News

As the Department for Education concludes its consultation on the Progress 8 accountability measure, arts and education organisations have come together to warn that current proposals risk perpetuating the low value given to arts subjects in schools.

Submissions from the Independent Society of Musicians, Equity, Campaign for the Arts, Music Mark and National Society for Education in Art and Design all highlight that the proposed new system may continue to limit opportunities for students to study arts subjects and will continue to reinforce a hierarchy of subjects.

The organisations are all members of the Arts and Minds campaign coalition, whose recent research revealed that only 7% of school leaders plan to increase the time spent on arts subjects*, despite the scrapping of the EBacc and the government’s ambition to ‘revitalise arts education’.

The main barriers include the accountability system, priority given to other subjects and the exam factory culture – all of which are reinforced by the proposed Progress 8 model which outlines which subjects school performance will be judged on.

The organisations’ concerns include:

The proposed framework risks incentivising schools to offer only one arts subject.
Schools that are not able to offer any arts subjects can continue to do so under the current proposals
Lack of funding for staffing and resources will likely reinforce the existing hierarchy of subjects

The coalition of organisations is calling on the government to rethink its proposals and work with the arts education sector to ensure that the Progress 8 model supports a meaningful expansion of arts provision in schools. The consultation should consider how Progress 8 is used in league tables and move away from the current system that puts schools in competition with one another.

They also point out that attempts to restore the status of the arts and expand provision must also grapple with decades of underfunding and missed teacher recruitment targets and calls on the government to join these dots and put the education setting on a trajectory to restore funding and recruit the required specialist teachers.

The Arts and Minds submission sums up the difficulties with the government’s proposals: “While the proposed changes take some small steps to restore the relative status of arts subjects, the
proposal’s adherence to the current exam system and competitive school accountability process will continue to limit access. This inherent contradiction will undermine schools’ attempts to broaden the curriculum to include more arts subjects and puts at risk the government’s promises to the teaching profession.”

Arts and Minds Arts Ambassador, Bob and Roberta Smith, comments, “Pernicious Progress 8 pushes the arts away from our children and devalues the subjects in the eyes of parents.”

Ends

*Teacher Tapp, December 2025