Thursday 11 April 2024 5:30 am | Updated: Wednesday 10 April 2024 5:07 pm

Will it work? Cuts to university arts funding

Is it curtains for the UK’s creative industries?

It’s an election year. Politicians are giving us a barrage of policies. But we often forget to ask the most important question: will they actually work? In this column, Sam Fowles takes policies on their own terms and ask whether they solve the problem they’re supposed to solve. This week, cuts to university arts funding.

What’s the plan?

Education secretary Gillian Keegan has cut university funding for creative subjects, diverting the money to STEM. With Labour promising to expand arts education, it’s a prominent policy divide between the two main parties. Keegan wants students to “pursue higher education studies that enable them to progress into employment, thereby benefitting them as well as the wider economy”. Keegan’s plan will see top-up grants for arts courses such as music, drama and fashion frozen at £16.7m, a figure which is already at half its 2020 level. Resources will instead be focused on “strategically important subjects” such as medicine and engineering, which will receive an extra £18m for student grants next year.

While higher education is a good in and of itself, producing graduates who are more socially, culturally and critically aware, Keegan’s policy seems to look at universities purely as job training schemes. As this column takes policies on their own terms, we’ll just ask whether Keegan’s plan ensures higher education delivers in economic terms.

Reasons to get excited

We need more doctors and nurses. Medicine and nursing are expensive subjects to teach and charging students the full price will exclude talented students. It’s a prime candidate for government support. The government promised to double the number of medical school places by 2031. That requires between 2,000 and 3,000 additional places per year. Keegan’s proposal will provide an extra 205. Better than nothing, but some way off what’s needed.

Does it add up?

Keegan’s policy relies on two underlying assumptions: (1) you’re more likely to get a job with a STEM degree than something creative and (2) STEM subjects are of greater strategic value than arts subjects. Neither holds up.

Around 2.9m people are employed in STEM-related industries. The creative industries employ 2.4m. Both, therefore, are significant employers. The creative industries contribute around £126bn to the economy every year – more than the aerospace, automotive, life sciences and oil and gas sectors combined.
The arts generate £5 in taxes for every £1 of public investment. While the UK’s overall trade deficit is £53bn, the creative industries run at a surplus of £22.7bn.

Last year the department for culture announced an “ambitious plan to… boost UK creative industries by £50bn”. Yet the arts alone suffered cuts of 43 per cent between 2011 and 2021. Cutting off the pipeline of talent hardly seems a good way to “boost” the creative sector.

Cause for concern

The strategic value of creative industries goes well beyond economics. The Cultural Philanthropy Foundation identifies eight key benefits. Creative industries and education are an essential facet of the UK’s soft power and global influence. Engagement with creative opportunities has positive benefits for physical and mental health (which, in turn, helps take pressure off public services). It encourages community building and cohesion and drives innovation. It makes people happier and more fulfilled. Unfortunately, it’s currently the better off who get most of these benefits. Cutting public funding for creative education is likely to exacerbate this exclusivity.

Creative education also encourages innovation, critical thinking and empathy. With the development
of AI and remote commuting (enabling “technical” jobs like programming to be easily offshored) the World Economic Forum predicts that skills like creativity and empathy will be in increasing demand in the global north.