The prime responsibility of the Department's Creativity Section is to co-ordinate work on the implementation of the Unlocking Creativity initiative. It has a wide brief, working across Departments, principally with the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment, the Department of Education and the Department for Employment and Learning, to harness and mainstream creativity within the cultural, educational, training and economic areas.

These Departments have been partners in Unlocking Creativity since 2000 and are committed to a cross-cutting strategy to promote creativity in Northern Ireland. Their mission statement is:

To develop the capacities of all our people for creativity and innovation and so promote and sustain the social, cultural and economic well-being of Northern Ireland.

Since the inception of the Unlocking Creativity initiative, the following 3 documents have been published:

Unlocking Creativity: A Strategy for Development (pdf size 1.43MB)

Unlocking Creativity: Making it Happen  (pdf size 2.13MB)

Unlocking Creativity: a creative region (PDF 416KB)  

Creativity is not only at the heart of our arts and creative industries but underpins our ability to innovate, to create and exploit new economic opportunities and to compete more effectively.

To support the initiative in the early stages £2.8 m was invested over three years in the Creativity Seed Fund (CSF). The idea behind the Fund was to encourage projects that would either promote creativity in education or strengthen Northern Ireland as a competitive presence in the creative industries. The latest Evaluation Survey (PDF 137KB) of CSF projects was published by the Education and Training Inspectorate in 2005.

As part of the process of working with the various projects to evaluate their work, the inspectors developed Appreciating Creativity, (size 48.5KB) a set of quality indicators relating specifically to creativity.