The writing's on the wall...

…for schools that don’t use creative approaches to learning.

I’ve just returned from the National Education Union’s annual conference in Harrogate in the north of England, where the Hands up Project had a stall selling our books, showcasing our new exhibition ‘Oh big blue’, and encouraging teachers to get involved in our work.

One of the topics that was hotly debated at the conference was how inspection bodies like Ofsted place very little emphasis on creativity when they are inspecting schools, instead only looking at exam results and achieving targets and aims for each term.

At the Hands up Project, in contrast, we’ve always placed a huge amount of value on the creative work of our children, and we’ve always done our best to share this work as widely as possible. - through our books, our exhibitions, and our events. We do this because we know that creativity is such an important element in learning a language, but also because we know that it boosts the children’s self esteem so much to know that their work is being seen, heard and read.

Yesterday morning we did a live link to our educational space in Cairo and teachers at the conference were able to meet some of our Palestinian children there, and hear them read their poems.

The screenshot above shows a moment when they showed us their work on the walls of the educational space and we showed them the poems from our new book on the walls of the Hands up stand (some of which were written by our children in Cairo.

You can see some highlights of the whole session in the video below - made by Sulaiman who organised the session from their side.

And just in case anyone is in doubt about the importance of sharing the work of our young people in Palestine as widely as possible, I’ll leave the last words to Nada Miqdad - a 16 year year old poet, artist and actor in Gaza who has three remarkable poems in ‘Moon tell me truth’ and one in ‘Oh big blue’

Please help us to keep amplifying the voices of young Palestinians.

Nick