It’s tempting to wonder whether the Government’s statistics on engagement with the arts, revealed in the latest Taking Part survey (p2), can be in any way meaningful. They’re based on 2,622 interviews carried out over a year, in which children are asked “about their engagement and non-engagement in cultural activities during the 12 months prior to the interview”. The figures, showing percentages largely in the upper 90’s, seem encouraging, but we need to realise that each child who is counted as having engaged with an artform might only have done so once in the past 12 months. Therefore, one of the 87.7% per cent of 5–10 year-olds who ticked the box marked ‘reading and writing’ (defined as “writing stories, plays or poetry, reading books for pleasure, taking part in a reading club and listening to authors talk about their work”) might have ploughed through ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ on a single occasion in a whole year, while another might have devoured a good-sized children’s novel every week. One 10 year-old, ticking the ‘music’ box, might have learned one simple song, while another has passed Grade 4 on an instrument and is making up their own music. In other words, the statistics do not give any depth or reality to the variety of children’s cultural experience, and cannot home in on the gaps in opportunity and provision which we all know are there. Even the ‘five hours a week’ measure is not going to tell us anything about quality or richness. We can’t say that these are lies, but they have so little meaning that they might as well be. We must hope that our politicians will continue to acknowledge the importance of educational opportunity in the arts, but we can’t be sure that the Government’s reliance on this kind of data is going to prove a useful tool in measuring any progress.
The new divide?
Ben Bradshaw, our be-quiffed Culture Secretary, made an interesting observation following the first meeting of ‘c&binet’ last month (p3). Seeing an impromptu ‘alternative conference’ of people from less well-established organisations in the foyer, he pointed to “the age-old and creative tensions between the bigs and the smalls, or the young and the old”. We’ve noticed these in the arts world too – and many small or young companies reading about the new RFO criteria may be dreaming of security and recognition. (Whether this perception of RFO status is correct or not we will leave to history to answer.) Our grapevine has also yielded anecdotal evidence that the small and the young are suffering disproportionately from the recession – losing survival-level funding or finding tour bookings cancelled because their names aren’t big enough to obviate box office risk.