Schools in England have been required to adopt and adapt an ongoing series of policy initiatives: some however are offered on an 'opt-in' basis. This paper examines one such 'offer,' that of Creative Partnerships, a programme which provides schools in designated deprived areas the opportunity to work with creative practitioners in order to change both classroom practice and whole schools. We report here on the snapshot phase of a national study, using a corpus of multimethod qualitative data from 40 schools. We suggest that headteachers saw different opportunities in the CP offer but what actually happened in the school related to three interwoven strands: the situatedness of the school, the headteacher's stance towards change, and the architecture of change management. Our analysis, which highlights the ways in which many of the schools were unable to 'spread and embed' the pedagogical changes supported through CP, suggests that the majority of heads could benefit from involvement in explicit discussion about 'unofficial'-and more democratic-approaches to leading and managing change.Keywords Creativity Á Change management Á Leadership Á EnglandIn an effort to maintain the impetus for, and pace of, educational change the English New Labour government has produced a continuing flow of initiatives. As Ball (2008, p. 3) puts it, ''policy is currently experienced as a constant flow of new requirements, changes, exhortations, responsibilities and expectations.'' This policy churn has left many schools and headteachers suffering profound reform enervation. But there is relentless pressure on English schools to continually improve. This is embodied in the expectation of OfSTED and Local Authorities that schools produce