Sixteen years ago, a single policy decision set about dismantling one of the most vibrant strands of English state education. The English Baccalaureate – introduced in 2010 as a performance measure, not a qualification – was designed to drive uptake of traditional academic subjects: English, mathematics, sciences, a language, and either history or geography. What it actually produced, by design or neglect, was a systematic hollowing-out of creative and cultural education across the country. Now, for the first time in a generation, the machinery of reform is turning back in the other direction – and the stakes could not be higher.
The numbers are stark enough to constitute a national scandal. Between 2010 and 2023, entries to arts GCSEs fell by 42 per cent, according to the Cultural Learning Alliance’s 2025 Report Card. More than 40 per cent of English state schools no longer enter a single pupil for music GCSE; 41 per cent have dropped drama; 84 per cent do not offer dance. In Further Education, the collapse is even more dramatic: the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre reported a 57 per cent fall in creative FE enrolment in England between 2014/15 and 2022/23, with steeper declines in Wales (68 per cent), Scotland (20 per cent), and Northern Ireland (28 per cent). Meanwhile, the creative industries contribute £31 billion to the UK economy and employ over two million people – a sector the government’s own industrial strategy, published in June 2025, identified as one of eight key growth pillars.
This is not an abstract policy debate. It is a story about what kind of society England believes it is raising its children to inhabit.
The Architecture of Decline
To understand how we arrived at this point, one must trace the architecture of a policy ecosystem that made the marginalisation of the arts almost inevitable. The EBacc was never a curriculum. It was a accountability measure – a way of nudging schools, through league-table pressure, toward a defined cluster of subjects. Headteachers, facing inspection and performance scrutiny, responded rationally: if arts subjects do not count toward the measure, and if funding is tight, resources flow elsewhere.
The consequences compounded with each passing year. Between 2010 and 2012, the coalition government withdrew funding for a range of national arts education initiatives as part of school academisation. Arts teacher recruitment fell away. The pipeline that had fed music, drama, and art departments at secondary level began to dry up. The Cultural Learning Alliance recorded a 27 per cent decline in arts teacher numbers over the period. In the most deprived areas – where cultural access was already thin – the contraction was most acute. The PISA 2022 Creative Thinking assessment confirmed the damage internationally: just 66 per cent of English 15-year-olds agreed they were given the chance to express ideas at school, below the OECD average of 69.3 per cent. Singapore topped the rankings. England did not come close.
The damage was not limited to what happened inside classrooms. A 2024 report from the Museums Association described creative and cultural education as having been “systemically deprioritised” in English state schools over the previous 14 years. The phrase was chosen with care: this was not drift but a structural outcome, produced by a coherent set of policy choices that elevated measurable outcomes over the harder-to-quantify qualities – imagination, risk-taking, collaborative problem-solving – that creative education develops.
The Francis Review: A Turning Point
In July 2024, the incoming Labour government commissioned Professor Becky Francis CBE to chair an independent review of England’s curriculum, assessment, and qualifications system – the first such review in over a decade. The interim report, published in March 2025, acknowledged what the sector had long argued: that the EBacc performance measure “may be constraining” student choices and limiting access to arts and vocational subjects. The final report, published in November 2025 under the title Building a World-Class Curriculum for All, went further. Its centrepiece recommendation – accepted by the government – was the scrapping of the EBacc measure.
Professor Francis, who also leads the Education Endowment Foundation, told Schools Week that the review sought to improve “across the board” without destabilising the system. “It doesn’t mend things that aren’t broken, but rather builds on that strong foundation and goes hard on areas where we do need improvement,” she said. The review also recommended introducing a statutory national assessment of reading fluency and comprehension in Year 8, replacing the KS2 grammar, punctuation, and spelling test, and reducing GCSE examination time by at least 10 per cent.
The government’s response, published alongside the final report, signalled a genuine change of tone. The Department for Education acknowledged, in writing, that arts education had suffered a “prolonged and serious decline” – an admission that Baroness Fraser of Dreghorn, speaking in the House of Lords in March 2026, described as representing “a change of tone that many in the sector had long been waiting for.” The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill will, once curriculum revisions are implemented, require all state schools – including academies, which currently do not have to follow the national curriculum – to teach the national curriculum up to age 16.
What Rebuilding Actually Looks Like
Policy acknowledgment is one thing. Rebuilding is another, and the gap between rhetoric and reality is where previous reform efforts have foundered. The creative industries sector plan, published by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in June 2025, aims to increase annual investment in the creative industries to £31 billion by 2035. But as Times Higher Education reported in January 2026, specialist creative institutions have accused the government of undermining its own industrial strategy by cutting funding for arts courses and excluding non-STEM students from grants. “Supportive noises” from government, said Mark Osterfield, executive director at the Central School of Ballet, were failing to translate into “hard cash.”
The government’s answer – announced in March 2025 by Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson – includes a National Centre for Arts and Music Education, scheduled to launch in September 2026 through an open procurement process. The centre will promote arts opportunities via careers guidance and the national network of Music Hubs, support teacher training with online CPD resources, and foster school partnerships with cultural organisations. An Enrichment Framework, developed with a panel of experts, will cover extra-curricular activities from sport to debating to volunteering. Three million pounds has been earmarked to expand the Creative Careers Programme in schools.
Progress 8 reforms, which will effectively replace the metrics that squeezed out creative subjects, take effect for the 2025/26 academic year, with performance data published in autumn 2026. The Ofsted inspection framework has been overhauled: from November 2025, single-word judgements have been replaced by a five-point grading system across nine evaluation areas, with a new traffic-light report card format. A YouGov survey commissioned by Ofsted found that 70 per cent of parents preferred the new system, which provides context on wellbeing, safeguarding, inclusion, and curriculum breadth – areas previously invisible under the old structure.
The Broader Question: What Is Education For?
Behind the policy mechanics lies a deeper philosophical question that Sir Ken Robinson articulated with devastating clarity in his 2006 TED talk, Do Schools Kill Creativity? – now the most-watched TED talk of all time, with over 80 million views on the TED platform alone. “We are educating people out of their creativity,” Robinson said. He led the British government’s 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, whose report All Our Futures was described by The Times as raising “some of the most important issues facing business in the 21st century.” Robinson, who died in August 2020, spent the final decades of his life arguing that the industrial model of schooling – with its emphasis on conformity, compliance, and competition – was actively hostile to the qualities that human societies most need.
The OECD Learning Compass 2030 now frames creativity, agency, and teamwork as core educational outcomes – precisely what sustained arts learning develops. Durham University’s March 2025 report echoed the point: despite the UK’s cultural sector contributing £31 billion to the economy and employing over two million people, opportunities for young people to engage in the arts were declining. Creative UK’s manifesto calls for all school pupils to receive subsidised cultural experiences – museum visits, theatre trips, gallery tours – at least once a year, alongside regular library access. It also demands a long-term, public-facing campaign to change attitudes toward creativity and creative careers.
Meanwhile, 2026 has been designated the National Year of Reading – a Department for Education initiative delivered by the National Literacy Trust in partnership with The Reading Agency, BookTrust, and more than 60 organisations. The campaign targets parents of children under five, boys aged 10 to 16, and families from disadvantaged communities. “Reading expands minds, builds confidence and fuels creativity,” the campaign’s literature states. The ambition is to rebrand reading as “socially meaningful and personally valuable” – something that fits how people actually live, not an obligation imposed from above.
The tension between these various initiatives – reading campaigns, curriculum review, inspection reform, arts funding promises, creative industries strategy – is that they pull in slightly different directions. The curriculum review reinforces the primacy of core literacy and numeracy while simultaneously creating space for creative subjects. The National Year of Reading elevates reading but does not, in itself, address the structural squeeze on drama, music, art, and dance. The creative industries plan promises growth but cannot, on its own, rebuild the school-level pipeline that feeds the sector.
What Comes Next
The honest answer is that the rebuild will take years. The pipeline of arts teachers cannot be restored overnight. Schools that dropped music and drama a decade ago have lost not just staff but institutional knowledge, community partnerships, and the cultural expectation that creative subjects matter. The Francis Review provides a framework; the National Centre for Arts and Music Education, if it launches on schedule in September 2026, could become a genuine focal point. But the real test will be whether the government funds its ambitions at the scale required, and whether the creative industries – now identified as a national priority – are treated as more than an afterthought in educational policy.
The Cultural Learning Alliance’s 2025 Report Card includes testimony from young people who lived through the decline. One student described how creative subjects were increasingly seen as “extras” – optional, non-essential, expendable. Another noted that the devaluation was not just happening in classrooms but shaping how young people viewed the arts as viable futures. The Alliance’s warning bears repeating: the erosion of creative education is creating a generation with fewer opportunities to develop the skills that employers, economists, and policymakers across the political spectrum agree are essential.
England’s education system is not, of course, unique in struggling with these tensions. But the scale of the arts decline in English state schools – measurable in GCSE entries, FE enrolments, teacher numbers, and international comparisons – is exceptional among comparable nations. The policy corrections now underway represent a genuine, if belated, attempt to reverse the damage. Whether they succeed will depend on sustained political will, adequate funding, and a willingness to treat creativity not as a luxury but as a fundamental component of a functioning education – the kind of education that produces not just workers, but citizens capable of imagining alternatives to the world as they find it.
