Everyone in Britain should be issued with a “universal library card” and children should spend 10% of their school time on arts activities, according to a new report.
The Fabian Society’s Arts For Us All calls for Keir Starmer’s government to remove the “class ceiling” by democratising access to the arts in schools and ensure culture is a prominent feature of its “decade of economic renewal”.
Starmer spoke passionately about his love for the arts in the lead up to the election, while promising to review school curriculums to ensure the “downgrading” of arts subjects stopped, but there has been little concrete policy so far.
Alison Cole, the director of the thinktank’s arts and creative industries policy unit, said Labour had the chance to rebuild the cultural sector and encourage economic growth in the process.
She said: “By embedding creativity in the school curriculum; making the arts part of everyone’s daily experiences; firing up our world-leading creative industries; and investing in creativity and technology hand in hand, we can harness the arts as powerful engines of change, inspiration and future growth.”
The thinktank’s other ideas include giving children a “culture pass” to access arts and heritage institutions; a comprehensive review of arts funding; and ensuring every child can learn an artistic practice such as painting or playing an instrument.
The Fabian Society believes art held in public collections should be lent to GP practices, town halls and other places where “people naturally congregate”, while also calling for another review of Arts Council England.
Arts For Us All comes after months of debate about the future of the arts in Britain and inequality in the sector in particular. The Sherwood writer, James Graham, who used his MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh television festival to call for the class bias in the creative sector to be tackled, has backed the report.
During the lecture, Graham cited a recent report that claimed only 8% of people in the British film and TV industry were from working-class backgrounds.
He said: “It’s so exciting to see practical but nevertheless ambitious ideas on how to re-embed arts and culture into the fabric of our communities and our schools. The arts enrich any society, in all the ways. Emotionally, economically … This moment demands they not be an afterthought but a key part of the nation’s renewal.”
The culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, told the Royal Television Society in London on Tuesday that the entertainment industry is “one of the most centralised and exclusive industries” in the country.
Nandy said: “8% – the proportion of working class people in TV; 23% – the proportion of commissions made by companies based outside of London; 30% – the fall in trust in media over the last decade. None of this is inevitable.”
Earlier this month, she said that Labour would “open up access to these sectors and make them more representative of the whole UK”, while launching new research from Netflix that claimed working-class parents are discouraging their children from pursuing a career in the arts.