A new report is calling on policymakers to reconsider the status of arts in state schools and re-evaluate the English education system.
The Arts in Schools: Foundations for the Future report was published by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and A New Direction – a group that aims to help young people in London achieve their creative potential.
The report outlines a series of recommendations to improve arts education, stating: ‘We need an accountability, assessment and progression system that supports arts subjects in ways that are sensible, proportionate and developed through consultation with teachers and practitioners, advancing good practice and providing reassurance of a consistent baseline.’
It recommends that less emphasis is placed on the assessment of 16-year-old students, and that other methods of learning should be implemented. Other suggestions include:
- Ensuring every child has access to a minimum of four hours of arts education per week.
- New definitions of curriculum areas that ‘makes explicit the distinct value of the arts’.
- There should be more support for the arts in schools from the professional arts sector.
- Each school should be encouraged to consider the diversity of the texts, genres and artists studied in their curriculum.
Steve Moffitt, chief executive of A New Direction, says that we ‘need to act now’ before arts education is ‘further eroded’.
