‘Do you really think that British politicians don’t care about the Arts?’ and ‘What do we want?- A Wish List’.

Convenor: Amelia

Summary:

- No funding cuts

- Let the arts deliver other policies outside the arts policies- embed us in health, education, economy, employment etc.

- The Arts Council to be less wary of commercialism- it is not always a dirty word.

- More sharing of resources between arts organisations.

- Experts in each of the art forms to deliver funding. Job swaps and sabbaticals for Arts Council relationship managers.

- Job swaps between venue managers and small companies

- Funders to encourage and value risk taking.

- Funders to uphold the importance of access and inclusion.

- Encourage diversity by distributing government funding not solely through the Arts Council. Could DCMS give to trusts and foundations?

- ACE officers to train local authority funders.

- A target of number of performances that ACE officers have to see.

- National roll out of the ‘percent for arts’ scheme where building developers must set aside a certain amount of their budget for supporting arts in new communities.

- Performing Arts to be on the national curriculum at key stage 3 as a subject in its own right, not part of English.

- Extension of existing Creative Partnerships to place more artists in schools.

We then got into a bigger, ideological discussion about why every time a new government comes in we have to have to re-establish the importance of the arts. We agreed that as artists we have not made the case to the British public/government that the arts are an incontestable social good.


We discussed advertising campaigns for Theatre as a whole and confidence in speaking out in defence of theatre and the arts.


Jonathan Holmes (jon) is collecting email addresses of anyone who might be interested in joining a policy group that could work on delivering the ideas which have come out of the Arts Campaign D&Ds.