Our foot's in the door: Editorial to Special Issue on Creativity, Arts and Cultural Education

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