Public engagement with the arts:
Arts Council England’s strategic challenges
August 2006
Catherine Bunting
1 Introduction
Arts Council England works to get more art to more people in more places. We
develop and promote the arts across England, acting as an independent body at
arm’s length from government.
Between 2006 and 2008, we will invest £1.1 billion of public money from
government and the National Lottery in supporting the arts. This is the bedrock of
support for the arts in England.
2006 marks the 60th anniversary of the granting of the Royal Charter to the Arts
Council. This is a moment to celebrate six decades of the arts as they are
experienced by millions of people across England and to be proud of the strength
and diversity of the country’s artists and arts organisations. It is also an opportunity
to look forward and to consider how the Arts Council can best support a vibrant
cultural community in the future.
By examining the broader policy context and the changing social and cultural
environment we have identified a number of key strategic challenges that we will
address over the coming years. This paper sets out those strategic challenges and
provides a backdrop for future Arts Council policy and research initiatives,
including the arts debate – our first-ever public value inquiry.
2 Public engagement with the arts
Our core purpose is enshrined in our Royal Charter of 1946 and reflects a dual
responsibility – to enable and support quality, excellence and innovation in artistic
practice and to encourage public engagement with and participation in the creative
life of this country.
The Arts Council of 1946 was a product of its time. Like much of the post-war
Welfare State, it was characterised by a paternalistic delivery of services by
professionals who were judged to know best. In its early years the Arts Council
was concerned with the preservation and development of largely elite artforms in
metropolitan centres and ‘public engagement’ was expressed as a desire to
increase the accessibility of these artforms to the general public – to ‘educate the
masses’. Since then, the arts funding system has become less hierarchical in
approach and the geographic distribution of funds has become more equitable, but
the Arts Council’s priorities have always been with supply rather than demand.
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In the 1980s and early 1990s low and inconsistent government grants to the Arts
Council destabilised those parts of the arts community that relied heavily on public
subsidy. Over the last decade we have focused most of our time, energy, and
resources on addressing the resulting structural and financial insecurity. Much has
been achieved, including substantial increases in government investment in the
arts and a growth in understanding of some of the sector’s most acute financial
difficulties1. However, in recent years – in line with other developed economies –
there has been increasing recognition both within and outside the Arts Council that
greater public investment in the arts needs to be tied more closely to a stronger
and more modern notion of public engagement.
Peter’ Hewitt’s Changing Places (2005) laid the foundations for a new direction for
the Arts Council. It recognised that a vibrant arts ecology requires both elements
of our Royal Charter to flourish together. Our renewed commitment to public
engagement with the arts can be seen in our corporate plan for 2006–8 and is
reflected in our new mission statement: ‘to put the arts at the heart of our national
life and people at the heart of the arts’.
Our first strategic challenge is therefore to build understanding of what greater
public engagement with the arts might look like in the 21st century, and how it can
best be accomplished through the investment of public money. We will need to
approach our work with a fresh perspective and build a new knowledge and
evidence base to inform our decisions.
3 Value and accountability
The Arts Council’s public engagement challenge is not unique – many public
institutions are seeking new ways of connecting and conversing with their users
and consumers. Creating a greater role for the public has been part of a broader
process of public service reform, closely tied to a desire for stronger public sector
accountability.
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Tangible benefits have been observed; for example, data from our survey of
regularly funded organisations shows that between 1996/97 and 2003/04 the
estimated proportion of regularly funded organisations with accumulated deficit fell
from 41% to 22%
3
The Arts Council faces the ongoing challenges of relevance, value and
accountability shared by all organisations where the absence of a bottom line
makes it difficult to assess the extent of organisational success and how resources
should be targeted. In recent years these challenges have become increasingly
significant for all public bodies. Education and health targets, for instance, have
become a common source of contention in the mainstream media. The publicly
funded arts sector has not been immune to this trend.
The last decade has seen unprecedented levels of public investment in the arts
and, unsurprisingly, this has been accompanied by increasing demands for
evidence of demonstrable impact and for a discernible return on investment.
However, the injection of funds has not been accompanied by any enhanced
clarity or consensus around the purpose of public investment in the arts, nor an
open, detailed and wide-ranging negotiation of the expected outcomes of such
investment.
As such, perceptions of what success looks like vary across the wide range of
organisations involved in the publicly funded arts sector and not enough has been
done to develop and agree meaningful, transparent criteria on which to base arts
policies, decisions and evaluation.
This paucity of agreed success criteria has had two palpable effects. First, in some
parts of the arts community it has fuelled a resistance to the overall concept of
performance measurement. Second, it has encouraged policy makers, public
funders and practitioners to use instrumental arguments to defend public
expenditure on the arts. Investment tends to be justified by the contribution that
the arts make to broader social and economic agendas, despite a contested
evidence base and general recognition that such instrumental purposes are
unlikely to be prioritised by many artists and arts organisations. The inadequacy of
these arguments and the desire for a new approach have been expressed by
numerous academics, think tanks and commentators, including Tessa Jowell in
her 2004 personal essay, Government and the Value of Culture, and John Holden
in his influential work Capturing Cultural Value (2004).
However, it seems that the debate about value has become divorced from longterm strategy and day-to-day operation in the publicly funded arts sector. It is
masking two more fundamental challenges for the sector: challenges of
accountability and innovation.
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If the objectives and expected outcomes of public investment in the arts are not
clear then it becomes difficult to attach meaningful conditions to a funding
agreement. When the time comes for an organisation to account to its funder for
what has been achieved with its share of public money, what data should be
presented and in what format? Funded organisations can end up fitting aims and
objectives to their activities retrospectively, depending on how they perceive their
funder’s current priorities. Funders tend to develop cumbersome and data-heavy
monitoring processes, the purpose and value of which are not always evident to all
of the parties involved.
The Arts Council’s strategic challenge is to ensure that public investment in the
arts is accompanied by a more appropriate notion of accountability, one that is
meaningful to our own ambitions, to the individuals and organisations we fund and
to the wider public.
Public accountability is important in its own right as an element of a healthy
democratic function. However, there is another important reason to evaluate the
performance of the publicly funded arts sector more effectively: to drive innovation
and change.
With few agreed success criteria it is difficult to weigh up the merits of the different
ways in which public money can be invested in the arts. What incentives should
there be for the publicly funded arts sector to explore how and why it might need to
change? What should the rationale be for increasing or decreasing funding to a
particular organisation? A more challenging vision of what could and should be
achieved through public investment in the arts would encourage the Arts Council
and the individuals and organisations we fund to innovate in ways that move us
closer towards that vision. Without such a vision our decisions may be overly
weighted in favour of the status quo and our pace of change may be too slow to
keep up with the shifting needs and aspirations of society.
The Arts Council’s impact depends on our ability to make confident and legitimate
decisions about how public investment can best be deployed – which in turn
requires clarity of objectives, a deep understanding of accountabilities and a
commitment to evaluating effectively and acting on the results. Our mission
provides a broad statement of intent. To be successful we need a clear
understanding of how the different ways in which we could pursue our mission
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might create value for all the communities we serve. Our strategic challenge is to
develop a ‘value framework’ – an analytical framework that sets out how the Arts
Council will deliver value to our stakeholders by achieving our mission.
4 Our value framework
4.1
Conceiving the framework
Our value framework needs to be rooted in the priorities and aspirations of all of
our stakeholders. Members of the public – that is consumers and citizens – lie at
the heart of our mission. Our framework therefore needs to incorporate some
measure of ‘public value’ – value that is created through accessing and
responding to the preferences and opinions of the public2.
However, our equal commitment to the arts community, and our responsibility to
many other stakeholders, means that our framework must take a more subtle and
complex view of public value. It must integrate measures of public value with
measures of the value that we seek to create for artists and arts organisations and
for our partners in central and local government and other public bodies.
This diverse group of stakeholders will have a wide range of potentially competing
priorities, so there may be conflict between different elements of our value
framework. The Arts Council’s responsibility is to use evidence, analysis,
judgement and dialogue to balance the needs of different stakeholders and secure
the best settlement between competing aspirations and priorities.
The framework will need to incorporate an analysis of how different stakeholder
groups create value for each other. In particular, many artists and arts
organisations are primary creators of public value and the Arts Council needs to
understand how we can best support and facilitate that exchange.
The framework must also reflect our role in a rich and complex arts ecology. There
may be many kinds of arts activity that create value but that are or could be
supplied effectively and efficiently by the market or by other public bodies. Most
artists and arts organisations work in a mixed economy and our framework needs
2
For an overview of public value and its relevance to the arts see Public value and
the arts: literature review, Arts Council England 2006
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to lend clarity to the specific contribution of public subsidy as one of a number of
income streams. The Arts Council does not represent the entire artistic community
in England. Our strategic challenge is to maximise the contribution that our share
of public money makes to a vibrant, healthy, 21st century arts ecology.
4.2
Applying the framework
Once developed, our framework will enable us to assess how our current activities
and funding programmes create different kinds of value, and how we might create
more value in the future. For example, we will be able to identify gaps or
weaknesses in the funding infrastructure and this knowledge will inform our policy
priorities and resource allocation.
Our value framework will help shape the expectations we place on the individuals
and organisations we fund3. Developing the framework will generate a better
understanding of how decisions create value for different stakeholders. This will
enable the development of funding agreements that are based less on the ability
of applicants to ‘tick the right boxes’ and more on a shared understanding of how
they can contribute to specific elements of a broad value framework.
The framework will enable us to develop a more coherent and effective approach
to assessing the value created by individuals and organisations through the
funding they receive from us and to evaluating our own performance.
The Arts Council’s strategic challenge is to develop and apply a value framework
that strengthens our capability to make expert and informed decisions about the
best use of our resources.
5 Stakeholder dialogue
Stimulating public engagement with the arts, redefining our notion of public
accountability, and developing and applying an effective value framework are all
long-term challenges. We are developing a programme of research, analysis and
policy development that will speak to these challenges over the coming years. As
well as drawing on our own expertise it is critical that we turn outwards for
The Arts Council’s recent customer satisfaction survey concluded that greater
clarity of purpose and greater clarity around the kind of support that can and can’t
be provided would result in increased satisfaction among our stakeholders
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inspiration and guidance and engage our stakeholders in the debate at every
stage.
Our partners in the arts community, in central and local government and in other
parts of the public realm are critical to the delivery of our mission. Our value
framework must reflect their needs and priorities. However, we must create
opportunities for members of the public to participate in shaping the future of
public investment in the arts in this country. By giving consumers and citizens a
voice in the debate and by actively seeking to understand and respond to their
preferences we can increase the value and legitimacy of our work. We can learn
more about what excites and inspires people, and how we can create more
relevant, appealing and well-marketed arts opportunities. We can help support a
21st century arts ecology that more fully reflects public aspirations and seeks to
make a greater impact on the creative lives of our communities. And in a small
way we can help our democracy to function better.
To address the strategic challenges set out in this paper the Arts Council needs to
transform our approach to stakeholder engagement – to become adept at
connecting, conversing, listening, responding, shaping. Our long-term programme
of research and policy development will help drive this process of reform and
renewal. The cornerstone of the programme is the arts debate – our first-ever
public value inquiry.
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© Arts Council England, September 2006
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