhizomatic learning.

So the Rabbit Holes Collective now, and Liv's part of it, collecting song and birdsong from the forest, collecting the sounds of the roots of the forest and mycelium network, thinking about the rain and the leaves falling, and this is all with the children learning.

In fact, Margaret Heffernan visited-- Kate knows this because I think she was there-- Margaret Heffernan visited the-- Margaret Heffernan, by the way, is a brilliant thinker author, entrepreneur, as you know, and she visited the forest, and she said something so beautiful.

It was Andrew Amondson's installation in the Egg Theatre. So Andrew worked with some vendors and Olafur Eliasson in Berlin and co-designed this beautiful forest with our design students, inviting the local community to come and witness this beautiful creativity.

It was really also learning about nature and how we are part of nature and how we can take care of it in a most beautiful. And I think Margaret's phrase, full of joy and delight. So I think that's a really important question, Kate. Thank you.

Emma: Yeah, thank you, Kate. That was nice. Brought together so many different strands. I'm going to bring together now a question that we were going to explore in time, and a question from Andrew Brewerton. And the question we were, the theme I wanted to explore with you, Penny, was really about-- Nesta talks about this concept of school readiness.

And I'm interested in children being ready for school. What does that mean? But what does it mean if you turn it on its head and think about, what would it mean if schools were actually child-ready? And I think this ties in really nicely to Andrew's question, which is, "What would you identify as the structural obstacles to your practise of creative learning and teaching within the current educational orthodoxy?" I thought he used those two things together quite nicely.

Penny: Oh, Andrew. Andrew's written a brilliant chapter in the V&A publication about making learning, and I totally recommend it. I think it's really difficult at the moment, isn't it, because we are kind of caught in a situation where we want to change things, but we have a given structure.

So I think it is about, I think it is about systemic change, and I think it's the right time for this. And I'm very pleased to be part of the Arts in Schools project that Sally Bacon and Pauline Tambling are leading with the Gulbenkian Foundation under new direction, and that is about really thinking about what is school, and really thinking about starting from the child, and the importance of the arts, and not least, saving the arts in schools.

And hopefully we'll be co-convening a group of young people in the cross-party political group at the House of Commons soon. The work we've done, I think Andrew knows, is around spaces of liberated learning, opening up these spaces, especially for more vulnerable families, to then think about how we can play and learn together in forests and fields.

And that's why the work with School Without Walls is so important to Forest of Imagination because it shows what's possible. It manifests it every day. And I think we're caught with a system that is broken, and we need to not just mend it, we need to absolutely reimagine it together.

So it's not just the language, it's actually the processes as well, and breaking down the walls, to use a phrase from School Without Walls, breaking down the walls between the cultural centres and schools, and inviting families to believe what is possible, and to unlearn, unconstrain the families through really imaginative, playful learning so that they are well, that they feel welcome, that they are welcome.

And the whole city or town or village wherever you are is a playground of learning. I think that's where the work with the RSA will be really important. And I think, again, coming back to-- I think, Andrew, you mentioned this on a different call-- I think it's really important to bring the context of education and the arts and social care and health together.

I believe that we should have artists and art therapists and researchers in every educational setting. That's how 5 by 5 started 22 years ago. We wanted to be researching alongside the children, and it was really around the process of contemporary art that children are asking these brilliant questions.

How can you bring the outside inside and make turf their classroom? How big does a map have to be inside it? So starting there, rather than with a packaged, delivered curriculum that's assessed, I think that is where we need to kind of rethink everything, so in terms of Nesta and the whole focus on early years, particularly,

But interestingly, Andrew, I found a quote yesterday. I had a catch-up. I'm trying to persuade Matthew Bisco, who you know. He's the assistant head and the lead [INAUDIBLE] now in Plymouth. I'm trying to persuade him to do a PhD. And he wrote back, and I said, just what are your main concerns?

And he said-- I can find it-- "My most pressing concern as an educator-- my most pressing concerns as an educator have grown and remain to be the fundamentality of identity and voice in our commitment to social justice for communities, marginalised, oppressed, isolated, lost, and to understand who they are and the power they hold to become the author of their own story. So the human experience is precious, finite, and full of colour, yet is so often stifled by the design of others perceived to know best."

So I think that really stayed with me, and the Cultural Learning Alliance have just published a brilliant briefing paper on the early years in the arts, and some of the language in that is much more about that kind of affording, the affordance and the potential, the possibility of learning, is so vital.

Emma: Thank you, Penny. I'm going to now switch it back to the-- away from schools back to the early years, and I've got a question here from Edel Condon, who asks, "What practise elements ensure quality co-constructive learning between artists and children under three years?"

Can you just say that-- you broke up slightly on the last bit. Sorry.

I'll repeat the question, so "What practise elements ensure quality co-constructive learning between artists and children under three years?"

Penny: So I think, really for me, it's about distilling the role of the adult alongside the child, and I think especially under three, that whole body learning, moving and learning. David Almond, our patron, says children so naturally sing and dance and act and play. And I think if that environment is loving and fair in compassion and companionship, that phrase, the adult's companion in the children's learning, I think yes, and to take the pressure off so that we can increase the kind of capabilities alongside children.

Reggio-- our colleagues in Reggio Emilia, just before the pandemic hit for the celebration of Loris Malaguzzi's 100th birthday, and just that idea that we're inviting this sense of agency, where the children can really be who they want to be. It is about being human. It's about expressing our ideas in so many different modalities.

And that starts from the moment of birth, the phrase children are "competent and creative" from the moment of birth, and the image of the child in the UK is not necessarily-- well, maybe Wales, and Scotland, and Ireland, but in England, the image of the child, especially in our curricula, plural, isn't necessarily valued so much. So I think we need to see children as powerful thinkers and knowledge makers and really be alongside their self-directed play.

We had a lovely project in the second lockdown with seven local schools, and we were thinking about imagination and outside and nature and play and food and sensory experience. And we invited, working with a local artist, Lucy Cassidy, we designed the Society for the Protection of Magical Creatures, where the children would come in and adopt a magical creature and then look after it, and that's beautiful. And that could be-- I think the principles of the early years should go all the way through education.

Emma: Thank you, Penny. I'm close to the time. I'm going to ask you one cheeky last question before we wrap up. So just a very-- it's quite a big one, but if you can just sum it up as best you can in maybe a couple of minutes, that would be amazing.

So our mission's goal-- I'm going to reframe it, actually, away from school readiness and gaps-- so something around actually enabling the human potential of every child, regardless of income and where they live and the family that they're born into by age five, so enabling everyone to have the same opportunities to realise their potential.

And our goal is very much set around 2030. So it's about bringing everyone into the same, or narrowing the differences between those growing up in poverty and those who aren't, by 2030.

So in one or two sentences or a couple of minutes longer, if you could wave a magic wand, what would you like childhood to look like by 2030? Or if you want, you can narrow this to maybe children's educational settings.

Penny: Gosh. Well, that's a massive question, and I think-- OK, I have an idea. I think that we need to re-imagine learning and re-imagine childhood and give children-- I was on a call the other day with [INAUDIBLE], and he was talking about we need to learn from children with children. We're born from children, not the other way around.

So we need that invitation for childhood to be reimagined. And in our local context, we're thinking about and working with UNICEF around the concept of the child-friendly city, where children have freedom of the city, that they can learn. And just as our work with Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination and Goldsmiths and our university, thinking about spaces of liberated learning.

But all the time and everywhere, learning is everywhere. It's not just at school. And I think that's where I would suggest that we have a Commissioner for Imagination and Future Generations in every nation. So that was a very short answer to a very big question.

Emma: No, that's a brilliant way to end, the Commissioner of Imagination and Future Generations. What a fantastic way to wrap up a conversation, and what an amazing-- I think it gives the [INAUDIBLE] a grounded focus in terms of how those things might manifest in going forward, so thank you.

So thank you, everyone. What incredible questions that you've shared. It's been a really interesting discussion, and it's provided so much food for thought. I hope everyone in the audience has found it useful.

Now that we've reached the end of the event, I'd be really grateful if those joining us could please fill in the short survey, and the link will be shared in the chat and is also available in the event's description. And as a thank you for filling out the survey, you'll be entered into a prize draw to win a 50 pounds bookshop.org voucher.

Before we wrap up, I'm just going to say that our next episode of Nesta Talks will be on Thursday the 23rd of February, and we'll be sitting down with Dr. Dylan Yamada-Rice to discuss storytelling in the digital age and how immersive entertainment can support children's childhood development. So please go to our website for more details and sign up, or sign up to our newsletter to keep in touch about more events like these.

And before we finish, I just want to say an enormous thank you, Penny. That has been the most stimulating, most inspiring conversation, and I'm sure-- well, I'm taking away so much from it. These be quite challenging times. They are very challenging times on many levels, and I think the insights you've given today and the inspiration, it really just, I think, will charge all of us up to continue this work and to have hope, to have hope for the future and for the children being born today, that their lives will be positive, meaningful, and full of joy, and that's what we all hope for.

So that's all from me again. Thank you once again, Penny for such an amazing conversation, and thank you so much to the audience for joining us. Goodbye.

Penny: Thank you for having me