Every Child Can. If Only They Could.
There is a particular kind of government announcement that manages to be simultaneously well-intentioned, inadequate, and infuriating. Last week’s ‘Every Child Can’ programme is a masterclass in the genre.
The headline sounds impressive: £132.5 million from the Dormant Assets Scheme to enrich the lives of children through arts, sport, nature, civic life, and life skills. It takes about thirty seconds with a calculator — and the Department for Education’s own published statistics — to establish what this actually means.
According to the DfE’s Schools, pupils and their characteristics release for 2025/26, published on 4 June 2026, there are 8,920,227 pupils in schools in England. £132.5 million divided by 8,920,227 is £14.85 per child — under fifteen pounds, to be spread across five separate categories of activity, delivered both in and out of school, over the course of this parliament. If we restrict the calculation to the 8,359,972 children in state-funded schools — the ones who actually need this support, since the 560,255 children in independent schools (6.3% of the total) are already well provided for — the figure rises to £15.85. Per child. For arts, music, drama, dance, sport, nature, civic engagement, and life skills combined.
There are 4,470,363 children in state-funded primary schools across 16,712 primary schools in England. Even if the entire £132.5 million were spent exclusively on those primary children — ignoring secondary schools, ignoring sport, ignoring nature and civic engagement and all the government’s other aspirations — it would amount to £29.64 per child. For comparison, Cotswolds Arts Through Schools spends £26 to £40 per child per year to deliver professional arts education alone. The government’s entire enrichment fund for all activities across all ages and all categories barely covers what a single small programme in rural Oxfordshire spends on the arts.
You know the words that accompany these announcements. With each additional sentence the ambition grows and the funds are spread more thinly. New benchmarks for schools. Ofsted to assess enrichment offers. School profiles for parents. Five categories: arts and culture; civic engagement; nature, outdoor and adventure; life and future skills including STEM; sport and physical activities. Activities could include music groups, engineering clubs, debating societies, football clubs, and much more. The intention is to develop ‘engaging and enriching offers that reflect the needs of pupils and communities.’ If it wasn’t so serious, it would be comic.
The words are fine, as they always are. Bridget Phillipson says every child should be able to enjoy sport and the creative arts, not just the lucky few. Lisa Nandy says every child deserves the chance to find their spark through great art, sport, music, dance or drama — that arts and culture belong to all of us, not just a privileged few, and that a child who loves the arts shouldn’t have to be born into the right postcode to pursue it. For too long, she says, we have underinvested in a generation with appalling consequences.
She is right. But neither Secretary of State has begun to spell out the scale of what she is describing. The DfE’s own data shows that 6.3% of children are in independent schools — not 7% as is often loosely cited. The remaining 93.7% are in state schools. As Richard Morrison noted in The Times in April 2026, the clear majority of conservatoire students are privately educated. The pipeline from state primary school to professional arts, to the creative industries that contribute £126 billion a year to the economy, closes at age seven or eight. It closes in the primary school classroom. And it will not be reopened by £14.85 spread across five activity categories – most of it probably in secondary schools.
The context is bleaker than the announcement acknowledges. The same DfE data shows that 26.5% of all pupils — over 2.2 million children — are eligible for Free School Meals. In primary schools the average FSM rate across year groups is 26.1%, rising to 31.6% in Year 6. That last figure deserves to be read twice: nearly one in three children leaving primary school is now eligible for Free School Meals. In 2015/16 the equivalent figure was 15.7%. The FSM rate at Year 6 has more than doubled in a decade. This is the population the government is proposing to enrich with £14.85 per child.
The government’s own State of the Nation survey of 14,000 young people found that despite being the most digitally connected generation in history, young people today face some of the highest levels of isolation globally. They want safe spaces, trusted adults, better mental health support, and greater access to enriching activities. One child, asked what she would do if she wasn’t spending seven to nine hours a day on her smartphone, replied: ‘Stare at the wall.’ In one sentence she summarised the crisis precisely. Children need activities — in school hours, where they can discover what interests them, and out of school hours, where they can pursue what they have discovered. The government appears to have read the reports but not grasped the depth of what they describe.
The Enrichment Framework, Ofsted enrichment assessments, school profiles for parents — the architecture of good intentions is impressive. But architecture without foundations collapses. You cannot deliver high-quality arts, music, and cultural enrichment for £14.85 per child per year across five categories. You cannot pay teachers or arts practitioners to deliver after-school clubs with it. You cannot bring in professional artists, musicians, dancers, and performers with it. You cannot fund transport to galleries, theatres, and concert halls with it.
At a time when most state primary schools have approximately £1 per child per year for all arts activities — art, music, drama, dance, and oracy combined — the fine words of two Secretaries of State cannot be met by adding £14.85 to be divided across everything from football clubs to debating societies to nature walks – even if it was allocated to ALL children.
We know what it actually costs, because we are doing it. Cotswolds Arts Through Schools is spending approximately £26 to £40 per child per year to deliver professional arts education to primary school children across Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, and Warwickshire — and that is with the extraordinary generosity of our partner arts organisations, who contribute their time and expertise at well below market rates. What is needed from government is a ring-fenced £50 per child per year for the arts alone, with additional funding for sport, civic engagement, and the rest of the government’s aspirations on top of that.
Fine words butter no parsnips. They will not solve this crisis either. The government has grasped that something is seriously wrong with childhood in this country. It has not yet grasped what it will actually cost to put it right. And it is still failing a generation of children.
