Facelift for Artsmark

Arts Council England (ACE) is undertaking a pilot project as it prepares to ‘refresh’ its Artsmark award, the accreditation scheme that enables education providers to “to evaluate, strengthen and celebrate their arts and cultural provision”. For the past eight years, school signups for Artsmark have remained static, despite almost £7m in funding and consistent overhauls to the delivery methods of the award. Nevertheless, ACE remains committed to the award it describes as “highly valued” by teachers and schools, and is predicting an ambitious sign-up rate of 50% of schools by 2020.

The most recent data on Artsmark suggests that little if any progress has been made embedding the award into schools in the past decade. Figures show that from 2011 to 2014, only 3,000 – 13% – of the UK’s 22,255 eligible schools held the award, exactly the same percentage as was reported in 2006.

Annual funding to the scheme up to 2010/11 was around £600k, although when Trinity College London was appointed as the delivery partner for the award for 2012-15, this jumped to just over £1.2m per year. ACE has praised Trinity’s work in the three year period for having “strengthened, supported and connected the Artsmark community” with “advice, guidance and a community magazine”, although the partnership has not been renewed and ACE has reclaimed responsibility for delivering the award.

There have only been two reports into the effectiveness of Artsmark: one from 2006, which said “the findings consistently point to higher impacts of the application process than the achievement of the award itself”; and a second from 2011, which highlighted the “opportunity” to develop the award to make it more “relevant, accessible and flexible to the needs of schools”. As ACE prepares to give the scheme a shot in the arm, with a re-launch planned for September, it has now had conversations with head teachers, teachers, Ofsted and Bridge Organisations – the ten organisations that worked as regional partners with Trinity to assist in the delivery of the award – which are “feeding into the new Artsmark”. The proposed funding for 2015/16 is £1.3m.