This month we have important information on responding to the government’s Curriculum and Assessment Review – and how we can help; details of a pre-budget announcement about education funding; the launch of the important new report from the Education Oracy Commission; a new report on the role that parental education and wealth plays in the acquisition of ‘assumed knowledge’ from the Social Market Foundation; news about £15m of new funding for school-based nurseries; a new National Audit Office report on support for children and young people with special needs; news that Russell Group university admission metrics will no longer be used in grading England’s schools; and information about a new report which explores how connecting creative clusters across the UK might unlock significant economic and social potential.
Curriculum and Assessment Review
This month and next we are excited to be working on our response to the government’s important Curriculum and Assessment Review, and want to share this with you in advance of the deadline for submission on 22 November.
As you will recall, a full investigation into the curriculum and assessment system in England was pledged in the Labour Party manifesto before the July election. The Curriculum and Assessment review launched just after the general election in July, and the Call for Evidence opened on 25 September.
This a huge opportunity to have your say in the education system in England after 14 years of a stark decline in expressive arts subjects in schools – a decline we chart in our 2024 Report Card. The Call for Evidence is open to everyone, and we need to ensure that DfE hears from arts teachers, school leaders, artists, arts organisations, creative industries employees, parents, carers and any young people who might want to respond. Remember anyone can respond.
The Review team is asking for all respondents to use their online system where possible in order to help them analyse the responses, so you can use the link here. The most important things to do right now as you plan your own responses are to:
- encourage others to respond – we need to turn up the volume on the expressive arts education voice in responses to the review
- encourage colleagues to address three key things in their responses: the stark arts education decline in schools since 2010; the evidenced value of the expressive arts in developing children’s and young people’s capabilities and skills for life and work; and because of this, the importance of expressive arts subjects as an equal curriculum area within a genuinely broad and balanced curriculum in state schools
- use our evidence – and your own – to support your submissions (see below) – the more coordination from our sector, particularly on high-quality evidence, the better.
There are 45 questions in the online portal and you definitely don’t have to respond to all of them unless you want to – we will share with you which we think are most important to address from an expressive arts and cultural learning perspective. A special curriculum Review newsletter (coming soon) will feature our responses, and our suggestions for which sections and questions to prioritise, and will signpost you to helpful evidence to use in your submission.
We will be using our 2024 Report Card as important evidence in our submission. You can also use our Blueprint for an arts-rich education, our 2017 Key Research Findings and – this is new and not yet on our website – our emerging Capabilities Framework which we will share with you in draft form. More very soon on this!
We will also be using this special review newsletter to signpost to subject association responses (including NSEAD, One Dance UK, the Independent Society of Musicians, Music Mark, and National Drama), so that you can see what is being called for from specific arts subject associations across Art & Design, Dance, Drama and Music.
In the meantime, events around the country have been announced this autumn to support the curriculum review. Held in each region in England, the roadshow events will allow experts, parents, teachers, leaders, students and employers to hear from the Review Chair, Professor Becky Francis and other panel members and encourage those attending to give their views. You can find details about the events, which also include online webinars, here. Do make your voices heard on behalf of children’s and young people’s right to an arts-rich education.
Funding for school rebuilding and breakfast clubs in pre-budget announcement
We will have our budget summary for you soon, but on 27 October, the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, announced her intention to protect education priorities in terms of funding decisions with a focus on improving opportunities for children and young people. The Chancellor has committed £1.4 billion to ensure the delivery of the existing School Rebuilding Programme, with 50 rebuilds a year delivering on promises made to parents, teachers and local communities that crumbling school buildings will be rebuilt. In addition, to support parents – particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds – the government also confirmed it will triple its investment in breakfast clubs to more than £30 million to help ensure children are ready to learn at the start of the school day.
To keep more children in stable and loving homes, the government has also announced £44 million to support kinship and foster carers. The government has also confirmed its commitment to further reforms to children’s social care in future spending reviews to make sure every child, irrespective of background, has the best start in life.
The confirmation of the funding for education follows a 5.5% pay increase for school teachers agreed earlier in the year as the government sets out to reset relationships with the sector.
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves said “Protecting funding for education was one of the things I wanted to do first because our children are the future of this country. We might have inherited a mess, but they should not suffer for it.”
Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson said “This is a Budget about fixing the foundations of the country, so there can be no better place to start than the life chances of our children and young people. Our inheritance may be dire, but I will never accept that any child should learn in a crumbling classroom. We are determined to break down those barriers to opportunity, whether it’s brilliant early years, free breakfast clubs or high and rising standards in our schools, this government is putting education back at the forefront of national life.”
CLA is pleased to see this commitment to protecting education priorities and prioritising children and young people from the Chancellor and the Secretary of State for Education. These are important signals from the new government in its first budget and make clear its commitment to break down barriers to opportunity for all children and young people, even when funding is under extreme pressure.
Launch of Oracy Education Commission report
CLA was delighted to be represented at the launch of the Oracy Education Commission report, We Need to Talk, in the House of Commons on 9 October. An audience of MPs and representatives of a range of organisations, including CLA, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, heard from Commission Chair, Geoff Barton, a range of commissioners, Baroness Morris, and children from Cubitt Town Primary School. The children, needless to say, all made superb presentations.
The report is calling for schools to be incentivised to provide a broad curriculum, enabling children to access the value of the expressive arts and citizenship as contexts for literacy. The aim is to help prepare children and young people to become citizens who can flourish throughout their lives.
CLA was pleased to see a clear emphasis on the value of the expressive arts in developing children’s oracy and communication skills. The report provides a valuable piece of evidence for submissions to the government’s curriculum and assessment review, and chimes with CLA’s own evolving Capabilities Framework (more on that soon) which addresses how the arts develop personal communication, confidence and creativity. Congratulations to all involved.
Assumed knowledge report from the Social Market Foundation
A new report from the Social Market Foundation, entitled ‘Things Worth Knowing’, was published on 17 October. The report is supported by Speakers for Schools – a social mobility charity which works to level the playing field for state secondary pupils by providing the kind of experiences available to independent school pupils. ‘Things Worth Knowing’ highlights the role that parental education and wealth plays in the acquisition of assumed knowledge, and the role that plays in young people’s transition from education to employment. The report demonstrates that disadvantaged young people, even with similar academic grades as better-off students, can end up doing less well in the HE and employment sectors. The lack of what the researchers call ‘assumed knowledge’ (in a nutshell, how the system works) is a major continuing barrier to social mobility.
The report gives a number of examples and areas of how students with assumed knowledge are at an advantage such as:
- Understanding how A Level choices can affect your chances of acceptance into particular universities or courses
- Poor awareness of employers’ understanding of volunteering and participation in extra-curricular activities
- Weaker understanding of post-18 options and the value of different universities
- Poor understanding of earning potential across different professions
- Less confidence in work and less belief in themselves (compared with colleagues who hadn’t had free school meals) despite having shown greater grit and determination to get the role in the first place
The report found that the more sources of advice a young person had, the higher they scored on career related knowledge. Young people from disadvantaged backgrounds were much less likely to get advice and information on careers from family and friends and had much less access to talking to people in high paying jobs. The report calls for much more effective careers education and stresses the importance of high-quality work experience for all young people.
The ‘Enrichment Gap’ section in our 2024 Report Card addresses how access to high-quality arts opportunities and facilities enable pupils in independent schools to ‘get ahead’ in education and employment. ‘Assumed knowledge’ is an important part of confidence building. This links to CLA’s latest evidence work and our emerging Capabilities Framework which we will be publishing soon. Within the Framework we describe agency as a key capability, embracing confidence, identity and autonomy as important personal benefits.
See our Blueprint for an arts-rich education to see how a focus on arts careers advice, entry and progression routes are important for young people, and how the cultural sector needs to see itself as providing education for employment, removing barriers and creating opportunities in order to build a creative workforce across all sectors, and a trained and diverse workforce for a thriving cultural and creative industries sector. The sector needs to be relevant to national education, skills and industrial strategies and to work with school careers programmes, connecting with post-16 education, including adopting the Gatsby Benchmarks, and offering work experience and entry-level jobs through apprenticeships. See the detailed version of our blueprint here.
£15m funding for school-based nurseries
The Department for Education has announced new funding of £15m for primary schools to apply for support for up to 300 new or expanded nurseries based in schools. Schools can apply for up to £150,000 each. This is the first stage of a plan through which the Secretary of State has promised a new era of child-centred government to deliver meaningful reform of early years provision. She said “all children should have the opportunity of a brilliant education no matter where they are, where they are from or how much their parents earn. Our new school nurseries will provide thousands of additional places where they are needed the most, plugging historic gaps and making sure geography is no barrier to high quality childcare.”
CLA has long asserted that access to an arts-rich early years lays the foundations for a culturally rich later life, but is also a social justice issue, since not every child experiences an arts-rich home or education setting. You can read more in our CLA Early Years Briefing. We welcome these new plans, and hope that this new era of child-centred government can embrace the expressive arts as important for the personal and social development of very young children.
New NAO report on support for children and young people with special needs
This new report from the National Audit Office (NAO) assesses how well the current system is delivering for children and young people (from birth to 25) identified as having special educational needs. It also looks at DfE’s progress in addressing the underlying challenges to providing a sustainable system that achieves positive outcomes for children. The report states that:
- Following the Children and Families Act 2014, there have been significant increases in the number of children identified as having SEN, particularly those with education, health and care (EHC) plans specifying a need for support in more expensive settings.
- Since 2015, demand for EHC plans has increased 140%, leading to 576,000 children with plans in 2024. There has been a 14% increase in the number of those with SEN support, to 1.14 million pupils in school. These changes have increased the cost of the SEN system.
- Although DfE has increased funding, with a 58% real-terms increase between 2014-15 and 2024-25 to £10.7 billion, the system is still not delivering better outcomes or preventing local authorities from facing significant financial risks.
- DfE estimates that some 43% of local authorities will have deficits exceeding or close to their reserves in March 2026. This contributes to a cumulative deficit of between £4.3 billion and £4.9 billion when accounting arrangements that stop these deficits impacting local authority reserves will end. As such, the current system is not achieving value for money and is unsustainable.
- DfE has been implementing its 2023 plan for system improvement, but there remain significant doubts that current actions will resolve the challenges facing the system. None of the stakeholders we spoke to believed current plans would be effective.
- The government has not yet identified a solution to manage local authority deficits arising from SEN costs, and ongoing savings programmes are not designed to address these challenges.
- Given that the current system costs over £10 billion a year, and that demand for SEN provision is forecast to continue increasing, the government needs to think urgently about how its current investment can be better spent, including through more inclusive education, identifying and addressing needs earlier, and developing a whole-system approach to help achieve its objectives.
The report concludes with nine recommendations for DfE and wider government, given the challenges facing the SEN system, including:
- explicitly consider whole system reform, to improve outcomes for children with SEN and put SEN provision on a financially sustainable footing
- develop a shared understanding of how identifying and supporting SEN should be prioritised, including within the health system
- develop a vision and long-term plan for inclusivity across mainstream education
In his summary of his major report, Gareth Davies, head of NAO said: “Although DfE has increased high-needs funding, the SEN system is still not delivering for children and their families, and DfE’s current actions are unlikely to resolve the challenges. The government has not yet identified a solution to manage local authority deficits arising from SEN costs, which ongoing savings programmes will not address. Given that the current system costs over £10 billion a year, and that demand for SEN provision is forecast to increase further, government needs to think urgently about how its current investment can be better spent, including through more inclusive education, and developing a cohesive whole system approach.”
In the Arts in Schools report, available on the CLA website, it is observed that in all the roundtables and consultation that led to the report, a demand for more funding was not raised as an issue, except in the specific area of SEND. It was noted that delivery costs are often higher for SEND work – more time and therefore money is required when working with young people and artists with SEND, and ensuring this allocation is an important aspect of delivery. Teachers argued passionately that structured support (“scaffolding”) must be put in place to ensure that young people with additional needs could be included as equals in expressive arts learning in schools, and the need to recognise and properly scaffold this work was noted. Throughout the Arts in Schools roundtables there was agreement that schooling is about far more than academic achievement and that the needs of all children should be taken into account.
DfE will no longer use Russell Group metrics in its grading of England’s schools
The Russell Group is a list of 24 universities which describe themselves as world-class and research intensive. Following a review, the Department for Education Russell Group admissions metrics will no longer be used in a move aimed at getting school leavers to look at a wider range of institutions and vocational options. The metric was originally introduced by Michael Gove in 2012.
The DfE has updated its accountability measures for students aged 16-18 which will no longer include the percentage of school leavers who go forward to Russell Group, or Oxbridge destinations.
A DfE spokesperson said: “We are determined to widen access to higher education so that everyone who wants to attend university and meets the requirements can go. Our world-leading universities are engines of growth and opportunity and we are supporting them to deliver for students, local communities and the economy. We are dedicated to creating a sustainable higher education funding system in order to break down barriers to opportunity. As well as university, there are also a wide range of routes into a rewarding career which we will continue to expand and support, including apprenticeships, vocational qualifications and degree apprenticeships.”
The move was welcomed by Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, said: “I welcome the change because government metrics should not be based on self-selecting clubs. There are excellent universities in the Russell Group and excellent universities outside it and we shouldn’t push people towards the former just because it helps a school’s league table position.”
You can read more about the change here. There are some concerns that removing the measures might have the unintended consequence of taking the pressure off leading universities to improve access.
To provide some background, CLA had long called for changes to the Russell Group list of facilitating subjects before 2019 when the arts were excluded from the list of facilitating subjects (the A Level subjects required or preferred by these universities for admission to their degree courses). The list had disincentivised arts take-up and was finally dropped in 2019. The list of EBacc subjects, which excludes the expressive arts, was chosen to mirror the facilitating subjects list. However, as we address in Arts in Schools report, the power of the Russell Group facilitating subjects narrative has had a long tail in terms of directing choices. We hope that this new move is a further step in widening access and breaking down barriers to higher education, and does not stop the efforts of leading universities to improve access. We see it as another important signal of the new government’s commitment to breaking down barriers to opportunity.
Creative Corridors report: ‘unleashing creative potential through collaboration and innovation’
This new Creative Corridors Report, launched on 24 October, is a collaboration between the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre (Creative PEC), and Arts Council England. It explores how connecting creative clusters across the UK can unlock significant economic and social potential, highlighting the UK’s 55 creative clusters and 700 micro-clusters, and emphasising the need for a coordinated approach to maximise their impact.
The launch event in Salford was held at the Lowry – with Media City providing the backdrop – and was attended by our CLA Co-Chair, Derri Burdon, and a range of creative and cultural sector leaders. The event sought to demonstrate how clusters of creative businesses, arts and cultural institutions, together with networks of talent across the country, can collaborate at scale, unlocking opportunities for investment, jobs, skills and cultural access. Annabel Turpin, Chair of Arts Council England’s North Area Council, chaired a discussion featuring Metro Mayors Andy Burnham and Tracy Brabin, technology entrepreneur Tom Adeyoola, and Shanas Gulzar, Creative Director of Bradford 2025. Darren Henley, CEO of Arts Council England, delivered a plenary to close the event.
The report proposes a model for experimentation and moving towards the corridor concept, and draws evidence from the North of England and London. It is positioning the corridors within the context of the new government’s agenda, and potential for increasingly devolved powers to regions and mayors. There is little reference to the school-based education infrastructure in the report, beyond promoting creative industry careers to educators, but the
The concept of ‘creative corridors’ aims to stimulate economic growth by enhancing linkages between these clusters, fostering collaboration, and leveraging regional strengths. This approach seeks to replicate the agglomeration effects seen in major creative hubs like London and the South East, but on a broader geographic scale. Existing initiatives such as the Northern Creative Corridor and the Thames Estuary Production Corridor are presented as models for this strategy. The ultimate goal is to create a more balanced and resilient creative economy across the UK, driving innovation, job creation, and cultural enrichment.
The report proposes ‘eight practical steps’ as initial actions to take towards developing a creative corridor intervention. These are arranged across four ‘Action Areas’ representing key challenges and themes that were identified as important in stakeholder discussions:
- Foster collaboration
- Elevate creative R&D and innovation opportunities
- Streamline skills pathways and work opportunities
- Boost profile and attract finance
CLA welcomes the focus in ‘Action Area 4’ on taking steps to create fairer access to creative and cultural careers, diversifying the creative workforce and providing better support for freelancers. However, we think there needs to be greater acknowledgement of the vital role formal and informal education providers (schools and youth agencies) will need to play in order to achieve the Creative Corridors ambition. We will advocate strongly for the CLA’s Blueprint for an Inclusive Arts-rich Education for Every Child to inform future place planning, and for schools, youth agencies, creative educators and children and young people to be acknowledged as key stakeholders.
While it is disappointing that the report itself doesn’t focus attention on the need to create fair access to arts, culture and creativity for all children and young people, it was heartening that Andy Burnham, Tracy Brabin and Darren Henley all spoke passionately on the subject during the event. Burnham poignantly addressed the challenges faced by young people in Greater Manchester, describing how they can see the skyscrapers from their windows but struggle to see a path into creative jobs. His vision for the Mbacc (the Greater Manchester Baccalaureate) aims to change this by saying to young people “do do drama, music, art & design.” Echoing CLA’s 2024 Report Card, he lamented that creative subjects have been marginalised in the curriculum over the past 15 years, and urged people to “seize the opportunity now to reintegrate creativity at the heart of the curriculum.
