What Was Said, What Happened
Back in January 2024, we sat down and asked ourselves a simple question: was our own experience of what the arts do for children actually backed up by the evidence, or were we just telling ourselves a comforting story? We went looking, and found study after study — from the Arts Education Partnership, the Journal of Educational Psychology, the University of Nottingham, Brookings, the National Endowment for the Arts — all pointing the same way. Arts-rich schools do better academically. Children in arts-rich schools think more critically, empathise more readily, engage more with school itself. None of it was news to anyone who has spent time in a classroom with a paintbrush or a violin in it. But it was good to have the evidence.
It seemed to me that children in our villages were not getting the opportunities I got in my county primary school. And I was not alone in that impression. I remember doing early scribbling and painting and continuing to enjoy it in secondary school before proudly winning the Headmaster’s Art Prize. I remember country dancing. I remember singing and early choirs — and being sent to the back row because I sang lower than everybody else (no attempt to use that fact in harmonies!). I remember agonising piano lessons with tedious scales and totally off-putting lessons — and I remember regretting I was not being taught tunes we could sing, because what I wanted to do was play songs people could sing along to. But in our primary schools it appeared there was no longer art, singing, instruments, or dancing — what a dismal loss.
That same spring, it briefly looked as though the country’s political class had noticed this disgraceful failure too. In March 2024, Melvyn Bragg wrote in The Times that music was under attack and theatres were closing, warning that a nation sleepwalking into permanent mediocrity might not notice until it was too late. Robert Crampton, in the same paper, described watching drama clubs, holiday workshops and school darkrooms disappear from state schools over twenty-five years, even as independent schools moved the other way, offering their pupils exactly the rounded, creative education state schools were quietly stripping out. And Sir Keir Starmer, then Leader of the Opposition, gave a speech in which he called it ‘immoral that working-class children are being denied the same opportunities’ as privately educated children to reach the top of the arts — citing a 47% fall in arts GCSEs since 2010, and noting that although 94% of British children attend state school, only 60% of British acting, directing and music award nominees came through the state system. In a separate interview with Richard Morrison, he went further still: ‘It’s very difficult for a child to aspire to something they know nothing about’ — and insisted that fixing this had to start at primary school, not GCSE.
That was the promise. Here is what happened.
Sir Keir Starmer won the 2024 general election, became Prime Minister, and resigned on 20 July 2026 — just over two years later — amid mounting economic strain and public dissatisfaction, handing over to Andy Burnham. In that time, we are not aware of any dedicated new investment in primary arts education of the kind his own words called for. The GCSE arts decline he cited in 2024 has continued: Music GCSE entries alone are down 10.8% since 2017, and 42% of schools now enter no pupils for Music GCSE at all. The funding cuts and music hub reductions Bragg described — hubs cut nationally from 116 to 43, English National Opera given 24 hours’ notice that its funding was being withdrawn — were not reversed. A dismal catalogue of neglect and failure.
The new government’s current education secretary, Lucy Powell, has this summer announced sweeping curriculum reform — but her plans are about reframing what schools prioritise, not new ring-fenced money for the arts specifically. Meanwhile, a coalition of 200 organisations has spent the last year building ‘Enrichment Benchmarks’ that name the arts as one of five essential categories every school should provide — and, as we wrote recently, government has been supportive of the concept while attaching no funding to it whatsoever.
Two years of strong words. Almost nothing to show for it, at the level that matters most — the primary classroom, where Starmer himself said the work needed to start.
Which brings us to something genuinely live, right now, that theoretically could actually change this — not through another speech, but through a mechanism with real money attached.
On 1 July 2026, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport opened a 12-week public consultation, the first review of how National Lottery Good Cause funding is distributed since Tessa Jowell’s review back in 2002. In 2025 alone, the Lottery generated over £8 billion in ticket sales, of which £1.7 billion went to good causes — roughly 23p of every pound spent on a ticket. That money is currently split by law: 40% to charitable, health, education and environmental causes, and 20% each to Arts and Culture, Sport, and Heritage. This review could change any of those shares. The arts’ fixed 20% is not guaranteed to survive it.
The case needs to be made not just for the arts in general, but specifically for arts education — for the kind of primary-level investment that every politician quoted in this piece has, at one time or another, said mattered, and that none of them has yet actually funded. The deeper problem is that all National Lottery good cause funding operates on a principle of ‘additionality’ — it is not permitted to substitute for spending government should be providing anyway. The government’s own guidance for this very consultation says as much: Lottery funds ‘are not to be used for standard school budgets.‘ That principle sounds sensible on paper. In practice, it means that as governments have cut arts and sport funding in schools, Lottery money has not been able to step in and plug the gap — leaving small charities like ours, Cotswolds Arts Through Schools filling in lengthy applications, trying to show why what we do is additional and not part of the school budgets but since we work in schools because that is the one place all children can actually be reached, we are told the money cannot be spent there. This consultation alone won’t change that rule. But we can use it to say, loudly, that the rule is currently costing children an education they should already be getting — and you can also write directly, in your own words, to Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, and Lucy Powell, the Education Secretary, to make the case for real money for arts and sport in primary schools.
If you read this blog, if you have ever watched a child’s face change the first time they picked up a violin or held a paintbrush that was actually theirs to keep, you will know how much the arts matter for children. What happens when something that ought to be part of every child’s education is no longer being provided adequately?
What happens when small primary schools cannot afford specialist music teaching, professional artists, instruments or the cultural experiences that children in better-resourced schools take for granted? And what happens when a charity steps in to provide those opportunities, not as an occasional luxury, but because it believes they are fundamental to a rounded education?
There is an important distinction between funding the ordinary running costs of a school and supporting additional creative opportunities that children would otherwise never experience. That distinction needs to be understood by those deciding how Lottery funding is distributed.
This review offers an opportunity to examine whether the current arrangements are reaching the children and communities that need support most, but Lottery funding cannot, and should not, be the entire answer. If the arts are genuinely important to children’s education — as politicians of different parties have repeatedly acknowledged — then their place in primary schools deserves sustained attention, proper resources and a clear commitment.
I began by remembering the education I received: painting, singing, dancing and music, even if my piano lessons were not quite what I had hoped for. I did not become a professional artist or musician. That was never the point – those experiences were part of growing up. They gave me opportunities to try things, to make things, to perform, to discover what I enjoyed and what I did not and I want today’s children to have those opportunities too.
At CATS, we are doing what we can – across more than 70 state primary schools, we bring professional artists, musicians and cultural organisations into children’s lives, but the question is not whether charities such as ours can keep finding ways to help – it is whether the country is prepared to make the arts a dependable part of every child’s education, rather than something available only when a school finds an unusually determined headteacher, a generous donor or a local charity.
The words spoken in 2024 were encouraging.
What matters now is what follows them.
