CREATIVE BREAK TIME

CREATIVE BREAK TIME: A COLLABORATIVE PROJECT BETWEEN TOMA X METAL X FOCAL POINT GALLERY

From 2024 to 2027, Focal Point Galley, Metal Southend and The Other MA (TOMA) are working intensively with local school teachers and creative practitioners through a collaborative, creative and active research project. This work is supported by Freelands Foundation and was one of the four selected projects to receive funding from their Autumn 2023 grant.

Creative Break Time explores the creative wellbeing of teachers whilst radically providing them with care and creative time to foster inspiration, collaboration, and peer learning. We’re connecting through supportive residencies, artist and teacher-led workshops, teacher-training resources, in-school activities, artist-teacher partnerships and deep hanging out with special guests from educational and creative sectors.

So far, we’ve shared our work at the iJADE 2025 Conference, hosted crits for artists and teachers, gifted 100 limited edition commissions to local school teachers and co-developed new tools to ‘itch the curriculum’. Our co-researchers include teachers from Greenways Primary, Milton Hall Primary, Shoeburyness High and St Bernard’s High School.

Our mission is to bring Southend artists and teachers together in transformative ways and we emphasise care, rest, wellbeing and meaningful collaboration in order to do this. By investing in teachers’ creativity, we want to bring about lasting change in Southend schools across all curriculums and key stages.

If you’d like to find out more, contact our project team at creative.break@outlook.com

Here’s a live feed of Instagram posts which gathers the findings and experiences of our co-researchers and participants, including teachers, artists and organisations.

Scroll over each image to find out more.