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Penny Hay

August 2026 · Issue

Imagination Is Our Human Superpower: How Prof. Penny Hay's 'Children Are Artists' Philosophy Is Inspiring Creative Education Worldwide

Professor of Imagination. The title alone does work before a word is spoken. In this exclusive Pulse Magazine feature, Bath Spa University's Prof. Penny Hay reveals why she believes every child is already an artist — not an artist-in-waiting — and why creativity is not an optional extra but education's foundational human capability. From the Living Tree in Forest of Imagination to research spanning Bath, Mumbai, and across Europe, Hay makes the case, backed by forty years of evidence, for imagination as our human superpower.

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The Pulse Magazine: Creative Education Leaders 2026 Special Edition

This special edition of The Pulse Magazine spotlights Prof. Penny Hay, Professor of Imagination at Bath Spa University, in an exclusive cover feature exploring what it means to build a career, and a philosophy, around the conviction that imagination is not peripheral to education but foundational to it. Drawing on her 2023 monograph Children are Artists and forty years of research, teaching, and institutional leadership, Hay shares the thinking behind House of Imagination and its three signature projects School Without Walls, Forest of Imagination, and Playful Green Planet each reimagining where and how children's learning actually happens.

The feature goes deep into the ideas shaping creative education in 2026: why children should be understood as artists in the present tense rather than talents to be cultivated later, what the artist-researcher model reveals about knowledge that purely academic methods cannot access, and why arts education must become a structural entitlement rather than a privilege of circumstance. Readers also get an inside look at Hay's international collaborations, from Bath to Mumbai to Barcelona, and her urgent case for what is lost when imagination is treated as optional.

A must-read for educators, policymakers, and parents rethinking what education is truly for.

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