Money makes the world go around but art gives life shape

If there’s one thing the creative industries are used to doing, it’s justifying their existence with compelling statistics. That’s particularly true in education with Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) now answering to three frameworks designed to assess the value of their work.

First came REF, the Research Excellence Framework, swiftly followed by TEF, the Teaching Excellence Framework. Both are rigorous, systematic and comprehensive exercises which reward institutions based on submissions and evidence.

But that’s not true of the third assessment tool in the government’s arsenal: the KEF or Knowledge Exchange Framework, which aims to analyse the value of an institution’s research – and who it’s shared with – to both the economy and society.

As a society, what we value is in constant reappraisal. The biggest problem with KEF’s metrics, though, is that they conflate income with impact, and that’s something that should concern the creative industries way beyond the lecture hall.

Arts impact not easy to quantify

Everything we do at the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) is focused on preparing our musicians to shape and lead the music industry of the future. This ethos underlies our whole strategy.

For more than 50 years, that pursuit has been getting our academics out of bed in the morning, shaping every aspect of a student’s life to be relevant, useful and impactful beyond our institution.

We are passionate about the role of music in people’s lives, and about developing and experimenting with ways we can enrich and grow this further. As Churchill saw it: “Ill fares the race which fails to salute the arts with the reverence and delight which are their due.”

Many of the RNCM’s longest running and most rewarding initiatives are driven by their strong social impact. While Russell Group institutions have had great success with start-ups and high profit IP, our impact is less easily quantified in business terms.

Powerful indirect impact

Our staff and students work on music that supports people with Parkinson’s, that aids quality of life for children in hospital, and that enables people in prisons to express themselves through creative work.

We partner with local museums to tell our sector’s story in exciting new ways. This work has powerful indirect economic impact by relieving costs elsewhere – in the NHS for instance – and can be a catalyst for societal cohesion.

The RNCM building is a public venue at the heart of Manchester’s cultural scene and students share their work with the public daily – just as staff share their knowledge around the world at academic conferences, masterclasses, performances and summer schools.

From day one of a student’s undergraduate studies, we teach them about tax, video editing, website design and how to optimise their engagement with social media. They all undertake industry placements across a mix of roles, and they’re invited to devise their own creative projects and bid for funding from a £5,000 prize fund (generously supported by Yamaha) to make them happen.

Worth not registered

And yet, very little of that matters when it comes to the KEF. While it all has measurable worth to students’ outcomes, to society and to industry, very little registers on the existing set of KEF metrics.

Why is that important? Because the arts cluster is unable to get credit for the work it does. Even though the data submitted is a combination of income, people engaged and text relating to KE, the financial reward for KE activity – Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF) – is calculated only in line with how much income has been generated.

The conflict is obvious. Smaller institutions – especially in the arts cluster – are least able to afford to lose HEIF and least well placed to gain from this system. Being in the north appears to make institutions doubly vulnerable; 83.5% of the total 2022-23 HEIF allocation for the arts cluster was concentrated in London.

Perhaps even more important, these figures suggest to potential partners that we are not pulling our weight, because almost everything of indirect financial or societal value is absent from the easily digestible stats, relegated to the under-read narrative statement at the end of the institution KEF profile published online.

In that omission, there’s real risk of reputational harm. Research England’s own data evidences that engagement with this section is poor and, what’s more, there’s no method to measure, judge and verify the information in those statements. Putting that in place would take a researched review, one that Research England seems reluctant to make.

We are about more than money

In a wider context, the future of creative and performing arts relies on an accessible and sustainable route to training – be that in music, drama, art, design, film, gaming, or any other elite discipline.

More than nine in 10 of us reports engaging with the arts on a regular basis, and the sector grows at a faster rate than the wider economy. Despite that, it is systematically underfunded – music in particular. From pre-tertiary provision to funding for professional orchestras, money is almost impossible to come by.

Understanding the actual vs anecdotal value of the creative arts to society makes arts cluster HEIs crowing about KEF metrics a bit more tolerable. We are about more than the money we make; our work improves wellbeing, delivers critical healthcare, supports the rehabilitation of prisoners, and enriches the experience of all of us. To paraphrase the playwright Jean Anouilh: “The object of art is to give life a shape.”

Not just a funding bid afterthought

HEIs seek to undertake original research and for this research to have impact. However, being able to relate and apply the findings of our research to the real world should not be a funding bid afterthought.

Our research is developed according to what knowledge people need us to create and share. Income is a valuable outcome but, as it stands, unless we earn money from it, we will be unable to represent our valuable work in this year’s easily auditable HEBCI return. Boiling down KEF to the bottom line will miss the opportunity to create wide-reaching transformation in our sector, in our graduates and in our world.

Despite the richness of our knowledge exchange and prioritisation of impact for social good, not to mention many centuries of human experience that testifies to the economic and social worth of the creative industries, we continue to limit how loudly our arts cluster can celebrate their achievements.

That must change so that pathways into the creative arts are properly valued and sustainable, because the alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.