Primary - is creativity not allowed anymore?

[Nuffaluff]

I’ve been primary school teacher for a long time. Been at the same school for too long probably.
We had a change of Head a few years ago and he loves schemes of work. We have schemes of work for everything and we aren’t allowed to do our own planning anymore. Some things are okay, but we have Ark Curriculum which is awful for the younger children - very dry, all work in booklets with very little hands-on, practical work and zero fun.
All the joy has gone and it is killing it for me, especially as my class are only Year 2! It’s even worse for the Year 1 teacher. The children don’t like it but, of course, most of my colleagues (the good teachers!) pretend it’s brilliant in staff meetings and then bitch about it behind closed doors! Opinions are not allowed unless you agree with the Head.
I miss the days when I could plan my own lessons as I’ve been trained to do.
What I’d like to know is - how is it at your school? Do you get to plan your own lessons still? Do you get to do fun stuff with the kids, e.g. make a mosaic when you’re learning about Romans?
Do I need to get out of teaching before I’m too old to retrain?

This thread has made me incredibly sad.

I work in a small school, which is part of a small MAT (only 6 schools).
We base our maths on White Rose, but that's it. No schemes for anything else. My last school had progression documents for foundation subjects and some suggested MTPs, but nothing as prescriptive as described by other posters.

Both schools had Ofsted within the last year. Both schools maintained 'good' because safeguarding was strong, leadership was strong, teachers and subject leaders knew where the curriculum was going and most importantly the children could talk confidently and enthusiastically about their learning.

All this rubbish that leaders are spouting about schemes being necessary because of Ofsted is complete rubbish.

And they wonder why teachers are leaving the profession in droves.

I have handed in my notice because of this. Going to do something else until there is a labour government.

My school has adopted Oak for its wider curriculum which has very few practical activities especially in Geography and History. We are still allowed to create our own outcomes but this defeats the purpose of saving time as I spend hours trying to gussy up the interminable slides and make it all memorable and interesting. With some lessons, a lot of the information is in the transcripts so we have to read and study these before each lesson or add info to the slides. It feels like it won't be long before we are just reciting scripts.

The children enjoy the star words and vocabulary but I feel that it's leaving some learners behind and actively putting others off. If they travel through KS2 with the same learning-by-numbers lessons, the novelty will wear off even for those currently interested. Everything looks the same!