Don’t cut the arts in schools

Last night the Queen awarded the prestigious Queen’s Medal for Music to the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, an organisation which for years has given opportunities for teenage orchestral players to perform at the highest level with great conductors. It has nurtured careers, from the conductor Simon Rattle to the trumpeter Alison Balsom, and has inspired generations of performers to enter the profession.

The range and diversity of young people’s creative activity has surely never been greater: a couple of weeks ago at the Barbican we presented Unleashed, bringing together poetry, dance, song and hip-hop — all created and performed by east London teenagers in a pulsating show that showed what it feels like to be young in London today.

This creative activity, freely available to all, now rests on a knife-edge because the Government is considering education reforms which will marginalise and deprioritise the arts. As widely reported, the planned new Ebacc qualification will concentrate on a few academic subjects and will be the key measure by which pupils and schools are assessed, however inappropriate that is for the pupils involved. The arts will have to jostle for their place in other areas of the curriculum. Government has yet to accept the principle so powerfully argued by Sir Ken Robinson over a decade ago: supporting the creativity and innovation of young people will ensure the success of our country.

We do not want to return to some imagined golden age, for the world has changed radically and education must change with it. This is not a whinge about funding cuts. It is about simple priorities: the fundamental entitlement of every child to explore their creativity. It is just not good enough to say that the arts can pick up the slack in the rest of the curriculum, unless there are systems in place to ensure that schools deliver this crucial element.

There is a balance here, as there always has been, between what the education system offers and what can be provided externally. The cultural organisations of this country are ready to participate to the full in this vital process.

At the Barbican we are working to establish a culture hub across the City and east London with the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, working with the music education hubs in five east London boroughs to create a new offer for young people. But we cannot do this alone, because an education system that is not seen to value the arts will lead to inexorable decline.

There are signs that the Government is ready to listen. This week Michael Gove met cultural leaders to hear the case for the arts. He now needs to speak clearly of his own support and the practical ways in which this will be delivered. He has a blueprint on his desk, the report on cultural education that his department and the DCMS commissioned from Darren Henley. It needs urgently to be turned into a plan.

If we get it right, we can be rewarded with a new generation that is articulate, imaginative, outward-looking, and committed to our country’s future. If we don’t…