If politicians are serious about rebuilding our communities, they need to recognise that art and creativity are not the finishing touches. They are part of the foundations. Andy Burnham recently said that culture is too often dismissed as a distraction, a “nice to have”.
Yet, as he put it, “it’s about making sense of your own reality”. Culture is not something we add once the work of rebuilding communities has been done. Culture is part of how we rebuild them.
It creates places where people meet, gives them agency, opens doors into careers they might otherwise never have imagined, brings life back to empty buildings and struggling high streets, and gives communities the opportunity to tell their stories. But we have been steadily stripping away the infrastructure of arts education that makes this possible. In schools, provision for arts subjects has declined.
The Cultural Learning Alliance reports a 42% fall in arts GCSE entries since 2010. At universities, art education has faced an increasing battle to justify its existence in relation to future economic validity. And in museums, learning teams are often the first to face cuts when funding is stretched.
The government’s curriculum review and renewed commitments to museum funding suggest an appetite to think differently. But if we are serious about changing the direction of travel, we should look beyond policies to the organisations already doing the work. The new Freelands awards are one way of doing that, committing £1.5m over five years to recognising progressive visual art education across museums, galleries and arts organisations.
It’s central to Freelands Foundation’s mission to champion art education. Our first three winners, each of whom receive £100,000, demonstrate what is possible. In Barrow-in-Furness, Signal has become an essential part of a community dominated by the shipyard and now building nuclear submarines, that is remote and culturally underserved.
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