Written by Louise O’Boyle, Associate Dean (Academic Quality & Student Experience) Ulster University and CHEAD Expert Trustee.
This reflection argues that creative education is essential civic infrastructure. Drawing on sessions at GLAD 2025, it examines language, employability, and generative artificial intelligence (AI) in relation to practice, equity and sustainability, and concludes with implications for curriculum, assessment and sector advocacy.
Positionality note: I write as a participant-observer and practitioner in art and design higher education, which necessarily shapes the emphases and interpretations offered here.
On Friday 5th September, delegates from across the UK and Ireland gathered at Nottingham School of Art & Design, Nottingham Trent University for the 2025 GLAD Symposium, Where Art School Leads. From the outset, the layered hum of conversation signalled purpose. There was a charge in the air, a sense that this would not be a day of polite listening but of genuine exchange.
The symposium title resonated personally and was collectively held by those who live its implications daily. From the moment Caroline Norbury OBE, Chief Executive of Creative UK, delivered her keynote, the tone was set. She argued with clarity and conviction that the creative sector is a driver of prosperity and societal benefit, not a luxury but a necessity. She challenged us to attend to language, including how we describe who we are, what we do, and the impact we have, because it shapes public understanding and flows into policy and funding. Too often we are framed through scarcity: programmes “at risk”, graduates “struggling” and creativity a “nice to have”. A shift is required. Art schools are the incubators for the creative thinking and skills that are increasingly critical (see WEF Future Skills Report 2025). Across the day, conversations returned to this theme as we traded deficit narratives for accounts that evidenced the scale and substance of art, design and creative education in the world and the lives of citizens.
We also wrestled with what we mean by industry and the perceptions it evokes. It is tempting to imagine it as a neat destination, job title waiting, welcome pack on a desk. The reality our graduates inherit is more fluid, as are the careers they are now creating for themselves. Portfolio careers are normal, not a plan B: a weave of freelance work, community practice, entrepreneurship and/or movement across creative, cultural and sometimes entirely different sectors. In that world, employability is not about squeezing into a precut box; it is about learning how to build your own and being ready to dismantle and rebuild it as the ground shifts, with graduate outcomes prioritising orchestration, collaboration and transdisciplinary fluency over narrow role conformity.
Beyond ‘doom’ narratives: AI, access, equity and time to think
Threaded through many sessions and discussions was the question of AI: its impact on curricula and on what it will mean for our graduates, disciplines and the HE sector overall. Commentary has often claimed AI flattens difference and devalues skills. We acknowledged that anxiety and led through it. What emerged was not techno-optimism but a clear responsibility to shape how AI appears in creative education so that it widens access to resources, deepens equity of opportunity and, crucially, returns time to think. Used well, AI can remove administrative weight from students and staff, open libraries of reference materials, techniques and software to those historically excluded, and create the headroom required for slower, riskier, more imaginative work. That entails curricula which cultivates critical AI literacy (when to use and when to refuse), attention to provenance and ethics, and the ability to direct tools in service of concept, context and care, supported by assessment that evidences process and provenance, foregrounds judgement and iteration, and makes space for human-led experimentation alongside tool use. For graduate prospects, the differentiator will not be “can you use the tool?” but “can you orchestrate it, set the brief, judge quality, make meaning and keep the human in the loop?”
Practice in action: sustainability, inclusion and co-creation
The practices and research shared throughout the day brought to life: work confronting colonial legacies through creative practice; co-creation in prisons and with communities excluded from mainstream narratives; projects that refused to treat sustainability as a slogan and wrestled with it across programmes, curricula and pedagogy. None of this felt like showcase theatre. It felt like the everyday work of creative education at its best, rigorous, relational and willing to change because the world requires it. These were not simply examples of creative excellence; they showed how critical thinking, cultural literacy and technical expertise braid with the human capacity to listen, adapt and respond.
In this landscape, the most valuable graduates see themselves as lifelong learners, people who can pivot, reskill and reimagine their roles as contexts change; who move between critical thinking and technical craft; who know when to speak and when to listen. Cultural literacy matters as much as software fluency; the capacity to collaborate matters more than any single tool. The mood throughout was collective in intent. Whether discussing pedagogy, curriculum reform or what truly inclusive education looks like in practice, the message was clear: collaboration must be deliberate, not accidental; advocacy cannot be something we do only when a consultation window opens; and if we want to influence the frameworks shaping creative education, we need to speak with a voice that carries.
Implications and next steps for creative education
The conversations are still settling. The question that brought us together has shifted. It is no longer simply Where does art school lead? but How art school leads? The symposium was not merely a showcase of best practice but a crucible for ideas poised to shape the cultural, societal and economic landscapes of tomorrow. It affirmed that in an age of misinformation, social fragmentation and ecological crisis, the capacities cultivated within art schools, including critical inquiry, material intelligence, radical imagination and collaborative problem-solving, are not peripheral luxuries but essential civic capacities. The challenge is to carry what we know about making, imagining and building communities into the places where it can do the most good, including how we steward new tools so they expand access and gift back time for creative thought.
Event webpage: https://www.gladhe.com/home/2025symposium
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