Our foot’s in the door

Some years ago now, my primary school dance club chose  Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Mushrooms’ (1962) to perform in a Medway town arts festival at Chatham dockyard. We read and discussed the text, improvised our interpretation of mushrooms ‘overnight, very whitely, discreetly’ and of girls (and boys) taking ‘hold on the loam’  to ‘acquire the air’. We also listened to music that might suit, engaged a group to offer an accompanying reading and added a repeating ostinato during the second half – ‘our foot’s in the door’… ‘our foot’s in the door’. Those were the days. Long days of creativity, expressive freedom, professional artistry and agency, and time and space to explore possibilities within and beyond the curriculum. Or were they? Perhaps I am simply wearing rose-tinted spectacles, my vision blurred by the intervening years of endless pendulum swings. During the period of the Creative Partnerships initiative, for instance, creativity and the arts were pla