Contribution
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller) on securing this important debate, and I have enjoyed learning a lot about her illustrious background. I cannot claim to be anywhere near as accomplished as she is, but I used to love doing amateur dramatics at school and university, so I can see a Lib Dem drama club emerging at some point soon. Anyway, I will now move on to the serious part of the speech.
The Beatles, Damien Hirst, Amy Winehouse, Anthony Hopkins, Judi Dench and Vivienne Westwood are just a few examples of the brilliant artists who our country has produced over the past century. Our creative industries are renowned throughout the world and, as we have already heard, they contribute enormously to our economy, employing more than 2.3 million people every year.
It is vital that we preserve and grow our arts, which starts with promoting creative education in our schools. As we have already heard, the benefits of creative education are numerous, from developing a lifelong passion to helping children and young people with their mental health and equipping them with important life skills.
Sadly, however, creative education has not been treated with the priority it deserves and teaching in schools has suffered as a result. There are now 15,000 fewer full and part-time teachers of arts subjects in schools than in 2010. With fewer specialised teaching staff and increasingly constrained budgets, we have seen a drop in the number of children taking arts subjects, with enrolment at GCSE level falling by almost a half and at A-level by a third between 2010 and 2023. That means too many children are missing out on the opportunity to broaden their horizons and learn new skills.
At the heart of this issue is the fact that the arts have wrongly been labelled as unimportant and trivial. As a result, in the context of overstretched budgets and limited resources, arts subjects are the first to be cut back, with schools increasingly focusing on their core curriculum offer and extracurricular activities in the arts having to be scaled back.
The Liberal Democrats believe that our children’s education should be rounded and varied. Too often, Conservatives think that creative education is the sacrifice we must make for strong academic standards, but it should not be an either/or situation—it is always both/and. There is plenty of evidence to indicate that there is a link between participation in the arts and higher attainment. I hope that the Government’s ongoing curriculum review and the upcoming reform of Ofsted inspections ensures that all students can access a broad curriculum, including art, music and drama subjects, alongside a strong focus on high academic standards in other subjects.
As the hon. Member for East Thanet (Ms Billington) pointed out, the growing lack of arts provision in our schools, colleges and universities has widened inequalities between disadvantaged students and their peers. It is often only more privileged families who can afford private tuition, extra classes outside school or an independent education, because, as we have heard, the facilities of independent schools are often second to none in terms of the creative arts, thus disadvantaging children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
That has a direct impact on who goes on to work in the creative industries, with data showing that there are four times as many individuals from middle-class backgrounds in creative occupations as there are from working-class backgrounds. The arts should not be accessible only to the most privileged. If we want to harness the full talent of our children and young people to ensure that we continue to make the creative industries a powerhouse for our economy, we need to widen opportunities to the arts at every level.
It is not only schools that have seen the take-up of arts subjects plummet but further and higher education institutions. According to the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, over the past decade there has been a 57% drop in the uptake of creative courses in further and higher education. As we have heard, the exclusion of arts subjects from the English baccalaureate and cuts to funding for creative arts subjects at university by the previous Conservative Government have fuelled this decline.
That is why the Liberal Democrats would like to see arts subjects being included in the English baccalaureate to boost access to the arts. We also need to stop talking down and defunding creative arts degrees and vocational courses, and to drive up high-quality apprenticeships in this area.
Let us be proud of our world-leading institutions. Earlier this year, I visited Wimbledon College of Arts with my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Mr Kohler), and I saw the amazing work that its students do in costume and set design, puppetry and performance. The college is part of the University of the Arts London, which is second in the world for art and design; we should celebrate that. In my own backyard, I went to the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance in Twickenham last week, where the students put on the most incredible show. I know that many of them will go on to be talented performers in their own right.
The creative arts enable all of us to lead a fulfilling life, and they are also one of our country’s finest and most recognisable exports. Let us give our children and young people the opportunity to flourish fully, and let us develop a pipeline of talent into our arts sector to ensure that children and young people get the widest opportunity possible at school, college, university and beyond.