Filed under: meetings | Tags: ace, arts, England, funding, Northern Ireland, Scotland, UK, Wales
On Tuesday Damien and I were in the BBC Radio Theatre in Broadcasting House in London for the launch of Culture UK – a new partnership between the BBC, Arts Council England, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the Arts Council of Wales and Creative Scotland.
BBC Director-General, Tony Hall, said the aim of Culture UK is “to excite the nation about the arts, opening up funding to a range of arts organisations to make content which can be shown on the BBC, developing UK-wide cultural festivals that can reach new audiences, creating opportunities to showcase emerging and diverse talent, and making the most of technology to inspire new experiences in the arts.”
Tony Hall said “culture makes us believe in the future”. He spoke about the importance of inspiring people about the arts, saying “there are communities we simply don’t engage with: that has to change”. Culture UK will have a development team from across the UK (modelled on that created for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad) which will work towards three big landmark moments a year. Culture UK was launched with the announcement of 26 new commissions. See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/mediapacks/culture-uk?ns_mchannel=social&ns_campaign=bbc_press_office&ns_source=twitter&ns_linkname=corporate
Robin Simpson.
Filed under: meetings | Tags: ace, arts, diversity, funding, research, UK
On Monday I was in London to take part in a meeting of the AHRC Connected Communities Advisory Group. The Arts & Humanities Research Council has now confirmed that the Connected Communities programme, which funds innovative collaborative research undertaken by partnerships involving academic institutions and community organisations, will continue until 2020. In Monday’s meeting we discussed the ‘Utopias’ programme of activities supported by Connected Communities to link to ‘Utopia 500’ – which commemorates five hundred years since the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia (see: http://www.utopia500.net/). The Utopia Fair at Somerset House in June showcased the creative outcomes from 25 AHRC-funded projects. These projects brought together local community groups, researchers, activists and artists across the UK to explore how utopian ideals can be used to benefit the environmental and social future of our communities. Representatives from contemporary Utopian movements from all over the UK took up stands in Somerset House’ courtyard, celebrating the pockets of utopia that are flourishing around the country from Newcastle to Merthyr Tydfil, Sheffield to Scotland, Brighton to Doncaster plus a range of London sites. There is a video summary of the Utopia Fair at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2k8U_fYJGw. I was interested to learn about links developed by the Utopias programme to ‘Like Culture’ – a cultural network of European cities and regions: http://www.likeculture.eu/. In Monday’s meeting we also heard about ‘Common Cause’ – the new Connected Communities BAME project which aims to strengthen and extend the existing network of university and BAME community collaborators working in the arts and humanities. Common Cause is an 18 month project, supported by Arts Council England and the Runnymead Trust, and I was delighted to learn that Voluntary Arts BAME Advisory Panel Chair, David Bryan, is now part of the team delivering the project for Connected Communities.
Robin Simpson.
Filed under: meetings | Tags: ace, arts, England, excellence, funding, research, volarts
On Tuesday and Wednesday I was at Cast in Doncaster for ‘People Place Power’ – the third Creative People and Places conference. Creative People and Places is the Arts Council England programme to increase engagement in the arts and culture in some of the areas of England that currently fall within the 10% least engaged (as measured by the Active People Survey). ACE has funded 21 consortia including local arts organisations, voluntary and public sector agencies and other partners to develop innovative approaches to increasing engagement. Voluntary Arts is a member of the Peterborough CPP consortium (‘Peterborough Presents’) and is working in partnership with several other CPPs. We have also been contracted by the national network of CPPs to provide and advice and support to help all CPPs work with local voluntary and amateur arts groups.
Opening the conference, CPP National Steering Group Chair, Holly Donagh, reflected on changes in the engagement debate over recent years. She said “we’ve got initiatives like 64 Million Artists and Everyday Creativity, the BBC’s Get Creative campaign, Fun Palaces, the work of Voluntary Arts, Paul Hamlyn’s Artworks programme, just to name a few national initiatives. And in some ways those questions of reach, audience engagement and democracy have become the most interesting questions about the arts and really central to the debate now, where perhaps once they were more marginal.” Holly also suggested that “business as usual is not sufficient for the challenges of the future and ignoring fault lines and inequalities that existed for generations will serve all communities poorly in the long run”.
Giving the opening keynote presentation, ACE Chief Executive Darren Henley talked about the need for a creativity revolution: “a change in how we think about and use our natural everyday creativity and how we need to recognise the importance of making and participating art and culture in all aspects of our lives”. He said: “This means listening to people and working with them to help develop their ideas about what a local culture might mean. While the concept of strong national culture should offer confidence, opportunity and inclusivity to all, a local culture provides the primary sense of belonging and participation the sharing and self belief that all successful communities need and which is crucial in all our lives young and old. And it’s what makes us special as a community and that’s very precious.” Darren Henley spoke about the importance of the democratisation of culture and building sustainable local infrastructure.
The second keynote speaker, on Wednesday morning, was the Guardian journalist Lynsey Hanley who gave a brilliantly entertaining and provocative presentation, drawing on her new book about class and culture, ‘Respectable’. She talked about doing culture the ‘right way’ vs doing it the way you want to, saying “feeling extremely uncomfortable to the point of thinking ‘I just can’t do this’ is not unusual for a socially mobile person”. She asked whether the Internet really widens access to knowledge when acronyms rule and discussed the ‘canalisation of television’, asking “why is there a BBC4?” And she completely won her audience over when, in response to a question from the floor, she suggested we should “find out what people are doing already and invest in that”.
Also on Wednesday morning I chaired a conference breakout session titled ‘What is quality and how do we measure it?’ Kathryn Goodfellow and Juliet Hardy from bait (the South East Northumberland CPP) spoke about the development of the bait quality evaluation framework. Abigail Gilmore from the University of Manchester discussed the Culture Counts quality measurement tools and learning from the AHRC Understanding Everyday Participation research project. And Mark Robinson from Thinking Practice reported on the CPP national evaluation. After these presentations we had a very interesting and engaged conversation about measuring quality and excellence which grappled with how to capture the ‘magic’ element of cultural activities.
Over the past couple of months, the Voluntary Arts Up for Arts team (Helen Randle, Helen Jones and Jennie Dennett) have been interviewing voluntary and amateur arts groups across the country about their experiences of working with CPPs, in order to produce a series of five-minute audio case studies. On Wednesday afternoon Helen Randle and I presented a conference breakout session in which we played some of the recorded interviews to provoke a discussion about the challenges of working with voluntary arts groups. It was great to have some CPP representatives in the room who personally knew some of the interviewees and the recordings proved to be a very effective way to generate a rich conversation – as well as ensuring that some genuine participant voices were heard at the conference. Many thanks to Helen, Helen and Jennie for their work on the case studies.
The final conference session on Wednesday afternoon was a panel discussion chaired by the Guardian Theatre Critic, Lyn Gardner, looking at the relationship between excellence of art and excellence of engagement. The speakers included Jo Hunter from 64 Million Artists. My final memory of a really interesting and provocative conference was Lyn Gardner’s comment: “What is Great Art anyway? Maybe it’s just an Arts Council construct.”
Filed under: meetings | Tags: arts, England, funding, politics, training, UK
On Thursday I was at the offices of UK Music in London for the first meeting of the new Community Arts Qualifications Advisory Group. This group has been set up by Creative & Cultural Skills for two reasons. Firstly, the Government’s current apprenticeship reform programme requires a fresh look at all existing apprenticeship frameworks, converting them to new ‘Apprenticeship Standards’ by September 2017. CCSkills believes the current Community Arts framework is popular and important to maintain and has established the Advisory Group to shape a new apprenticeship for the future. The Advisory Group will also formally advise on the curriculum development for the new National College for the Creative and Cultural Industries. This is an initiative CCSkills is setting up to deliver high quality, industry-led intensive vocational training at Purfleet in Essex, and through partners nationwide. CCSkills plans to include a community arts strand to the curriculum (working title ‘Audiences and Participation’). The Advisory Group will shape this strand, working with the University of the Arts London Awarding Body. At our first meeting we discussed the need for more apprentices in the arts and the challenges and opportunities for larger arts organisations as a result of the Government’s new apprenticeships levy which comes into force from April 2017.
Robin Simpson.
Sir John Major delivering the NCVO Hinton Lecture 2015
On Tuesday evening I was at the Royal College of General Practitioners in London to see Sir John Major deliver the annual NCVO Hinton Lecture. The former Prime Minister’s speech, titled ‘A Nation at Ease with Itself?’, focussed on inequality, poverty, fairness and social mobility. Addressing a voluntary sector audience, John Major reminded us that, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he introduced Gift Aid and as Prime Minister he launched the National Lottery, 21 years ago. He had observed that it had become increasingly difficult for charities to compete for Treasury funds with pensions, social security, health spending etc. He saw the National Lottery as “money from the public for the public”, “to protect the independence of charities”. To date the Lottery has distributed over £34 billion to good causes and “as intended, most of this money has gone to small local schemes”. But John Major said he worries for the future of the Lottery. It was designed as a national lottery, in effect a monopoly, to maximise returns for the designated good causes but its success has attracted rivals, such as the increasing number of ‘society lotteries’ who pay a far smaller proportion of their income back to worthy causes. John Major also spoke about the importance of small charities, at a time when there is much emphasis on charity mergers. He said small charities “offer small, anonymous acts of kindness, vital to the recipient, that may be overlooked by their larger brethren”. He thought it would be wise to expand the remit and funding of the charity commission. He talked about the poverty of loneliness, saying it is not the responsibility of government to create communities. Rather this is something that has to involve government and charities and faith groups. He said the rise in single person households is a major risk to loneliness and “the community will deal with this issue best”. You can read the full transcript of Sir John Major’s speech at: https://www.ncvo.org.uk/about-us/media-centre/press-releases/1114-a-nation-at-ease-with-itself.
Robin Simpson.
Filed under: meetings | Tags: arts, education, England, funding, politics, UK
- Ed Miliband speaking about the arts and culture at Battersea Arts Centre
On Monday evening I was at Battersea Arts Centre in South London to hear a speech about arts, culture and creativity by the leader of the opposition, Ed Miliband MP. This event was organised by the new Creative Industries Federation and the Federation’s Director, John Kampfner, introduced Ed Miliband, saying “[The arts] is our superpower. We need to nurture it through innovation, entrepreneurialism and joined up working. We need to do far better, as the Warwick Commission reported, in making the arts accessible to all and yes, we need a body politic that is proud to invest in what makes this country great.”
Ed Miliband started by saying: “I care about you and your success because I think the arts, culture and creativity define who we are as a nation, because you make an incredible contribution to our economic success and because I think government policy has to make a difference and help you succeed as an industry and a sector. And I’m conscious that by making a speech [about the arts] I’m venturing into relatively uncharted, not to say risky, territory.”
He said all of us will have our first memories of what moved us as children. Publicly funded art and culture is vital to our dynamism. Access to the arts and culture is not an optional extra, it is essential. He thought the findings of the Warwick Commission should worry us all.
Ed Miliband outlined three parts to Labour’s plan in relation to the arts and culture: increasing creativity in schools; improving access to culture; and encouraging people to work in the arts and creative industries. While it was wonderful to hear a party leader speaking so enthusiastically about the arts so close to a general election, I was disappointed that he did not say anything about the importance of participation in creative cultural activities – particularly as this was such a significant theme of the Warwick Commission report.
Ed Miliband said “I come with an offer, a different offer to put policy for the arts, culture and creativity at the heart of the next Labour Government mission. Of course we should keep the Department of Culture: it says something about our country that that should even be a question. But I want to go further. I don’t believe culture belongs just to one Department, because what you do matters across our whole society and we can only achieve the vision of a society that I believe in, based on equality and social justice, if we recognise the value of the arts and culture across every part of Government.”
He said he would make a permanent change to how the arts and culture are represented in Westminster, creating a Prime Minister’s Committee. There would be a focus on equality of access across the country and further devolution of resources. He spoke about the significance of the 50th anniversary of Jennie Lee’s 1965 White Paper on Wednesday and said “tonight I rededicate myself to making that mission our own” and we should “hold my feet to the fire over this”.
Harriet Harman and Ed Miliband
In the questions that followed the speech, Stella Duffy, Co-Director of Fun Palaces, asked Ed Miliband: “If we only look at funnelling people into education, into buildings and into institutions, we are forgetting those people in community who need our support around the arts and culture too.”
Ed Miliband replied: “Stella, where does that take you to in particular?” and Stella responded: “It takes us to Voluntary Arts, it takes us to 64 Million Artists, it takes us to Fun Palaces, it takes us to the Cultural Learning Alliance. There are hundreds of organisations, many of us quite small, quite new, who are looking at the arts in a completely different way. We are saying there are millions of people in the country who are scared to go into the buildings, even in the very beginning. They haven’t had it in schools for the past 5 years, they haven’t had what Jennie Lee promised, and what we are saying is we need to be asking those people in their communities. Stop flying in experts and as the community what they want.”
Ed Miliband said “I think it’s important what you’re saying but isn’t the key to this (and there are a lot of people in the room who would know more about this than me) what we said about education. The reason I talked a lot about education is it is so crucial, because if you don’t necessarily have it in your family background where else are you going to discover culture creativity and the arts?”
Stella replied: “Totally – I am that girl. I didn’t have it in my family either. But it’s also in community. Unfortunately we have an attitude of behaving as if the arts only belong in big buildings at the moment, and there are hundreds of thousands of arts centres that also need our support just now.”
Ed didn’t seem to fully understand the point Stella was making and spoke again about the importance of cultural education in schools.
David Jubb, Artistic Director of Battersea Arts Centre, summing up at the end of the evening, said: “Last Thursday the BBC and What Next launched the Get Creative campaign across the country, and to Stella’s point about how more people become involved in art and culture, if everyone in this room can go out and get involved in that Get Creative campaign, with your organization, your resources, that would be terrific.”
Robin Simpson.
On Monday I was in London to attend the Arts Council England event ‘The future vision for the Creative Case for Diversity’ at Sadler’s Wells. Giving the keynote speech, ACE Chair Sir Peter Bazalgette called it “one of the most important speeches I’ll make as Chair of the Arts Council”. In terms of delivering on diversity, he suggested that “so far, we’ve failed”. He admitted that ACE had expected improvements in diverse leadership within the arts, without sufficiently resourcing leadership programmes. He also felt that it had been a mistake for ACE to concentrate its work in this area on black and minority ethnic-led arts organisations. Baz quoted Jenny Sealey, the Artistic Director of Graeae, who called the arts “male, pale and stale”. He said the doorway into the arts can be hard to find and spoke about the “white cliff face of the arts establishment”. Baz said “From now on responsibility for promoting diversity within the leadership, workforce, programming and audiences, must belong to all our funded arts organisations”. From 2015 measured action on diversity “goes mainstream” as all ACE’s National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs) have signed up to ‘The Creative Case for Diversity’. Sir Peter said “we will be monitoring ourselves and publishing the results”. ACE will publish workforce diversity data for NPOs and National Partner Museums from 2015. Baz said “when we invest public money in arts and culture, it must be for thhe benefit of all the public” and finished by saying in 10 years’ time “diversity will no longer be an aspiration, it will be a reality … the arts will simply be the case [for diversity]”. See: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/dec/08/arts-council-england-make-progress-diversity-funding-axed-bazalgette
Sir Peter Bazalgette’s speech was followed by a panel discussion, chaired by the journalist and broadcaster Kirsty Lang. Dawn Walton, Artistic Director of Eclipse Theatre Company, talked about the “missing black story not being told on British stages”. Tamara Rojo, Artistic Director of English National Ballet, said diversity should be about “everyday decisions not just special projects”. Skinder Hundal, Chief Executive of New Art Exchange, said “my entry point [into the arts] was as a volunteer” and talked about the importance of “refreshing and rethinking how the arts ecology works”. Maria Oshodi, Artistic Director and CEO of Extant, pointed out that “disability is non discriminating, affecting all classes and ages”. Finally Rufus Norris, Director Designate of the National Theatre, said “theatre is an opportunity to stand in other people’s shoes”.
The outgoing ACE Chief Executive, Alan Davey, closed the event by referring back to the McMaster report of 2008 which said that if you want good art you have to reflect the diversity of this nation. Alan’s message to his successor was that “diversity is one of your challenges in the next period”.
My impression of the ACE Creative Case for Diversity event was that it demonstrated how important diversity is to ACE’s agenda but I was disappointed ACE had not gone further. I was also frustrated, unsurprisingly, that amid the focus on diversity in relation to leadership, workforce, programming and audiences, there was no mention of participation. Surely developing the diversity of grassroots participation in creative cultural activity should form the base on which many other aspects of diversity could be built.
Robin Simpson.
Cultural Playing Field 