Arts education is getting its money back. What reaches the art room?

A National Centre for Arts and Music Education is due to begin operating this September, on a three-year contract worth £13 million and running to August 2029. It will run online training for teachers, broker partnerships between schools and cultural organisations, and from September 2027 take on the funding of the music hubs from Arts Council England. An Enrichment Framework is being built alongside it. DfE procurement notice, 6 February 2026; DfE announcement, 18 March 2025

And the Curriculum and Assessment Review has recommended removing the EBacc performance measure, which since 2010 has shaped which subjects a Year 9 could realistically pick. The government aims to publish the revised national curriculum by spring 2027, for first teaching in September 2028.

For anyone who has led an art department through the last decade, this is the first genuinely good week in a long time. It is also worth being precise about what has happened: the ceiling has been raised, and nothing has yet been said about the floor.

The figures arrived in the same fortnight

Four days before this was written, A Level results were published. Arts entries fell again, to 90,985 — 10.0% of all A Level entries, the smallest share on record and a fall of 34% since 2010. Art and design, by far the most-entered arts subject, slipped to its own record low of 4.7% of entries, its entry numbers down 36% over the same period. GCSE figures follow this week. Campaign for the Arts analysis of JCQ data, 13 August 2026

So the money and the decline are arriving together, and the money is arriving slowly. The curriculum lands in classrooms in September 2028. The hubs handover has already moved back a year. A Year 9 choosing options this autumn will have finished their GCSE before any of it reaches them.

Access is not the same as quality

Every lever in the announcement is an access lever. They change how many pupils can get through the door of an art room, which matters enormously and is not the same problem as what happens once they are inside it.

None of the right-hand column can be bought, brokered or framed. All of it is departmental, all of it is free, and all of it is the difference between a pupil who chooses art and a pupil who does well at it.

Three of the four objectives describe a process

The four assessment objectives are set by Ofqual and carry 25% each, identically across AQA, Edexcel, OCR and Eduqas. Three of them — develop, refine, record — describe what a pupil did. Only the fourth describes what they produced. AO3 is explicit about when: observations recorded as work progresses. Annotation written in May about work made in November is not recording, whatever else it is.

Which is why the sketchbook is not a presentation object. It is the only place three quarters of the marks can actually be seen — and that makes how pupils are taught to use it a mark-bearing decision rather than a matter of departmental taste.

1. Weak A full-page copy of a photograph, neatly mounted, with the artist’s name underneath. One source, reproduced. It evidences care, and care is not an assessment objective.
2. Developing The copy, plus a small colour study beside it and a sentence saying which the pupil prefers. A comparison has appeared. But preference is not analysis, and nothing follows from it.
3. Strong Three quick media tests, one circled, a note on why, and a thumbnail showing where it goes next. Selection with a reason, and a forward move. Two objectives visible on one spread.
4. Exceptional The above, plus one test crossed through — “too even, loses the edge I wanted” — and the next page already acting on it. The rejected test is the evidence of judgement. The thinking continues across the turn.

None of these four takes longer than the others. The difference is what the pupil believes the book is for — and that is something a department tells them, every week, mostly without meaning to.

Where departments drift

Four drifts, and not one of them is caused by weak teaching. Each is a reasonable decision that stopped being examined, and each is held in place by a sentence nobody in the room would think to question.

1. 01

   The copy that never becomes a response

   A pupil finds an image, reproduces it well, and stops. The page is skilful and the thinking is absent. Nobody intervenes, because the work looks good.

   “It’s a really strong drawing — leave it.”

2. 02

   The sketchbook as decoration

   Pages get tidied, backgrounds painted, edges neatened. Time that should buy experiments buys presentation. The book becomes an object rather than a record.

   “Make sure it looks nice for the moderator.”

3. 03

   Independence assumed, never taught

   Pupils are told to be independent in Year 10 having chosen nothing for three years. Independence is treated as a personality trait some of them turn out to have.

   “The strong ones just get on with it.”

4. 04

   A standard nobody agreed

   Two teachers mark the same portfolio a grade apart and neither knows. It surfaces at moderation, in June, when nothing can be done about it.

   “That’s about a five, I’d say.”

What the four have in common is that every one substitutes something visible for something assessed. A tidy page for a tested idea. A finished drawing for a developed one. A confident pupil for a taught one. A number for an agreed standard.

Whole-school teaching strategies or assessment practices are likely to be too generic to capture the forms of knowledge that pupils build through the art and design curriculum.

Ofsted, Research review series: art and design, February 2023

That is Ofsted telling art departments that the school’s standard marking policy is probably not fit for this subject. It is the most useful sentence a head of art can have in their pocket when a whole-school system arrives wanting a percentage every half term — and it works far better than arguing that art is different. Show what the four objectives measure, and ask which of them a percentage captures.

The thing no announcement can fund quickly

There were 1,040 fewer art and design teachers in secondary schools between 2010 and 2020, a fall of around 8%. Around two thirds of primary trainees reported not feeling confident about teaching arts subjects. Those two facts meet in the same place: a Year 7 cohort arriving with a wider spread of prior experience than any scheme of work assumes. Ofsted, Research review series: art and design, 2023

Departments answer that in one of two ways. Some lower the entry point, which quietly removes two years of curriculum from the top end. Others teach the basics explicitly and fast, then move — on the assumption that nothing has been taught rather than that everything has. The second is more work in September and considerably less work in Year 11.

What the wall is teaching

Every art department is judged, informally and constantly, by what is on its walls. Parents see it at open evening, colleagues see it on the way to the hall, and pupils see it every day and learn from it what the subject values. Which makes the display the most under-used teaching tool in the building.

A wall of resolved, beautiful outcomes teaches pupils that art is the production of beautiful outcomes — and three of the four things they are assessed on are nowhere on it. That is not a display decision. It is a curriculum statement, and it costs exactly the same as the other kind.

So take the good news, and then walk your own corridor. Put one failed experiment next to the outcome it produced, and label it honestly. It takes a morning, no funding settlement is required, and it tells every pupil who walks past what this department actually believes the subject is for.