Sara Robinson looks at funding issues from an arts education point of view.
Funding policy has increasingly called for access and education to form a key part of the subsidised arts sectors creative activity. Ironically, this has resulted in a flourishing and varied body of work that is carving its own separate path, semi-detached from many of the larger arts organisations. Education departments have evolved more through individual will and good intention than corporate design, driven by funders and charitable imperatives rather than by mission. There are many organisations who want to see a convergence of art, learning and engagement at the heart of what they do. In the past decade we've seen a shift in language, from education to broader terms such as learning, participation, creative development, engage, explore and discover. Heads of these departments are becoming Directors with a place at the senior management table and more core resources for their work. The organisations which are currently thriving in terms of the breadth and variety of their audiences and participants are those who: a) invest heavily in the participation and learning areas of their work (SAGE Gateshead, Northampton Theatres and LIFT being three examples), b) embrace the blurring of amateur and professional realms, and c) provide opportunities for people to be engaged and to learn right across their entire programme, not just in those activities branded educational.
Funders could play a pivotal role in this process of bringing learning, access and engagement to the core of our missions by removing the demarcation that drives a wedge between educational and artistic. This feels uncomfortable because there is a risk involved; what if all the superb work under the education banner were lost, swallowed up into the mainstream or forgotten altogether? But if arts education was redefined for the 21st Century as the process by which people engage with art and the art engages with people then the new language of engagement would become the funders benchmark.
Lets imagine how this might work. If, as Dawn Austwick proposes, funders and arts organisations were able to develop proactive, sustainable relationships based on trust and mutual respect, then a culture of visionary risk-taking which sought to engage new and different people and art, might become more acceptable. Funders would invest in a body of work an annual programme, a festival, a season, or a project rather than the education activity or the production alone. It would not be possible to separate these aspects out because they would be so bound up with one another. A body of work would aim to be deep, longitudinal and joined up allowing for innovative forms of learning and engagement to take place across the programme. It would not be shaped by external agendas, but by the organisations ongoing strategic priorities. Methods of engagement would need to be researched, tested and refined so that they underpinned each initiative.
So, for me, intelligent funding begins by banishing the word education (unless its specifically about schools), and instead, collaborating solely with arts organisations for whom the methods used to engage people in making and consuming art is central to their thinking and core to their missions. Engagement with people might then become valued as highly as we value the art and the artist.
Sara Robinson is a freelance researcher, producer and consultant. She is co-author of the MMM provocation paper Mission Unaccomplished - the place of learning in our national and regional performing arts organisations.