Could Benchmarks Change Everything?
Since we started Cotswolds Arts Through Schools, arguing for the arts in primary schools has meant making the case from scratch, school by school, funder by funder. That has been true in schools, to trusts and philanthropists, and, when we get the chance, to politicians. Is that about to change?
In 2025, a coalition of over 200 organisations across education, youth work, and philanthropy — convened by the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, Big Education Trust, Oasis Charitable Trust and Rethinking Assessment — published a set of proposed ‘Enrichment Benchmarks’ for schools, modelled explicitly on the Gatsby Benchmarks that transformed careers education after 2014. CATS has joined this coalition, the Enrichment for All Coalition, as a member organisation.
The comparison to Gatsby is instructive. Before 2014, careers advice in English schools was patchy, under-resourced, and entirely dependent on individual headteachers’ priorities. The Gatsby Benchmarks gave it a shared national standard. They were made statutory in 2018, and school achievement against them has more than tripled since — from an average of 1.9 benchmarks met out of 8, to 5.8 by 2024. The Enrichment for All Coalition wants to do the same thing for enrichment: sport, outdoor learning, citizenship, skills — and, explicitly, the arts.
The proposed benchmarks are specific in a way that should matter to anyone who has spent years watching arts provision get squeezed out of the primary timetable. Benchmark 1 proposes a minimum of 80 hours of enrichment per pupil per year, backed by governor-level accountability and a named member of staff responsible for delivery. Benchmark 2 requires every school’s programme to include ‘the arts and creativity — including music, visual and performing arts and design, cultural experiences and trips’ as one of five mandatory categories, alongside citizenship, outdoor learning, sport, and skills development. Benchmark 6 calls on schools to commission and partner with external providers — organisations, in other words, exactly like CATS.
It should be noted, however, that although government has been supportive of the Benchmarks concept, there is no extra funding attached so far.
These benchmarks matter for a simple reason: they turn what CATS already does into something schools may soon be explicitly expected to provide, rather than something a scattering of well-organised schools choose to prioritise if they can find the budget and the will. Nine years ago, careers education had the same problem the arts has now — patchy provision, no shared standard, no accountability mechanism. Benchmarking is fixing that. There is a live, credible attempt underway to do the same for enrichment, arts included.
None of this happens by accident, and none of it happens without money. The coalition’s own report puts an indicative cost on rolling out the framework nationally: somewhere between £150 million and £180 million a year, delivered as an ‘Enrichment Premium’ modelled on the existing pupil premium. Separately, and before the Enrichment Benchmarks report was even published, the education consultant and primary teacher Joe Hallgarten made a strikingly similar case in a piece for Arts Professional, calling for £150 million a year for three years — the same sum as the current PE and Sport Premium — specifically to plug the gap in arts and cultural learning left by more than a decade of cuts. Two independent voices, arriving separately at the same number.
Spread across England’s 4.5 million state-funded nursery and primary pupils (DfE, 2025), £150 million a year works out at roughly £33 per child. That is not a hypothetical figure to us. It sits squarely inside the £26–£40 per child per year that CATS already spends delivering a genuinely arts-rich programme — visual art, music, drama, dance and oracy — across 70 schools in Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Warwickshire. The national ask being discussed in Westminster and in coalition reports is not a speculative number. It is roughly what we already know it costs, because we are already doing it.
However, we know it is inadequate, and we know all of our own expenditure is additional — it does not replace anything schools already receive. Any government funding of this kind would likely be absorbed largely into existing costs, such as teacher salaries, unless it is explicitly ring-fenced as additional, discretionary spending for arts enrichment. Otherwise the money simply disappears into the base budget and nothing changes for children.
Our experience also tells us that what we spend cannot yet deliver music adequately. Music costs more to teach well than visual art. General classroom teachers, supported by materials and structured schemes like Kapow and AccessArt, can teach art competently; our artists then add inspiration, excitement, and teacher training on top. Music is different. Very few general teachers feel confident enough to sing or play an instrument well enough to lead a class. To make a real difference to a school’s musical life, additional professional music teachers are required — and that costs more.
There is a harder edge to this too. The same government data shows the primary-age population is falling — projected to drop by 6.7% by 2030 as the birth-rate decline that began after 2012 works its way through the system. Fewer children should, in principle, make it cheaper to guarantee every child a genuinely arts-rich education, not harder. The ceiling on cost is falling at the same time as the case for investment is strengthening. There has rarely been a better moment to make this argument, and rarely a clearer blueprint for what ‘done properly’ would look like. However, the Treasury funds schools largely per pupil — so as school rolls fall, funding falls with them, while fixed costs (buildings, salaries, heating, lighting, insurance) do not shrink at anything like the same rate. The discretionary budget for arts and other enrichment is exactly the part of school spending that gets squeezed hardest when this happens.
CATS did not wait for a national framework to tell us the arts matter in primary school. But it is welcome, after three years of building this evidence ourselves school by school, to see a credible, cross-sector, Gatsby-modelled effort emerging that could make what we do the expectation, not the exception.
The other side of that expectation is that schools will increasingly be encouraged to seek external partners to help them deliver — organisations like CATS. That means we are likely to be asked to help more schools, at the same time as our existing schools ask us for more. Our own budget has grown from around £7,000 when this all started to currently spending over £350,000 a year; next year we will need over £550,000. Finding that kind of growth, year on year, is a great deal of hard work. If every reader of these blogs gave just £5 every time they read one, we would have exactly the gap we need to close. How about it — can you be part of the solution?
