Arts learning and the budget

“Can you give me one memory from the pandemic?” I asked this question to my Year 5 class in east London last week, provoked by yet more edu-catastrophising about the post-Covid state of our children.

Apparently, we should worry especially about 9-10-year-olds who were around six when lockdown hit. They lost the key years to develop language and socialising skills at school and are now seen as the toughest year group in many primary schools.

There may be some truth in this, but I am never quite sure what purpose these doomsday predictions serve, beyond headlines and possible funding for those – usually non-teachers – making them.

I asked the same question of a Year 3 class, who would have been four back in 2020. Although their memories are probably even less reliable, I noticed some similarities in their responses.

‘The chance to be touched by art’

Perhaps a whole class discussion is not the place to express the sadder things, but it was striking how almost all offered a positive memory – something unusual, warm and often funny. So many of the memories involved art: drawing and painting; making things from boxes or making sandwiches; showing what they had made to their peers online; doing mini performances on Zoom with their favourite toys.

Posing a single question to 60 children is about as unempirical as research gets. But their answers hint collectively at something our new crop of politicians in power appear to be on the verge of backing: the need to breathe new life into our cultural offer for children and young people.

At the Labour Party conference, the Prime Minister spoke passionately of how learning the flute as a child had opened up worlds for him, and of how all children deserve “the chance to be touched by art”.

Education Secretary Bridget Philipson has backed this up, and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has talked of a decade of creative decline in schools and that she is “determined” to ensure access to arts for every child. Chancellor Rachel Reeves also played the flute and Angela Rayner loves to DJ. Cabinet meetings must feel like kids from Fame.

Stars aligning for a revival of the arts in schools

So, it feels like the stars – and more importantly the politicians – are aligning for a serious, sustained revival of arts and cultural learning for all children and young people, with access and equity at the heart of this mission.

These words are important signals, as are other intended changes to the national curriculum, assessment and accountability in schools. The cultural sector – from individual artists to large institutions and the creative industries – stands willing to do even more, and I’d urge all readers to get behind other policy changes expressed in the Cultural Learning Alliance’s Blueprint for an inclusive arts-rich education for every child.

However, without additional dedicated funding, any real revival is highly unlikely. For the rhetoric to become reality, politicians need to put their money where their mouths are. My estimate is that ringfenced funding for arts learning – in and out of school – is around 20% of what it was in 2009.

Music education provision has largely been sustained; but the removal of Creative Partnerships, the Find your Talent programme and other smaller national programmes, plus local cuts to cultural learning and youth services, has systematically and anarchically withered an infrastructure of partnership opportunities with schools and young people that, while far from perfect, had enabled proper progress. As the Prime Minister also said: “We are brilliant at [early encounters with arts and culture] in this country. Brilliant.”

Stuck in a lift with Kier

If I were ever stuck in a lift with Kier – or Rachel, Bridget or Lisa – I’d be asking them for about £150m a year for three years, the same as the current PE and Sports Premium in schools, to start plugging this gap.

Yes, ministers, I know money in this budget is viciously tight, but this small investment could lever so much. A quick, cheapish win that, if invested carefully, could bring a load more resources to the table, particularly from the creative industries. And if they asked me what I would spend it on, I’d have a few answers – the main one being the creation of a National Youth Arts Trust, separate from Arts Council England.

As a primary teacher, I would argue for programmes that incentivise schools to invest in specialist arts and design teachers for Key Stage 2 and convert unused rooms (and falling rolls increase possibilities here) into dedicated spaces for the messier stuff – visual arts and design technology.

At secondary level, I would develop deeper collaborations between artists, arts organisations and art departments that are genuinely looking to grow provision, rather than use a few arts projects as fig leaves to mask a lack of commitment to universal, high-quality arts learning.

Beyond secondary, I would develop a cultural offer for young people not taking arts qualifications. Finally, I’d ask ministers to prioritise dance and design technology, the two subjects most damaged by arts learning austerity.

‘Imagination can be clumsy’

Over and above this, I would ask for time – maybe a whole year – to create a new collective vision; to plan a programme that can build and use the best possible evidence base; to learn from existing strategic efforts such as Creativity Collaboratives and ARK’s work with the Clore Duffield Foundation; and to lever the connections of other committed organisations such as the Day One Trust. I would also ask for a match-funding target, giving a year to match government funding with investment from industry and philanthropy.

As novelist Hanif Kureishi wrote, “ambition without imagination can be clumsy”. Into its second hundred days, this government’s capacity for imaginative choices already feels constrained, partly by external factors, but also by their own blinkers.

A small but significant reinvestment in arts and cultural learning, valuable in its own right, could help this government signal a longer-term commitment to what life might look like when we are out of this mess. As the Prime Minister himself put it, the arts can contribute to joy, but also to “getting lost in something bigger than yourself”.