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In a State
Campaign for the Arts, in partnership with the University of Warwick's Centre for Cultural and Media Policies Studies, has published 'The State of the Arts', a research document that examines the health of the UK arts sector by-analysing data from 2010 to 2023: a period of successive Tory-led governments. The in-depth study utilises five interconnected metrics: funding, provision, engagement, education and employment. While the report reveals that there is great appetite for the arts in the UK, it confirms that the sector has suffered a dramatic downturn in educational terms as well as a series of punishing financial cuts over the Tory austerity years. These factors, resulting in unsustainable practices such as widespread precarious employment, have combined to push the arts ecosystem to the brink.
For most pupils in English state-funded secondary schools, for example, the imposition of the EBacc curriculum and Progress 8 assessment has brought about the marginalisation of the arts. The evidence for this is that the number of arts teachers, and the number of hours spent on both arts teaching and arts engagement in schools have fallen by a quarter since Gordon Brown's Labour government was in power. This has resulted in arts subjects suffering a 29% decline in the share of A-level entries, and a devastating 47% decline in GCSE entries.
Despite the cultural sector growing faster than the wider UK economy, pay remains below the national average in each of the culture industry's sub-sectors (other than in film, TV and music), which means that many jobs in the arts are not only frighteningly precarious but also entirely inaccessible to those without private income or other support. This is an unsustainable situation which bodes ill for the fostering of diverse talent that the sector will rely on to deliver the new Labour government's primary goal: growth.
In terms of funding, the report points out that the UK, one of a small minority of European countries to reduce culture spending per person between 2010 and 2022, now 'has one of the lowest levels of government spending on culture among European nations'. In terms of share of GDP, most European countries reduced their spend on culture between 2010 and 2022, but the UK, despite already spending a lower proportion...