Cover Story

A single event – often misreported or misinterpreted – easily diverts public attention away from a long-term trend. Crime in the UK is down but a gruesome headline frightens us. The arts budget has rocketed in recent years but some significant failures give an impression that there’s a wolf at the door.

Government figures quoted recently in The Guardian¹ imply a £1.5bn annual market in trips to museums, theatres, and heritage sites. But the article also says teachers are unreasonably scared of litigation if something (very rarely) goes wrong. The Government’s new rules which recommend that staff should ‘rarely’ cover for each other have had some bad consequences. Birmingham Rep had 40 secondary teachers for a Theatre Skills CPD Inset course last year, but only two this autumn. Teachers said they could not get cover. Touring shows for young audiences in larger-scale venues are losing bookings because higher costs of cover for teachers and transport make trips too expensive.

SCHOOL’S ALL RIGHT

Children’s theatre companies touring into schools are doing well. Correction: bookings are at the expected level when established companies offer primary schools what they recognise as appropriate. The health and safety issues which worry teachers do not apply to shows in the school hall. Over 225 UK professional theatre companies offer plays and programmes of all sorts, and they probably reach most of our eight million young people. I say “probably”, because no official body checks the details of what goes where or who misses out.

In October, there was a conference to address the long-term issues of programme
co-ordination, marketing and innovation in middle and larger-scale touring theatre for young audiences. Commercial producers are keen to join with subsidised companies in national and regional consortia to make new and original work, to share skills in marketing, to help create new policies and a manifesto for drama and theatre, to learn from development models in Scotland and Denmark and to harness IT and social networking. Without public money invested in the unsubsidised companies, new titles and original or innovative theatre in venues are just too risky. Innovation at the small scale is affordable but if larger-scale work fails the losses can be catastrophic. We are stuck.

WORLD CLASS?

UK professional theatre for young audiences is a sustainable success at a basic level. But is the artistic standard of theatre in the UK as good as that offered to children in Holland, Denmark or Germany? Probably not. But then whether we look at Early Years provision, residential care, the number locked up, teenage pregnancies, obesity or educational outcomes for the majority, the UK does badly. In 1991, the UK signed up to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, but the obligation to “respect and promote the right of the child to participate fully in cultural and artistic life” has not yet been fully honoured. Governments still support the arts mainly for their instrumental benefits – in addressing all the failures listed above, as if they were caused by young people rather than by society at large. There is enormous public demand for cultural experience and expression for young people, from franchised drama clubs and a thousand youth theatres, to local dance schools, music lessons and discovery museums. But this demand is constrained by what people know. “Try something new today” was a slogan in my local supermarket before the recession hit. It has stopped now but was probably ineffective anyway. Similar exhortations to eat five pieces of fruit or vegetables a day don’t meet the real challenges to public health either.

PUSHING THE BOAT OUT

To enable parents and teachers to go beyond what they know, to provide a broad and balanced cultural offer for all young people will cost serious money and need managing. Forget exhortation, pilots and talent spotting. To get high quality arts to every child, as an experience and as a practice will require structural and long term intervention by Governments, from arts training for teachers to more permanent theatre ensembles. To build productive relationships with artists, teachers will need cover to attend professional development events. Not ‘rarely’ but more often. Our task is to persuade Governments that the national interest requires such investment in arts and cultural experience for young people. Unless we “respect and promote” the arts and cultural experience as a force for human development, coming generations will be unable to cope creatively with accelerating change and the very real challenges of the future.