News – Race evaluation

A review of Arts Council Englands (ACE) progress against its race equality targets has found the organisation making good progress in addressing race equality and promoting greater diversity within the arts. The report, which assessed the first year of ACEs three-year race equality scheme and action plan, shows the organisation has met its target of allocating 10% of the Grants for the Arts budget to Black and minority ethnic (BME) artists and organisations in 2004/05, and has distributed Respond, a toolkit to support regularly funded organisations (RFOs) in developing their own race equality and diversity action plans.
However, it states that ACE needs to do more to support its RFOs in their race equality work and has revealed patchy progress across regions in initiating and completing race equality initiatives. While many regions have made good progress towards the race equality goals, with ACE North East, for example, having completed 60% of its areas of work, ACE East has had to amend delivery dates on 50% of its race equality tasks.