Making our young people creative is crucial to the nation’s future, according to a reborn Creative Partnerships, but too many key players in the arts, politics and education are not yet convinced, reports Simon Tait

Cultural heavyweights – the likes of Nick Serota, Ekow Eshun, Vikki Heywood and Carole Souter - were out in force in the lecture theatre of the RSA a month ago for the launch of a paper entitled Get It: The Power of Cultural Learning, produced by something called the Culture and Learning Consortium, a new name on the scene. In the front row, looking not a little proprietorial, was the chief executive of another new name, Creativity Culture & Education.

He is Paul Collard, who until the start of April was director of Creative Partnerships, the sometime controversial creativity programme for schools set up nearly seven years ago under the Arts Council with, in that time, an accumulated £110m of revenue funding. Since then it’s worked with almost a million young people and 5,000 schools across England, liaising with artists, arts organisations and local authorities to bring programmes to young people.

CP has now enlarged itself into CCE and the advents of the new organisation, the new consortium and the paper are all connected with the fact that, for all its cash, its 200-odd staff and its successful initiatives, the CP message still hasn’t been getting all the way home.

Some government departments, schools and even the arts and cultural institutions themselves, says Collard, have not entirely bought into the fact that creativity is, in effect, the fourth R. Unless we all get it we are doomed, he says, it’s as fundamental as that.