The Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy MP announced further details of the Independent Review of Arts Council England in February, and a national survey has since been announced. You can find out more about the Review here.
OutdoorArtsUK would like to encourage our members and sector colleagues to take the survey so that our sector voice is represented in this review.
The deadline is 12pm 24th April 2025.
Guidance for Completing the Survey
To ensure OAUK can feed your views into the Review, our team used the Member’s Monthly Drop-In Meeting in March to gather perspectives. Several of you sent through your views by email, too. We have combined these with our own thoughts and collated them into a summary text to frame our own survey response. In case this is useful reading for you, you can see the text below. OAUK would like to thank everyone who gave us their time.
You may also want to review our recent blogs and articles that provide some context.
- Arts Pro article (this article is also available on our website under Latest News, for those who don’t have an Arts Profession subscription)
A summary of OAUK and our members’ perspective for ACE Review
On Mandate – How does Arts Council England support Outdoor Arts?
Arts Council England has good intentions to improve public knowledge of the arts, increase accessibility and advise Governments. ACE should continue to prioritise its investment according to indicative data of low cultural engagement, as this also tends to be a sign of historic underinvestment. This has led to improved acknowledgement and investment into practitioners and organisations that are diverse-led, and those operating in Priority Places. Although there is more scope for better recognition, the profile of Outdoor Arts (Street Arts, Festivals, Carnivals, Melas and Light Nights) has increased within ACE thanks to this accessibility drive.
ACE’s Mandate is thus agreeable, but its actions have not always matched its Mandate. Institutions with political power have substantial influence over politicians and DCMS, which affects ACE’s ability to deliver its own policy and strategy. As a result, voices from smaller grassroots sectors like Outdoor Arts are often overshadowed. This kind of interference creates contradictions, confusion and frustration within ACE and parts of the Cultural Sector who genuinely want to help ACE deliver its Mandate. Emphasising its arms-length position, when it comes to “Co-operating with Governments” within the Mandate, would help ensure ACE’s independence. While it responds to the devolution agenda, it is also important for ACE to continue to hold a national overview of the whole arts ecology through information gathered by its Relationship Managers.
On “Let’s Create”
Let’s Create should in theory be a great match for Outdoor Arts. Its core vision: “Everyone of us has access to a remarkable range of high-quality cultural experiences” should be the central goal of ACE, and the Investment Principle of ‘Inclusivity and Relevance’ is an important anchor to achieve this. Through Street Arts, Festivals, Carnivals, Melas and Light Nights, Outdoor Arts take high-quality cultural experiences directly into places where communities feel at ease. Individuals in areas of low cultural engagement often find indoor cultural institutions intimidating because some of these institutions have historically failed to create programmes that are relevant to them. If ACE wanted to be more effective in taking the arts everywhere, it should place much more importance on sectors like Outdoor Arts that are small but in fact have a huge scope of delivering on ACE’s strategy and Mandate. The whole premise of Let’s Create is to listen to these smaller voices.
If ACE further deepened its knowledge and appreciation of sectors like ours, it would involve us more consistently for its policy design and implementation, and engaging the arts ecology more holistically like this will help ACE properly prioritise where investment goes to achieve its strategy and Mandate. It is currently too influenced by responding to sectors who can make the biggest political noise. This holistic approach becomes even more important in difficult times. For example, ACE’s current focus on supporting cultural infrastructure through the £270m Arts Everywhere fund only extends to arts venues and education, but Outdoor Arts and other grassroots artforms use other infrastructure such as festivals in public squares, making this funding inaccessible for the wider arts ecology.
By involving us more in policy design and implementation, ACE would also begin to recognise and better utilise Outdoor Arts sector’s unique skills of attracting and captivating audiences who are low cultural engagers. ACE can work with the Outdoor Arts Sector to incentivise or encourage partnerships between us and the institutions by ensuring that major initiatives in the future could benefit both indoor venues and sectors like ours who can help them diversify their audience. This approach could have made the £270m Arts Everywhere Fund much more than a sticking plaster to deeply embedded industry-wide issues. Many cultural workers move between artforms, and indoor and outdoor contexts, and ACE embracing cross-sector collaboration will reflect the fluidity of our ecology, too. This will further prevent current siloed ways of working.
ACE also needs to support our sector’s resourcing so that we can contribute more effectively towards these kinds of collaboration. It needs to get their project funding out faster – 6-12 week wait and the proposal to bar applicants from having 2 project grants is counterproductive to boosting activity and economic growth. Improved communication, and efficiency in assessment and feedback giving, should be the focus of bettering project grant success rate. Enhancing available resources by making Outdoor Arts eligible for Theatre Tax Relief and re-opening international markets would also help.
– Sho Shibata, OAUK Director
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Image credit: Brimstone the dragon by Autin Dance Theatre, Lunar New Year Leicester 2024 by Nucis Designs, photo: Paulina Ozynska
