For fifteen years, the story of arts education in England’s state schools has been one of slow, methodical erasure. The English Baccalaureate – that unassuming cluster of six academic subjects introduced by the coalition government in 2010 – became the invisible wrecking ball that swung through music departments, drama studios, and design technology workshops with devastating precision. Now, in November 2025, the government has finally pulled the plug. The EBacc is to be abolished. Arts GCSEs will be given equal status to humanities and languages in school performance measures for the first time in over a decade. And a new National Centre for Arts and Music Education, expected to launch in September 2026, will attempt to stitch back together what austerity and ideology unravelled.
The question is whether this belated reversal can undo the damage already done.
The Scale of the Destruction
The numbers are stark enough to read twice. Since 2010, entries to arts GCSEs have fallen by 48 per cent, according to analysis by the Campaign for the Arts. In 2009/10, arts subjects accounted for 13 per cent of all GCSE entries; by 2025, that share had collapsed to just 7.04 per cent. More than 40 per cent of state schools no longer enter a single pupil for music GCSE. For drama, the figure is 41 per cent. For dance, 84 per cent of schools have abandoned it entirely at GCSE level.
The Cultural Learning Alliance’s 2025 Report Card quantified the wider fallout: a 27 per cent decline in arts teacher numbers since 2010, and Initial Teacher Training recruitment for Art and Design down 84 per cent since 2020/21 alone. Entire regions have become creative deserts. FFT Education Datalab data shows that in 2023, 70 per cent of schools with the highest levels of deprivation had no entries for GCSE music at all, compared to just 9 per cent of the least disadvantaged schools. The access gap is not a side effect of the system; it is the system.
“What we’ve witnessed is not accidental decline – it is policy-driven erosion,” Jack Gamble, Director of the Campaign for the Arts, told Arts Professional in August 2025. “The exclusion of arts subjects from the English Baccalaureate, the lesser weighting given to them in the Progress 8 school performance measure, and funding pressures on schools have all contributed to this disastrous trend.”
What the Review Actually Recommends
The Curriculum and Assessment Review, chaired by Professor Becky Francis CBE and published on 5 November 2025, is the first comprehensive overhaul of England’s national curriculum since 2014. At 197 pages, with 478 footnotes and a further 37-page analytical annex, it is not a document that yields its implications easily. But its central thrust on the arts is unambiguous.
The review recommends scrapping the EBacc entirely and reforming Progress 8 – the accountability measure that determines how schools are judged – to give arts GCSEs equal standing alongside humanities and languages. Under the new model, pupils will have dedicated breadth slots that must include subjects from at least two of three categories: Humanities, Creative, and Languages. Arts subjects can no longer be treated as optional extras without consequence to a school’s performance data.
The government has accepted these recommendations. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson confirmed on 4 November 2025 that arts GCSEs – Art and Design, Drama, Music, Dance, and Design and Technology – would be given “equal status to humanities and languages, recognising their value in boosting confidence and broadening skills for a competitive job market.”
A new National Centre for Arts and Music Education will be established to coordinate teacher training, research, and partnerships between schools and cultural institutions. It will be tasked with promoting arts education across the school network, including through the government’s existing programme of music hubs, and will deliver an online continuing professional development offer for primary and secondary teachers.
Additionally, a statutory enrichment entitlement will guarantee every pupil access to arts, culture, nature, sport, and civic engagement. Ofsted will assess delivery of this entitlement, and schools will publish profiles showing what enrichment they offer – a mechanism designed to prevent the entitlement existing only on paper.
The Teacher Crisis Nobody Talks About
Even if the policy architecture is now sound, the human infrastructure is in ruins. The CLA Report Card documented what young people themselves experience daily: creative subjects treated as “extras” – optional, non-essential, expendable. One young adviser at A New Direction, quoted in the CLA’s 2025 analysis, described how a friend teaching art in a state school “constantly has to justify everything she does. And that takes a toll.”
The pipeline for replacing those teachers has collapsed. Art and Design ITT recruitment fell 84 per cent between 2020/21 and 2024/25. Music teacher training targets have been consistently missed. When asked if they would consider entering teaching themselves, a group of talented young arts mentors responded with a “resounding ‘No'” – the profession feels undervalued, underfunded, and unsupported.
Deborah Annetts, Chief Executive of the Independent Society of Musicians, told a Westminster conference in April 2025 that music is “dying on its feet in secondary schools.” The ISM’s research found that 25 per cent of secondary school music teachers reported pupils were not receiving classroom music throughout Key Stage 3. The government’s response to the curriculum review acknowledges the need for “high-quality support for teachers of these subjects,” but the detail of how teacher recruitment will be rebuilt at the necessary scale remains thin.
The Creative Industries Paradox
There is a peculiar disconnect at the heart of England’s education-economy relationship. The UK’s creative industries contributed approximately £124 billion to the economy in 2023, according to House of Commons Library data – roughly 5 per cent of total UK economic output. They support 2.4 million jobs, around 7 per cent of all UK employment. Exports totalled £54.7 billion in 2021, accounting for nearly 15 per cent of all UK services exports.
The government’s own Creative Industries Sector Plan, published in June 2025 as part of its industrial strategy, pledges to increase business investment in the sector from £17 billion to £31 billion by 2035. London alone generated £64 billion of creative gross value added in 2023. The UK is the third biggest city for film-making in the world, and houses four of the world’s largest visual effects companies.
Yet the education system that is supposed to feed this economic juggernaut has been systematically starved of the subjects that develop the skills it needs. A House of Lords inquiry observed that schools are not preparing students adequately for careers in the creative sector. Working-class young people are four times less likely to work in the creative industries, and only 6.6 per cent of GCSE entries in the most deprived areas are in arts subjects, compared to 8.3 per cent in the most affluent.
Kate Varah, Co-CEO and Executive Director of the National Theatre, welcomed the government’s reforms: “Access to drama and arts subjects are an essential part of a broad, rich and inclusive curriculum. They introduce a huge body of knowledge and skills, helping students to build their understanding of the world, and supporting them to develop independence alongside key skills including confidence, problem solving, collaboration and self-expression.”
What Happens Next
The timeline is ambitious. The new national curriculum is expected to be drafted and tested with teachers before full implementation from September 2028. The National Centre for Arts and Music Education is due to launch in September 2026 through an open procurement process. Progress 8 reforms will take effect for the 2025/26 academic year’s performance measures, published in autumn 2026.
But the curriculum review’s chair, Professor Becky Francis, was careful to describe her recommendations as “evolutionary not revolutionary.” The school curriculum in five years’ time will remain subject-based and knowledge-led. The question is whether the shift in weighting – from penalising schools that offer arts to rewarding them for breadth – will be enough to reverse fifteen years of institutional atrophy.
There are early signs of cautious recovery. Campaign for the Arts analysis of 2025 GCSE results showed that Dance, Music, and Performing/Expressive Arts entries grew by 9 per cent, 7 per cent, and 9 per cent respectively – small increases, but the first sustained uptick in years. “It’s encouraging to see increases,” Jack Gamble noted, “but worth noting that this is from a historically low baseline.”
The structural incentives are now, at last, pointing in the right direction. Whether schools can rebuild departments, recruit teachers, and re-establish creative cultures that were dismantled over a decade and a half is a different question entirely. Policy can open doors. It cannot, on its own, fill the rooms behind them.
What is certain is that the argument has been won. The EBacc, which for fifteen years functioned as an elegant instrument of creative marginalisation, is finished. Arts subjects will no longer be treated as lesser disciplines in the metrics that govern school life. The National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Independent Society of Musicians, the Campaign for the Arts, and a coalition of over twenty organisations under the Arts and Minds banner all pushed for this moment. The government’s own industrial strategy now explicitly depends on the creative pipeline that its education policy was systematically destroying.
The task now is execution – and speed. Every year of delay is another cohort of pupils denied access to subjects that, as the OECD Learning Compass 2030 framework recognises, develop precisely the creativity, agency, and teamwork that the modern economy demands. England’s creative education crisis was manufactured by policy. The remedy must be equally deliberate.
