[4] Originally from a working-class Liverpool family,[5] around September 2001[6][7] Robinson moved to Los Angeles with his wife and children[8] to serve as Senior Advisor to the president of the J. Paul Getty Trust.

[10] The project worked with over 2,000 teachers, artists and administrators in a network of over 300 initiatives and influenced the formulation of the National Curriculum for England.

[12] In 2001, Robinson was appointed senior advisor for education and creativity at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which lasted at least until 2005.

[10][18][19] In 2010, the Royal Society of Arts animated one of Robinson's speeches about changing education paradigms, which has been viewed more than 17 million times on YouTube as of August 2023.

Finally, it should focus on awakening creativity through alternative didactic processes that put less emphasis on standardised testing, thereby giving the responsibility for defining the course of education to individual schools and teachers.

He believed that much of the present education system in the United States encourages conformity, compliance and standardisation rather than creative approaches to learning.

Robinson emphasised that we can only succeed if we recognise that education is an organic system, not a mechanical one: successful school administration is a matter of engendering a helpful climate rather than "command and control".

[citation needed] Robinson's 2001 book, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative (Wiley-Capstone), was described by Director magazine as "a truly mind-opening analysis of why we don't get the best out of people at a time of punishing change."

John Cleese said of it: "Ken Robinson writes brilliantly about the different ways in which creativity is undervalued and ignored in Western culture and especially in our educational systems.

The book draws on the stories of creative artists such as Paul McCartney, The Simpsons creator Matt Groening, Meg Ryan, and physicist Richard Feynman to investigate this paradigm of success.