campaign

Autumn Statement response

On 25 November 2015, Chancellor George Osborne delivered his autumn statement, announcing that funding for Arts Council England (ACE) will increase by around £10 million by 2019/2020. Other pledges included £150 million for The Science Museum, British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum to replace storage facilities; £78 million towards The Factory, Manchester and £4 million for Birmingham Arts Hub.

ACE chair, Sir Peter Bazalgette has acknowledged the importance of campaigners within the arts sector in this victory. The expected cuts have been avoided through the collaboration of ACE and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), as well as through valuable nationwide campaigns such as What Next?’s arts4britain campaign.

Whilst cuts to local governments, changes to the education system and on-going devolution leave much work to do, this is a moment to celebrate the impact of a unified campaign to protect arts and culture in this country.

ACA Roundtable

ACA Roundtable

Earlier this year, ACA sent a survey to members asking them to suggest potential causes for a decline in professionally produced arts for children. The survey identified some key areas that need to be addressed, regarding restrictions in funding and limitations in the National Curriculum itself.

Survey respondents have been invited to attend a round table hosted by ACA at The Young Vic on Tuesday 22 September. In this session, we will discuss the issues presented, aim to find a sustainable course of positive action, and examine how ACA can help further raise the profile of children’s arts.

If you are interested in following the conversation, or contributing your own thoughts, follow us on Twitter @ChildrensArts and tweet us on the day using #….. You can also keep an eye on our website and Facebook page for updates after the event about findings, and future related action.

ACA Round Table Report

Children’s TV/media rights?

Children’s TV/media rights?

Some thoughts for ACA by Oli Hyatt Animation U.K.

www.animationuk.org

“UK originated content is quickly disappearing from our screen despite an ever increasing dearth of platforms pushing it out.
Public Service Broadcasting commercial channels are reversing out of children original content, with their investment falling 96% in a little over ten years. The BBC has produced over 60% less original hours over the same period.

Children’s content is in crisis and Ofcom seemingly powerless to reverse the decline despite consistently airing their concern. I do wonder where the next incentive or intervention can come from.
The BBC is an easier fix. Whatever the outcome of the BBC settlement it will give Children’s parity in funding to Adults. Sounds fair doesn’t it, I’m happy to argue over what “parity” means, but as a concept it just feels like a good place to start.
What we need is a bold ambitious plan for our children’s content. One thing’s for sure, the next couple of years will be crucial in defining what the long term outcome for children’s content is”.

ACA is supporting Bacc for the Future campaign and we urge all our members to sign the petition:

ACA is supporting Bacc for the Future campaign and we urge all our members to sign the petition:

www.baccforthefuture.com/sign-the-petition.html

The Department for Education is planning to make the five English Baccalaureate (EBacc) subject areas compulsory for all secondary school pupils. The EBacc list of subjects contains no creative arts subjects.

It will make a narrow list of five subject areas compulsory – maths, English, sciences, languages (ancient and modern) and history or geography. If the proposals go ahead, creativity in schools would be damaged and there would be little room in the school day for the arts, music and drama.

Numerous studies have demonstrated both the lack of evidence for the choice of subjects in the EBacc and the harmful impact it has had on cultural and creative subjects in schools.

We know that creativity is educationally and economically valuable and it is valued by the British public so we are working together to urge the Government to reconsider their proposals.

Exclusion of music, art or culture from state secondary school core subject English Baccalaureate requirements – Lord Aberdare 22 July 2015, Lord  Aberdare asked a question in the House of Lords about the ommision of creative subjects from the English Baccalaureate

ACA Petitions Society Of London Theatres

ACA Petitions Society Of London Theatres

ACA has written to the Society of London Theatres asking for a change in the Olivier Awards to create a much needed new award, Best Production for Young Audiences.

Read the full letter here

If you feel strongly that the Best Entertainment and Family category would be best split into two awards, one for Best Entertainment, the other for Best Production for Young Audiences, ACA suggests that you should send a letter to

Society of London Theatre (Olivier Awards),
32 Rose Street,
London, WC2E 9ET
.

 

 

 

King’s College Cultural Enquiry into access to the arts for young people – speech by Vicky Ireland

The below linked file is a recent article by Sir Ken Robinson and below is a verbatim speech which was Vicky Ireland’s contribution to the King’s College Cultural Enquiry into access to the arts for young people.

 

My name is Vicky Ireland.  I am part of the living archive of this conversation having been born in 1945 and started work in 1966 as a member of the newly established TIE (Theatre-in-Education) team at the Belgrade Theatre Coventry. You are talking about my life.

Having to justify the goodness and the right of arts in our lives makes me so angry. Since cavemen painted on walls we have known the benefit of the arts; why do we have to keep proving it when we have masses of documentation and evidence? It is a Sisyphean task, with results to be forever ignored by politicians because the importance of arts and culture in our lives, is not a vote-catcher.

Why not? Because we are a philistine community in England, puritanical since Oliver Cromwell, ‘the arts are degenerate; they are a luxury; they are an add-on’, they are not recognised as something that enhances the quality of everyday life. 

Until the person in the street is re-educated to understand that the arts are integral, and this becomes a voting issue, nothing will change and change becomes more difficult.

When I started at the Belgrade I was interviewed by the city council, local philosophers.  They employed me; they had vision; they had passion; ordinary people who put the money together to make that TIE team happen and employ seven people.  A brilliant, brave, grass-roots initiative that shared the big questions of life with children, and which has since spread all around the world. But Theatre-in-Education has largely disappeared in England because Arts Council policy decided it would be better to have a sole Education Officer, rather than an autonomous  team and this has morphed into, “the Education Department”.

Organisations should be inclusive, with work for young people and children firmly rooted within their portfolio but if this view is not held and initiated by the person at the top, it becomes ghettoised; the main body does not do the work because the Education Department does it.  It has taken the National Theatre fifty years for its Artistic Director to allow work for little children to be commissioned and staged within one of its main theatres, rather than hived out to the Education Department.  Until arts organisations recognise that they have to serve all of the community, arts for young people will continue to be, in many cases, an add-on. 

We hoped the big questions TIE asked of children would continue to be asked, but having watched arts for children all my life, the difference now is that material is anodyne. Safe titles, safe content  no risk factor.  We have lost the passion to discuss the difficult. I talk to students in drama schools; they do not vote, they are not interested in politics; they have not been introduced to the great “whys”,  of life at an early enough age to form their own perceptions and voice.

We need to wake up and speak up for the  arts; for the importance of their place in our  live, for grass roots initiatives; for  passionate and talented artists to create challenging  work for, and with children,  -in order to develop a more caring, courageous and creative society.

We ignore doing this at our peril.

 

Ken Robinson article PDF

An Open Letter

To:
Alan Davey, Chief Executive, Arts Council England

From:
Action for Children’s Arts
Theatre for Young Audiences UK

Dear Alan Davey,

We are writing on behalf of the membership organisations, Theatre for Young Audiences UK (TYA UK) a member of Global Association ASSITEJ and Action for Children’s Arts (ACA), who between them represent more than 400 independent artists and organisations committed to the arts for children and young people.

We are writing to raise our collective concerns about the positioning of the arts for young people in the recent This England report.

As an artistic community dedicated to developing the arts for, by and with children and young people, we welcome the centrality of Goal 5 in the Arts Council’s 10 year Strategic Framework. We share your belief that every child and young person should have the opportunity to experience the richness of the arts. We also share your concerns about the provision of non-core arts subjects in the curriculum, as drama and theatre particularly, become increasingly marginalised within schools.

In Great Art and Culture for Everyone, Goal 5 is defined in terms of actions and outcomes focused on the ambition that children and young people have the best current and future artistic lives they can have and that ‘they are able to develop their artistic capabilities and engage with, and shape, the arts’.

We support the view that the arts should be a holistic and enriching part of childhood, not just skewed to educational and participatory activities. There is no doubt that the centrality of children and young people’s entitlement to culture within the strategy is a significant move forwards.

However, the opening statement under Goal 5 of the This England report reads as follows:

“Children and young people represent both the creative talent of tomorrow, and our future audiences” (pg 29)

Whilst this statement is true, the fact that no other entitlement of children is outlined, which recognises children as creative beings; as participants, as artists, as decision makers as well as audiences, now, is hugely problematic.

Fundamentally, as you know, arts experiences at their best are a way of investigating and understanding our world and our feelings and children and young people’s engagement is no less important, we would argue more so, than that of those older than them.

For those of us who are fortunate enough to work in this field, there is little doubt that quality early arts experiences inspire hearts, challenge minds and awaken imaginations in a profound way. The role of young people as ‘future audiences and future talent’ is disappointingly regressive and significantly out of kilter with ACE’S own Great Art for Everyone and with the artistic community who know and understand the value of work for, by and with children and young people.

Documents such as This England are important statements about the role of culture in our national life and influence the policies that will shape our cultural diet in the future. We therefore ask you to review this articulation of policy and recognise that our shared primary objective should be to provide children and young people with art of the highest quality because it should be a crucial and enriching part of everyone’s childhood.

We look forward to your response.

Yours sincerely,

David Wood OBE, Chair, ACA
Steve Ball, Chair, TYA England
Nina Hajiyianni, Chair, TYA UK

On behalf of the membership of TYA UK and ACA.

Start taking action for children’s arts

Human beings thrive on arts and culture. This is evidenced not only by the huge swathes of visitors to museums and art galleries every day (Tate Modern counted nearly 4,000 visitors per day for the 2011 Gaugin show), but also by the abundance of organisations and activities related to the arts. If you attempt to type in to a search engine some vague term such as ‘arts uk’, you are immediately bombarded with millions of links to the seemingly infinite facets of the arts industry; theatre, dance, fine art, to name just the most obvious. So with all this huge wealth of resources in the arts surely our kids have more than they need in the way of access to them. Not so. A recent UNICEF report showed that, unsurprisingly, ‘in the UK inequality was…seen in access to outdoor, sporting and creative activities, with poorer children spending more sedentary time in front of screens whilst the more affluent had access to a wide range of sports and other pursuits’, and a new report by the Children’s Society shows that half a million children in Britain are unhappy with their lives.

Some of this must be a direct result of the elitist tradition of arts and culture for the upper classes which still abounds in the UK, perpetuated by rising costs of attendance and lowered wages, which completely prices out a whole chunk of society who couldn’t possibly afford to spend £60 on a ticket to the Opera. And what of your average west end show? You’re still looking at around £20-30 per ticket. More affordable for the so called ‘squeezed middle’ but still out of reach for the average family, except perhaps as an irregular treat. No wonder then that cultural activities such as these are seen as being ‘for posh people’ or ‘for university bods’. Having grown up in a working class town on a council estate, these are genuine descriptions I still hear regularly from both adults and children, which is depressing in its self-defeatism. Any one of the people on that estate could enjoy a gallery or theatre show just as much as a ‘uni bod’ if they could go with an open mind and the self confidence that comes with knowing these things are there for THEM. Cultural public ownership often doesn’t feel as if it includes the working classes.

With these entitlement attitudes being cyclically ingrained in kids at home and the government demonising the working class even more than usual, through a constant barrage of recession-approved negative association (welfare – they don’t deserve it, jobs – they can’t be bothered, health – they can pay for it themselves etc.) the middle and upper classes dominate the market almost entirely. This attitude has to be changed and to do that, prices need to drop to a reasonable level, as well as provision of far more free outreach workshops which take the theatre out of the west end and encourage parents and children to get involved. It is do-able if the funding were there. It’s investment in our children, and you’d think we’d jump at the idea. But this brings us squarely to the general British attitude towards children and childhood. To be blunt we just don’t respect it. This attitude leaches into the top echelons of many arts organisations, where children appear to be an afterthought. I’m not saying people don’t care, or that they don’t do their best; in fact I’m generalising in a big way, but I’m talking more about an overarching attitude and social manner. Our modern family zeitgeist, if you like. Capitalism and major corporative influence of a level never seen before, sees us now buying into the commercialisation of our own children, then feigning ironic surprise when they riot angrily and prioritise free clothes and shoes. The arts have been proven to have a beneficial effect on cognitive development, so why are we allowing this aspect of childhood experience to be pushed aside by a Gove-led education system concerned only with academic league tables and in churning out future business graduates from business-run Academies expected to ‘save the failing system’? We need to mobilise.

Action for Children’s Arts recently sent Freedom of Information requests to 20 major arts organisations in the UK, asking them what percentage of their annual budget was spent on producing work for children. The results were shocking. Children under 12 make up 15% of the population and yet rarely more than 1% of any organisation’s budget was spent on them alone. We should, in fact, be spending more than the technical 15% on them – like I say, investing in their and our futures. But as well as not being bestowed with extra, they are refused even their fair share. 1% funding for our children is a disgracefully poor representation of our public arts industry. ACA held a conference on 19 June 2012 to discuss how we can work together to change this. The conference was insightful and full of optimism for future policy reform, both within the government itself and individual organisations such as the BBC and the Arts Council, among others. We are continuing to discuss and gather ideas, via twitter and on the website, to inform a discussion group in the pipeline, whereby we aim for the outcome of a solid action plan and potential children’s arts charter.

Let us not forget how many organisations there are who do provide arts services for children and work tirelessly to keep our children’s imagination filled with fun and play and wondrous things: Unicorn Theatre, Polka Theatre, 5x5x5=creativity and Imaginate to name but a very very few. However, children as a whole section of society are underrepresented in the arts and are too often lumped into ‘families’ groups whereby an adult event is deemed suitable for children rather than being devised with children in mind.

The number of arts facilities provided just for children does in no way represent their percentage numbers in society and this fact alone does them a great injustice. It’s about time we started making children our priority, the future of this country. It’s about time we started taking responsibility for the fact that they feel angry and undervalued and not lazily blame the parents, but blame the culture. When art becomes truly art for all, for the whole of society, we will have achieved our goal. Until then, join us in fighting for an undeniable right for our children, the right to have access to the arts.

Kate Withstandley

Exploring Art in the City

 

Putting Children First

Against a background of growing concern about children’s well-being in the UK, negative perceptions of children and a feeling that childhood itself is undervalued, perhaps we should not be surprised that little more than 1% of public funding for the arts is directed towards work for which children are the main audience.

This is what Action for Children’s Arts found to be the case when we sent Freedom of Information requests to twenty of the UK’s major arts organisations, the four national Arts Councils and the British Film Institute.  Their responses are included in a report, Putting Children First, that was presented at a conference at the Unicorn Theatre, London, on 19 June.

We asked the UK’s arts funding bodies what proportion of their grants helped to fund work aimed at children up to 12 years of age.  None of them was able to give a precise answer.  The BFI was unable to identify films made specifically for this age group, only those classified by the British Board of Film Censors as either U, PG or 12A.  Each of the national Arts Councils gave a high priority to ‘children and young people’ but none of them could say exactly how much their clients spent on work aimed at children.

We asked our sample of arts organisations how much of their budget went on productions, performances, exhibitions or broadcasts aimed wholly or mainly at children up to 12 years of age.  It was a relatively small sample, covering all the major art forms, but the degree of consistency between the answers we were given suggests that the results are likely to be representative.  The BBC spends 3% of its budget on programmes for children.  That’s less than it spent three years ago.  On average, the UK’s flagship arts organisations spend just over 2% of their total budget on the performance or exhibition of original work for children.

Since the publication of The Arts in Schools by the Gulbenkian Foundation in 1982, the arts world has generally perceived its relationship to children in the context of education.  Successive governments have funded programmes such as Creative Partnerships to promote links between the arts and education sectors.  Government-commissioned reports, from All Our Futures in 1999 to this year’s Henley Review of Cultural Education, have argued for the central place of the arts in children’s learning.

Most arts organisations today have strong education departments running programmes of high quality.  The irony is that, in most cases, they spend more on these programmes than they do on producing or presenting original work for children.  It is still the case that most theatres do one family show a year – at Christmas – and that most cultural organisations plan their programmes primarily to meet the perceived needs and interests of an adult audience.

Children up to twelve years old make up around 15% of the population.  The arts have a special place in their lives.  Through reading, singing and dancing, watching plays and films, seeing their lives reflected in paintings and sculptures, children’s imaginations are stimulated and they learn to be creative.  The attitudes, values and skills that we learn in childhood stay with us for the rest of our lives.  No one who works in the arts would disagree with that.  So why do we spend so little on children’s arts?

The cynical answer would be that more for children would mean less for grown-ups.  (They asked for more!)

The realistic answer would be that the arts are no different from any other group in a country that came bottom of the league in the 2007 UNICEF report on children’s well-being in 21 industrialised nations.

A better answer would be to make a less rigid distinction between children and grown-ups when it comes to the arts.  The best children’s books can be read and enjoyed by grown-ups too.  The best children’s theatre is a treat for parents and teachers (who have the added enjoyment of seeing the children enjoy themselves).  The best artists think like children.

With our report and our conference as a starting point, Action for Children’s Arts will be campaigning vigorously from now on for an overhaul of practice in the arts world.  We want galleries to put on exhibitions that children will want their parents to see.  We want the production of original work for children to be part of the remit of our flagship cultural organisations.  We want the BBC to start commissioning home-grown programmes for children again. We want the cultural sector as a whole to put children first.

Please read the report and join in the debate.