Sophie Ivatts – Celebrating 21 years of Clore Leadership
2016/17 Clore Fellow Sophie Ivatts considers her time as a Clore Leadership Fellow and the impact it has had on her career to date.
My Leadership Journey
When Covid came, I lost all my freelance work in theatre and TV. Partly out of pragmatism (I needed an income) and partly out of a long-held curiosity I decided to undertake a PGCE and spent the year of 2020-2021 training as a modern languages teacher. I came out of this experience more convinced than ever of the need for more creativity and cultural learning in our schools.
Inspired by this experience, and encouraged by the skills, confidence, and network that Clore had given me, I founded Beyond The Syllabus, a unique cultural learning programme for schools. It is a series of interactive workshops, designed to foster young people’s intellectual delight, interpersonal confidence, and critical thinking skills, through the discussion of art and culture.
Each workshop is built around a particular piece of art or culture – this might be anything from a podcast, to a painting, a film clip, or a novel extract. These are selected to act as a prism through which we can examine contemporary culture. Through a mixture of theatre-based practice, and guided discussions, pupils learn to analyse the source and engage in nuanced, critical discussions about the issues raised.
I piloted the programme with an academy trust in Stoke-on-Trent and the initial impact findings have been very exciting, reflecting a positive impact on pupils’ curiosity and confidence, as well as a more critical approach to their engagement with social media.
Key Learnings from Clore Leadership
The training and support I received from the Clore Fellowship gave me the confidence to develop Beyond The Syllabus and to go out and sell it to schools. It also gave me the appreciation of how important it was to think about impact and evaluation from the get-go.
Knowing how valuable collective wisdom is, and also being able to identify my own skills/ knowledge gaps, I have now put together a fantastic advisory board, which is already helping me as I look to take the project to the next phase.
The next step is to get some funding behind it, for which I’ll be drawing heavily on the training and network I gained through Clore.
What change would you like to see in the world of cultural leadership in the next decade?
I think we need more money going directly to individual artists and cultural entrepreneurs. In this country, you can have a career as an arts administrator, but it’s very tough to forge a career as an independent artist or cultural entrepreneur, and it’s prohibitively expensive/ precarious, and too often comes down to survival of the richest. We need to talk about putting artists/ entrepreneurs on salary, because it’s hard to be creative when you’re worrying about how to pay the rent.
