Four years ago, in the days after the government first announced it would begin work on a National Plan for Cultural Education, I wrote a post that was really a brainstorm dressed up as a blog. I asked more questions than I answered: who cultural learning professionals are, whether the local can ever be a systemwide commitment, whether a plan could hold pupil voice, equity, pedagogy and provision all at once. Baroness Bull had just been appointed to chair the Expert Advisory Panel. It felt like the start of something very exciting for the sector.
It’s worth returning to that post now, not because I want to mark my own homework, but because so much has actually happened since; including, in a very roundabout way, the answer to the question I didn’t quite know I was asking: what happens to a plan when it takes too long to arrive?
The plan that didn’t quite arrive
The Cultural Education Plan I was imagining never landed in the form I expected. Baroness Bull’s panel met, the 50 listening exercises happened, Parliament was told progress was continuing – and then a change of government intervened. What eventually emerged wasn’t a single Cultural Education Plan document at all. Instead, the ambition got distributed: into a root-and-branch Curriculum and Assessment Review (its final report landed in November 2025), into a new National Centre for Arts and Music Education being planned for this September, and (just last month) into “Turn It Up,” a National Plan for Music rather than the broader cultural plan I’d been picturing.
That last point matters, and it’s one I raised in the original post without quite knowing it would resurface: I wondered whether music would keep getting the attention while the rest of the arts waited. It has. The Cultural Learning Alliance made the same observation about Turn It Up: a music-specific plan, however comprehensive, “repeats the… habitual emphasis on and separation of music,” and creates an art-form hierarchy that sits awkwardly next to a supposedly wider cultural education ambition. Michael Gove and Ed Vaizey both called music the highest art form when they were in office; it’s striking how durable that hierarchy has proved, across governments.
What the National Centre actually is
The National Centre for Arts and Music Education – the closest thing we now have to institutional follow-through on the 2022 announcement – is backed by £13 million over three years, launches this September, and is supposed to do the things I was hoping for: teacher CPD, curriculum implementation support, partnerships between schools and cultural organisations, and (from August 2027) oversight of the Music Hub network as Arts Council England steps back from that role. It’s a real thing, procured through a proper tender process, not a press release. But it’s worth noticing what it isn’t: it isn’t the broad, cross-artform entitlement the original White Paper promised, and its remit is explicitly 5–16, which leaves open all my old questions about post-16 pathways and where cultural learning sits beyond conventional schooling.
The evidence base has caught up
If the policy architecture has been messier than I’d hoped, the evidence base has genuinely strengthened, and this is where I want to give credit to work I didn’t have in front of me in 2022.
The Cultural Learning Alliance’s Arts in Schools: Foundations for the Future – the proper successor to the 1982 Gulbenkian report I referenced back then, co-authored by Sally Bacon and Pauline Tambling after a six-month consultation with over 300 people – has become the reference point I was hoping would exist. It was a joy to meet with Pauline and have a read of an early draft. Its finding that arts subjects are marginalised in a system that “itself requires a major overhaul” is blunter than anything in my original post, and its ten core principles have fed directly into CLA’s ongoing Blueprint for an Arts-rich education, due this autumn. CLA’s Report Cards and Rapid Evidence Reviews (the latter co-commissioned with the Royal Shakespeare Company) have also done something I only gestured at four years ago: turned “the arts matter” into an actual, citable evidence base – including, this year, first-time data on Arts apprenticeship take-up and take-up by ethnicity. The Arts Entitlement Gap they describe (where postcode and family income shape a child’s access to cultural experience) is precisely the “systemwide commitment against a variable local offer” tension I was circling around without naming it properly.
The Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre has filled in the economic and post-school half of the picture that my original post barely touched. Its State of the Nations series has tracked a “severe” and sustained decline in creative further education participation across all four UK nations, and its research on universities’ role in creative clusters shows how unevenly the graduate pipeline reaches different parts of the country; useful, sobering context for anyone tempted to treat cultural education as a schools-only question. Read alongside July’s news that the DfE is cutting strategic priorities grant funding to creative and performing arts university courses, Creative PEC’s evidence makes an uncomfortable case: whatever gets built in schools, it may currently be running straight into a funding cliff-edge at 18.
What I’d still ask
Some of my original questions have been answered, in a fashion. Others feel more urgent than they did in 2022.
I’d still want to know whether cultural learning professionals will ever be valued, structurally, on a par with teachers; the salary question I raised then hasn’t gone away, and if anything the widening gap between school-based arts provision and a shrinking HE arts sector makes the career pipeline question sharper, not softer. I’d still want pupil voice built into the machinery rather than consulted once and filed away. And I find myself with a new question the 2022 version of me didn’t have the vocabulary for: when a plan gets absorbed into curriculum reform, a music-specific package, and a delivery centre with a narrower remit than the original ambition, has the cultural education plan actually happened, just not as a document? Or has it quietly not happened at all, dispersed into pieces that are each individually real but collectively smaller than what was promised?
I don’t think there’s a clean answer. But between CLA’s evidence base and Creative PEC’s economic data, we’re at least arguing about it with better information than I had when I first sat down to imagine what a plan might look like.
The missing piece: the profession itself
If I’m honest, the 2022 post barely mentioned the people who’d actually have to deliver any of this. That’s the gap I keep returning to now. In Building a Culture of Professional Learning, reflecting on a workshop I ran at HMC this June, I wrote about the difference between CPD teachers attend and CPD that actually changes their practice – and about how thin the evidence is that most schools have closed that gap, whatever leaders believe about their own provision. A National Centre, a Blueprint, an evidence-based Capabilities Framework: none of it does much if the profession asked to enact it isn’t resourced, trusted, or given sustained time to learn. The same argument runs through The Future of Teaching: Profession, Purpose, and Possibility, where I made the case that teaching has to be understood as a research-informed profession with real agency, not simply a delivery mechanism for whatever plan lands next – and where I said outright that the National Centre for Arts and Music Education could be transformative, but only if it’s ambitious enough to shape practice rather than sit alongside it as an optional extra.
The Chartered College of Teaching’s Chartered Status, for what it’s worth, is one of the few structures I’ve found that tries to hold professional judgement and evidence together rather than treating them as competing claims. Cultural education and the future of the teaching profession keep turning out to be the same conversation, just told from different ends, and it’s the thread I’ll be pulling on when I speak at the Future of Schools Conference in Manchester this October: any plan for cultural education is only as good as the professional culture asked to carry it. But that professional culture is complex ecosystem of actors beyond schools; which makes this all very interesting to explore.
Steven Berryman 
Leave a comment