Mr. Dermot Carney:

Creative engagement is the flagship programme of NAPD and a number of people in this room will know of it. It is now in its 13th year. It is the longest running multi-arts programme in second level education in Ireland. It is administered by the NAPD, the arts, cultural and heritage committee and me. The committee consists of the chairperson, Kay O'Brien, Anthony Condron, Mick Daly, Dr. Brendan Flynn of the Clifden Arts Festival, Mary Hanley, Patricia Hayden, Dave MacPherson, Paddy O'Connor and Michael Parsons, who is the chairperson of the Heritage Council. The key feature of the committee is that the members who are or have been in leadership roles do the work involved on a voluntary basis.

Creative engagement is an arts in education programme. Arts in education is different from just arts education. It describes a situation in which an artist or arts group comes into a school to work with students. Students sometimes go to the artist's place of work or to a cultural institution. The interaction between the students and the artists is called a creative engagement. Work produced throughout the country includes projects in visual art, poetry, prose, music, dance, theatre, heritage and film. It is very broad. In the creative engagement scheme the work of students in the school is enhanced by the involvement of the local artists and arts practitioners who are often chosen because they have different specialties from the teacher in a subject area. Many of the arts practitioners are affiliated to the Arts Council. We have the involvement of the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, which has a role in supporting professional artists and heritage professionals on the ground, working in tandem with the Department of Education and Skills.

Through the creative engagement programme NAPD wants to encourage creativity and well-being; complement curricular learning; encourage the building of sustainable partnerships between the school community, artists, arts organisations and cultural institutions; and to provide students with opportunities to express their experiences through varied arts practices including visual arts, drama, music, dance, film and literature. Through the creative engagement programme, NAPD hopes to create a body of work across a wide range of creative forms, including exhibitions, performances, videos, films, publications and so on, that can be widely shared and to showcase this work through NAPD and our other partners. We also hope to link with and build on existing arts provision at local level.

An application form for creative engagement funding of a proposed project is completed by interested schools before the end of October each year. It is signed by the principal of the school and sent to NAPD. The NAPD arts, culture and heritage committee then meets to consider applications for the project. For the 2017-18 school year, we received 95 applications and the year before we received 113 applications. That number has grown from 57 applications six years ago. The selection criteria for funding is a clear indication of student engagement in and ownership of the creative activity; evidence of a partnership between the student, teacher and artist; the originality of the proposal; a clear plan of action; the process of the project is emphasised as much as the final product; and there is a potential for collaboration with and replication in other schools.

The creative engagement project is based initially on grants from the Department of Education and Skills, the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and the Heritage Council. It is administered through NAPD's head office. The amount of the grant given to an application is determined by the proposal and the availability of funds. We are always looking for more. Applicants provide detailed projected costings on application. Schools are encouraged to provide some form of additional funding at local level. Schools are visited by NAPD arts committee members, who do so voluntarily, during the year and encouragement and support is given to teachers, students and artists involved. Each is required to complete an evaluation form at the end of the school year.

Over the past 12 years, NAPD has been actively encouraging schools to develop their arts plan. This anticipated the ideas contained in the arts in education charter and placed an emphasis on the role of the arts within schools. All creative engagement schools have to initiate or produce an arts policy as part of their application for funding.

The inspectorate has taken over that role in schools as part of a wider remit but it has been and continues to be an aspect of creative engagement that has added to the quality of the arts in second level schools. The National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals, NAPD, will be working with the Charter High Level Implementation Group to support further support developments in school arts policies.

An annual Creative Engagement exhibition is held each year to celebrate and display the project work of the schools. During the last two years it has been held in the Irish Museum of Modern Art, IMMA, and allows schools to show their work and share their experiences with others. In the past we have worked with the National Museum in Collins Barracks. We are looking for a venue for this year and, hopefully, we will be back in IMMA at some point