Arts in Schools: Foundations for the Future
The “Arts in Schools: Foundations for the Future” report (https://www.culturallearningalliance.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/The-Arts-in-Schools-full-report-2023.pdf) highlights that while arts are crucial for well-being, skills, and academics, access to the arts in English state schools is declining due to narrow accountability, creating a two-tier system. Key findings stress the need for a balanced education valuing the “whole person,” integrated arts provision with specialist teachers, stronger school leadership, and collaboration with arts organizations, emphasizing that arts aren’t a “nice-to-have” but vital for addressing mental health and building resilience, requiring immediate systemic change, not just more research.
Key Findings
- Undervalued but Essential: Arts education is critical for holistic human development, mental health, social cohesion, and skills for life and work, yet it’s undervalued in the state system.
- Arts subjects and experiences have an evidenced role in contributing to improving outcomes for children and young people, providing them with skills for life and skills for work.
- The arts are ‘full spectrum’ subjects, supporting the development of critical thinking, oracy, self-expression, self-belief, independence, initiative, focus, flexibility, collaboration, compassion, responsibility, resilience, achievement, and creative freedom
- Access is Not Assumed: Access to arts is no longer guaranteed, with specialist teaching and resources often lacking, especially in contrast to Scotland, Wales, and the independent sector.
- Education’s Purpose Needs Reimagining: The current narrow focus on accountability (e.g., league tables) marginalizes arts, necessitating a broader view of education that develops the “whole person”.
- Inspirational Practice Exists: There are pockets of excellence and innovative practice, but these are threatened by systemic issues, showing progress isn’t linear. Take-up is uneven; the arts are much more highly valued in independent schools.
- Systemic Change Required: Current problems stem from the broader education context, requiring significant system change, not just isolated arts programs, to fix.
Core Principles for an Arts-Rich School (Emerging from Findings)
- Breadth & Balance: Exposure to all art forms, balancing knowledge and skills.
- Inclusion: Meeting the needs of all learners, including those with SEN or disadvantage.
- Relevance: Connecting arts to children’s lives and future world.
- Learner Voice: Including children and young people in arts provision.
- Leadership: Senior leaders championing creativity.
- Specialists & Partnerships: Embedding specialist teachers and collaborating with external arts organizations.
Recommendations & Calls to Action
- Develop a coherent, evidence-based narrative for the arts in schools.
- Support teacher agency and professional development for arts specialists.
- Foster stronger links between schools, parents, policymakers, and arts organizations.
- Address the “can we afford not to invest” question, acting on existing evidence.
Key Quotes
Arts subjects and experiences have an evidenced role in contributing to improving outcomes for children and young people, providing them with skills for life and skills for work. The arts are an essential tool in building a humane society. They are a building block for social cohesion; they are important for understanding our collective histories, and for promoting inclusion, and enabling agency within a diverse society. They underpin our cultures, and the economy, and are important for personal development, health and wellbeing. They provide memorable experiences and a creative outlet which enables children to explore and express their emotions and their identities, and can help in supporting children who are struggling with their wellbeing. They can enable young people to collaborate and flourish as individuals in their schools, communities and the wider world, as well as in their future careers. Arts subjects have intellectual depth, breadth, and rigour. A rich arts education supports the development of many desirable skills and capacities which are valued by young people and by employers, including teamwork, empathy, problem-solving, experimentation, self-confidence, imagination, innovation, and creativity. We describe the arts as being ‘full spectrum’ subjects, supporting the development of critical thinking, oracy, self-expression, self-belief, independence, initiative, focus, flexibility, collaboration, compassion, responsibility, resilience, achievement, and creative freedom.
Since the National Curriculum was introduced there have been multiple changes of direction and little focus on the purposes of education. There is no systemic rationale for what is taught, and no coherent and ambitious vision for education in relation to the economy, society, community or the individual: as a result, we have a schooling system that prioritises school performance based on exam grades in defined subject areas, and in which success measures do not value the whole child. In the absence of consensus around purpose, in the context of increased accountability focused on a narrow range of subject areas, and acute funding pressures, there has been a systematic downgrading or exclusion of arts subjects and experiences. Structural barriers have led to a lack of subject parity. At every stage in the schooling system the arts are disadvantaged: at initial teacher recruitment and training through to a lack of support for arts teaching in primary schools.
The prioritisation of EBacc (non-arts) subjects in secondary accountability measures has meant a reduction in the level of arts subjects, teachers and resources available, and therefore declining GCSE and A Level take-up. Dance and drama have no parity at inspection level, and film and digital media have been excluded from the national curriculum. We have an assessment regime that does not work for arts subjects, which require different kinds of measurement, and the investment required to develop these has not been made because of their perceived low status. Finally, we have the long tail of the exclusion of the arts from the higher education facilitating subjects list before 2019, thereby further disincentivising arts take-up. Loss of subjects and teachers cannot easily be reversed. This downgrading of the arts is damaging for young people’s lives and aspirations, for the arts education workforce, for the workforce more widely, and for the health and diversity of the creative industries. And access to the arts is not equitable: we have a two-tier system, with the arts more highly valued in independent schools.
Many of the current problems we identify are as much about the wider context in which learning takes place as about the specific challenges for the arts in schools, and there are now widespread calls for education system change: we show that this is necessary and possible. In the past, major shifts in education policy – such as in 1944 – have emerged from times of crisis. As in 1982, we are writing at a time of social and political change, when the country is facing significant challenges, and when all political parties believe that investment in education and skills will be key to economic growth. We have arrived at a knowledge-centred approach to learning, and a system that has the objective of creating the employees of the future has failed to embrace what employers say they want – or the value of the arts on a personal level to young people – and has prioritised learning to count over learning to create. The system is still running on outdated policies from the late 1980s without a clear purpose for what schools are equipping young people with, or why.
Whenever there has been disquiet about the place of the arts in schools, the response of governments and funding agencies has been to offer non-statutory guidance, or to put in place time-limited ‘pilot’ and ‘targeted’ projects, or ‘plans’, to fill the gap. We see the very existence of these interventions as evidence that the arts have not had a central place in schooling, and that arts subjects have been consistently sidelined. We are not making a special case for the arts but would like to see a new public debate about education in England, as has happened in Scotland and Wales, where education and skills are devolved matters. This would enable us to look at what happens in schools anew, examining its fitness for the current context, and involve educators, parents, young people and employers, including the professional arts sector. In order to ensure access to the benefits of arts subjects that children and young people require we need a broader and more balanced curriculum for our schools, one that equips young people for the present as well as the future, and with a new area of learning, Expressive Arts, set alongside other curriculum areas of study – all of which are equal in status, and aligned to clear purposes for schooling.
