The numbers are damning. A 42 per cent collapse in Expressive Arts GCSE entries since 2010. A 27 per cent haemorrhage of arts teachers. Art and design teacher training recruitment down 84 per cent in four years. For a nation that markets itself as a creative powerhouse – the UK’s creative industries contributed £145.8 billion to the economy in 2024, growing at nearly five times the rate of the wider economy – the contradiction between what we celebrate and what we permit inside our classrooms has become impossible to ignore.
In November 2025, the government finally conceded. The English Baccalaureate, the school performance measure introduced by Michael Gove in 2010 that became shorthand for the demotion of the arts, is to be scrapped. Arts GCSEs will be given equal status to humanities and languages. A new enrichment entitlement promises every child access to civic engagement, arts and culture, nature, sport and life skills. It was, by any measure, a reckoning – not just with a policy instrument, but with a philosophy that treated creativity as optional, a luxury, expendable.
Yet the question confronting educators, policymakers and parents is not whether the EBacc deserved its demise. It is whether dismantling the scaffold that suppressed creative subjects will be enough to rebuild what was lost.
The Architecture of Erasure
The EBacc was never a qualification. It was a metric – a way of ranking schools on the proportion of pupils achieving passes in maths, English, two sciences, a language, and either history or geography. No arts subject featured. The consequences were architectural. Schools, acutely aware of how their standing in league tables shaped parental choice and Ofsted outcomes, began to engineer their curricula around the measure.
Sarah Hannafin, head of policy at the NAHT school leaders’ union, has been candid about the distortion. The EBacc, she argued, “disincentivised the take-up of creative subjects and skewed curriculum and qualification choices in schools.” What began as a nudge became a stranglehold. The Curriculum and Assessment Review, published in November 2025 under Becky Francis’s leadership, found that 56 per cent of schools had begun teaching GCSE content as early as Year 9 for all or most subjects, a practice driven partly by the relentless pressure of the measure. Some schools began GCSE preparation as early as Year 7. The breadth of key stage 3 – the last stage where children encounter a wide range of subjects without the funnel of high-stakes assessment – was hollowed out.
The human cost was starkly captured in a landmark 2025 study by researchers at the University of Cambridge, commissioned by the Nuffield Foundation, which tracked 1.7 million students in England through their educational records. Almost half of 14-year-olds expressed a preference for a creative subject. By their early thirties, only around one in 25 was working in the creative sector. The fall-off was steepest among poorer students and girls – a “double disadvantage,” as Professor Sonia Ilie described it, that saw class and gender conspire to close doors that should have remained open. “If you have a university degree in a creative subject, you are much more likely to end up in a creative career,” Ilie noted. “But the problem is that many young people are not reaching the point where studying for a degree is even an option.”
A Class Problem Masquerading as a Curriculum Problem
The rhetoric of curriculum reform often sanitises what is, at its core, a question of equity. The Cultural Learning Alliance’s 2026 Report Card laid bare the arithmetic: in the most deprived areas, only 6.6 per cent of GCSE entries are in arts subjects, compared to 8.3 per cent in the most affluent. Working-class young people are four times less likely to work in the creative industries. These are not abstract disparities. They represent a generation for whom the arts were never positioned as a viable pathway – not because they lacked talent, but because the system offered them no runway.
The erosion has been particularly acute in primary education. The Cultural Learning Alliance reported in 2025 that initial teacher training recruits for art and design had fallen by 84 per cent since 2020/21. Teacher trainees at institutions such as UWE Bristol reported receiving as little as one lecture and three two-hour sessions in art and design across their entire programme – a bare minimum focused on basic skills. The Year 2 art specialism has been removed entirely. As Susan Ogier has argued in the Cambridge Education Research Journal, accountability measures have limited children’s access to “a truly broad and enriching education, essential for preparing them for a creative and technological future.”
The irony is exquisite. While schools were trimming arts provision to meet the demands of standardised assessment, the creative industries were accelerating past the rest of the economy. DCMS data shows creative industries GVA grew 60.3 per cent between 2010 and 2024, compared to 24.3 per cent for the UK economy as a whole. The sector now employs hundreds of thousands of people across nearly 270,000 businesses. We are, in effect, starving the pipeline of the talent that feeds the one sector consistently outperforming the rest. The tension is not, as some would frame it, a zero-sum contest between STEM and creativity – institutions such as the National Mathematics and Science College have demonstrated that rigorous specialisation and intellectual curiosity are complementary forces. The real problem lies in a system that treats creative capacity as expendable rather than foundational.
The Assessment Trap
The EBacc was not the only mechanism of contraction. The House of Lords Education Committee, in its 2024 report Requires Improvement, found the GCSE system itself had become a distortion engine. Witnesses told the committee that pupils were sitting “around 30 hours of exams at the end of Year 11” – a gauntlet that left little room for project-based learning or the extended creative practice that develops original thinking.
Ofsted’s own research, published in March 2025, confirmed the pattern. In its longitudinal study revisiting 20 schools before and after the Education Inspection Framework, inspectors found curriculum quality had improved in ambition and depth – but the gains were concentrated in English and mathematics. Foundation subjects, including the arts, continued to suffer from weaker curriculum design. “We did not observe the same attentiveness to mathematics across the curriculum,” the report noted, before adding, with characteristic understatement, that maths strategy was “the only curriculum area we found to be weaker in 2024 than in 2018.”
The assessment trap operates through a vicious cycle. High-stakes testing narrows the curriculum. Narrow curricula reduce teacher confidence in creative subjects. Reduced confidence leads to diminished provision. Diminished provision produces fewer teachers. Fewer teachers reinforce the perception that arts subjects are peripheral. The cycle tightens until, as UWE Bristol’s Education and Childhood Research Group documented, trainee teachers observe “little or no art being taught in schools during their placements.” It is a pattern that extends beyond the arts. As Creativity’s UK has documented elsewhere, even the pressures of digital distraction and fragmented attention in classrooms compound the difficulty of sustaining deep creative engagement – another strand of an education system stretched thin by competing demands.
What Reform Must Actually Do
The government’s response to the Curriculum and Assessment Review contains genuinely ambitious commitments. Creative thinking will be embedded in refreshed programmes of study across subjects – creative thinking in computing, critical thinking in history, problem-solving in maths. A new oracy framework will support primary teachers in developing confident, fluent speakers. GCSE exam time is to be reduced by 2.5 to 3 hours on average. And the enrichment entitlement, underpinned by Ofsted’s new inspection framework, creates a structural expectation that schools will offer breadth beyond the academic core.
Kate Varah, co-CEO and executive director of the National Theatre, captured the significance of the shift: “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.”
But the structural conditions that created the crisis have not disappeared. The government’s own analysis acknowledges that implementation will require “high-quality support for teachers of these subjects” – a formulation that conceals the scale of the challenge. Schools face acute shortages of specialist arts teachers, adequate resources, and purpose-built facilities. An enrichment entitlement, however well-intentioned, cannot be delivered by non-specialists improvising in repurposed storage cupboards.
Ed Sheeran, whose open letter to the government – co-signed by Harry Styles, Annie Lennox and Sir Elton John – helped accelerate the policy conversation, was characteristically direct: the reforms “give young people hope and the opportunity to study music.” But his instinctive understanding of what education gave him – “the encouragement I received in school, especially from my music teacher, I wouldn’t be a musician today” – points to the deeper truth that policy instruments alone cannot capture. Creativity is not a subject. It is a disposition, cultivated by confident teachers working in conditions that allow risk and failure.
Beyond the Honeymoon
The Curriculum and Assessment Review’s final report recommended the government identify “where subject-specific disciplinary skills are not clearly described or not emphasised adequately” and ensure they are reflected in programmes of study. This is necessary work, but insufficient without the infrastructure to deliver it. A national centre for arts and music education – announced alongside the reforms – must be more than a token commitment. It must equip teachers with the confidence to teach creative subjects with the same rigour the best schools have always demanded.
Dr Emily Tanner, education programme head at the Nuffield Foundation, framed the stakes plainly: “With creative industries identified as among the highest-potential sectors in the UK’s industrial strategy, this research is timely. It shows that ensuring equitable access will require concerted action to remove barriers for girls and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.”
The government has accepted the diagnosis. The question now is whether it will sustain the investment – financial, political and cultural – required to reverse fourteen years of institutionalised neglect. The EBacc was not merely a metric. It was the expression of a worldview that measured school success in narrow terms while dismissing the creative capacities that determine whether young people can navigate, adapt to, and ultimately shape the world they inherit.
Removing it is a beginning. What matters is what fills the space it leaves behind.
