Creativity enables our children and young people to learn, develop a ‘can-do’ mentality, make progress, and confidently tackle ever-changing challenges throughout their lives.
It is the ability to look at things from a different viewpoint; to examine problems with an open mind and imaginatively explore innovative solutions; to learn from mistakes and to make connections. Creativity sits at the centre of the four contexts for learning and is a theme which sits across and through all areas of teaching and learning.
Why creativity?
In the Creativity Across Learning Report (Education Scotland, 2013, updated 2025), learning activities which effectively promoted creativity skills had strong elements of:
- Personalisation and choice
- Thought-provoking starting points
- Open-ended enquiry
- Problem-solving activities
- Learner responsibility for learning approaches
- Constructive collaboration, between learners and teachers, and among learners
- Teachers as facilitators or coaches.
What are creativity skills?
These are the creativity skills defined by Education Scotland and further examples and resources can be found here.
The Gallup Creativity in Learning report supports this and explores the role of technology in creative learning environments when developing these skills.
The Creativity Portal contains further links, tools and research to support exploring why and what is creativity.
Role of the iPad
With technology, learners can express their creativity in different ways, combining media, adding their voice, bring drawings to life and lead their learning.
Digital skills have an important role to support learners in using technology. Visit our Digital Skills page for further support and explore how to develop digital skills.
Software Library
Explore the Software Library book for an overview of the apps available and examples of how these could be used.
Here is an example of a lesson using different apps to be creative using Adobe Express and then sharing this learning in Showbie.
Everyone Can Create
Apple have created guides as part of the Everyone Can Create resources. These guides can be found in the Books app and are available for teachers and learners. The series of guides explore photo, drawing, music and photo.
Further resources are available on the Apple Education Community with further lesson ideas to explore be creative with learning.
