The Roundup - Edition 83

A message from 
Rich Jones, Head.

When I was about eight, my parents’ friends, Uncle Colin and Auntie Carol (that weird thing where they were assigned as relations but were just friends), occasionally drew the short straw and babysat me. I thought they were the height of cool: they had a toastie machine AND a soda stream. They had a metallic blue VW Scirocco with remote locking and, even better, Colin worked in TV and film. He was a lighting and sound man. He loved Jaws nearly as much as I did. 

One afternoon at their house he put on Jason and the Argonauts on his brand-new VHS machine. I was hooked – it was amazing. The moment the skeletons climbed out of the earth and launched into battle I could hardly breathe. Colin paused the tape and started explaining stop-motion animation and a man called Ray Harryhausen who was the main genius behind what I’d seen. My mind went. That afternoon Colin and I tried our own version with some Lego village figures and some old Blu Tack.

I was dreadful at it. 

Impatient, messy, very little moved and nothing made sense (delicacy remains an issue to this day). But I remember Colin saying “you see Richie, bringing things to life, making stuff move and telling stories isn’t that hard, you just need to play and play and play.”

That day cracked something open for me in my eight-year-old brain. It was the first time I felt creatively untethered.

It made, I guess, opportunity feel bigger, freer, and more possible. Perhaps my daydreams about a West Country A-Team could become a reality. Maybe my life could take a different path to office worker or mechanic. Was a creative thing possible in adult life?

I haven’t seen Colin for thirty years and I don’t even know if he’s still alive, but the truth is I might not be writing this Roundup without him.

All of this sits against a bigger backdrop. In the UK we still treat creativity as something soft or optional. Yet the creative industries are anything but optional. Six per cent of our entire economy and seven per cent of our national workforce sit in this sector. Its GDP impact rivals the oil and car industries combined. If this were an IT system, an AI breakthrough or a weapons platform, ministers would be touring the world trying to sell it.

Despite the negative chatter about the arts and the media over the past fifteen years, the world knows the truth. People come here from across the globe, especially the US, to make films and shows because our talent, skills and studios are exceptional. Creativity is one of this country’s greatest strengths and deserves to be treated as such.

And in our corner of the world at St Chris, we see the same energy every day. It lives in the Chicago performances, in the curriculum choices our young people make, in the playground ideas that turn into proper projects and in our upcoming Creative Careers evening. We don’t pay lip service to creativity. We see it, we nurture it and we expect our pupils to explore and try and fail and try again.

That afternoon with Colin and a lump of Blu Tack showed me that creativity is not a luxury. It’s a way of seeing the world. It’s a way of shaping it. And it’s something this community is already very good at protecting and growing.

As for my stop-motion experiment, it was so dire that even at eight years old I knew it had no future. The Lego figure drunkenly listed to one side like it had given up on life, and the final animation lasted about three seconds longer than my patience. Hollywood kept its distance. Sensibly. So here I am, a Headteacher instead, which turns out to be a far more forgiving audience than the film industry would ever have been…