Henry Ward

**Ollie Briggs** (0:06)
What would happen if an artist had control of a school curriculum? Henry Ward, former deputy head of Welling School in South London, has blurred the boundaries between artist and teacher, and the results for his students and the whole school were transformative. I talked to Henry about the role his artistic practice played in developing his teaching philosophy, and he shares some brilliant examples of his students' work. Most importantly, he offers a glimpse into what education would look like if the arts and creative learning were truly valued.

**Henry Ward** (0:39)
I had no real desire to be a teacher, and I kind of became a teacher slightly by accident. And then once I was teaching, the idea of any kind of responsibility was horrendous. But I quickly realised that without the responsibility, other people get to come in and make decisions that have an impact on what you're doing. So it started with taking on responsibility within the department, because I was starting to do things that I suppose were quite innovative. And I had a head of department who was quite open to that. But then when he got a promotion and the idea, well, somebody else is going to come and be head of department. What if they come in and they've got a restricted idea about what we should do? Maybe I need to be head of department to keep doing what we're doing. And it carried on like that really. And then the deputy head thing was slightly different in that I was director of specialism. And then the school got taken over by an academy chain. So the head was sort of disappeared. And in came this shiny suit wearing group of people. And they just made the job a deputy head job. So it wasn't a choice. And I think they did that because they saw director of specialism. They said, we don't need one of those. So let's give him lots of things he doesn't want to do. And then when he's gone, we can remove that position from the post. I'm pretty sure that's what it was.
But of course, what happened was, they gave me timetable and curriculum and options and all sorts of line management in different areas of the curriculum and so on. And that's basically giving somebody the school. So then I realized that actually it was a pretty exciting thing to do. And what if, as an artist, you had control of the school? I mean, what if you change a school from that perspective? So I think for the academy chain, which obviously I won't mention, but it's easy for people to look up, are quite sort of want a kind of consistency amongst their schools. They accidentally put somebody in position who was going to go completely the other direction and take the school somewhere else, which was great fun.

**Ollie Briggs** (2:27)
So this is where kind of sci-art came from?

**Henry Ward** (2:29)
Sci-art, the canon, drawing as a cross-curricular subject. Yeah, I mean, all sorts of projects.

**Ollie Briggs** (2:34)
What was the canon?

**Henry Ward** (2:36)
So the canon was a talking lesson with year sevens. So we realized one of the biggest issues at the school was literacy. And then speaking with the English teachers, their sort of understanding of the literacy problem was that it wasn't about what we called decoding. So it wasn't about the idea that kids couldn't read something, they could read it, but they didn't know what it meant. And that context was missing completely. And we'd actually, what we tried to do, we tried to become the 17th state school in the country that taught art history A level with very little success. So kids wanted to do it. And then we realized that at 16, they didn't have any context. So they didn't know there had been two world wars. They didn't know. I mean, it was really terrifying. And you suddenly realize the kind of impoverished nature of not having context. So we came up with an idea, which was what if we used pictures of artwork that had been made as a way of talking about the time it was made in. Not assessing it, not getting them to write anything down, just let's talk about it every week. So it took an hour off the curriculum for year seven.
I can't remember where it took it from. And every week we showed an image of an artwork and we said to the kids, what are you looking at? And they started talking about it. And over the course of an hour of talking, we'd develop an understanding of something. And then the next week it would be an artwork made maybe 50, 100 years later. We said, what are we looking at now? And then they talk about how it was similar or different to the previous one and what happened. It's amazing.