Chief executive wants to bring art ‘to people’s doorsteps’, but critics say strategy is vague

This article is more than 7 months old

This article is more than 7 months old

England’s arts chiefs have said they want to create a nation that has better access to culture in every “village, town and city” by 2030, where creativity in each individual is valued and “given the chance to flourish”.

Arts Council England (ACE) will publish a 10-year strategy on Monday called Let’s Create, produced after 18 months’ work including numerous workshops, consultations and public conversations involving more than 6,000 people.

The strategy, which focuses more on broad-brush aspirations rather than specific statements about levels of funding or support for different art forms, is a new version of one published in 2010, Great Art and Culture for Everyone.

The key differences in the new strategy include more emphasis on supporting people individually and at every stage of their life, championing a wider range of culture, and increasing spending and support for libraries.

It also aspires to give communities in every “village, town and city” more opportunity to design and develop the culture on offer there.

The strategy lists four principles guiding whether ACE will invest public money: “ambition and quality”, “inclusivity and relevance”, “dynamism”, and “environmental responsibility”.

The ACE chief executive, Darren Henley, said he wanted to move away from having centres of excellence in a small number of places and instead bring “world-class art and culture to people’s doorsteps”.

He added: “This is setting out our intentions, how we want to see arts and culture in England over a 10-year period. It is not a flick of a switch, it is a journey we are going to go on with audiences, with people who work in arts organisations, libraries, museums and individual artists.”

Henley said it had not been developed “by a bunch of bureaucrats sitting in a room on their own” but after a long period of consultation with professionals, audiences and potential audiences.

In the report, the ACE chair, Sir Nicholas Serota, uses the example of a 2016 nationwide arts project by Jeremy Deller and Rufus Norris, which he says encapsulates the aims of the 10-year strategy.

The project, to mark the centenary of the first world war, involved hundreds of volunteers standing in uniforms, in silence, in places across the UK, representing soldiers who died on the first day of the battle of the Somme.

Serota said it embodied boldness, collective creativity, partnerships “and perhaps most important of all, the dissolving of barriers between artists and the audiences with whom they interact”.

The report lists a number of important issues requiring action. They include:

Persistent and widespread lack of diversity across the creative industries and in publicly funded cultural organisations.

Difference in understanding of the terms “arts” and “culture” across the country, with many seeing the “arts” as only the high arts.

Big differences in cultural engagement, geographically and socioeconomically.

Unequal opportunities for children outside school across the country.

The often fragile business models of publicly funded cultural organisations.

A retreat from innovation, risk-taking and sustained talent development.

The report does not identify which areas or arts are likely to get funding changes, although Serota told the Guardian earlier this month that the east of England was likely to benefit more.

Why the arts can lead the revival of Britain’s towns | Nicholas Serota Read more

A delivery plan for the strategy is expected in April.

Most people working in England’s arts sector will get their first sight of the strategy on Monday, although five arts policy experts last week pre-empted the report, which they said would contain “vague generalisations” and “arcane art-speak”.

Instead, Shelagh Wright, John Holden, John Kieffer, John Newbigin and Robert Hewison published, on the Arts Professional website, an alternative cultural strategy for England which calls on ACE to recover key values such as justice, trust, accountability and risk, “rather than rely on bland outcomes that are so obvious that no one could disagree with them”.