I’ve been directing a cracking new play about grief and family by a 19-year-old from Merthyr Tydfil, one of the 500 submitted as part of the National Theatre’s New Views programme. Every year schools across the UK work with professional playwrights to mentor students in writing their own original works, and the results are enlightening.
Last month was the culmination of our 29th Connections festival, where 6,000 young people took part in productions from Plymouth to Forfar. Every year we hear countless reports from teachers and parents about how these projects empower those taking part, with tangible benefits to their enjoyment of, and consequent aptitude for, learning.
I regularly meet artists, writers, business leaders, teachers and public servants who tell me they took part in Connections at some stage in its three-decade history and that their lives were changed as a consequence.
All over the UK, arts centres and theatres are doing what they can, day after day, to engage with local schools and provide creative access to at least some of the country’s young people. But in the vast majority of areas where we and they cannot reach, opportunities are limited.
Why? Because the arts have been stripped from the school curriculum. Analysis from the Cultural Learning Alliance shows that there has been a decline of 42 per cent in the number of arts GCSEs since 2010. Teachers face multiple pressures and have little time to address this.
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I believe strongly in funding our cultural infrastructure and I believe passionately in the value of the arts in our education system and cannot for the life of me understand why it has been sidelined in the curriculum.
The fallacy that creativity and self-expression are an inessential nice-to-have, or that they are a route out of proper disciplined learning, are contradicted by every data-gathering endeavour going.
We as a nation are indisputably good at this, there are plentiful jobs (30 per cent of vacancies in the booming cultural industries are down to skills shortages), it is one of the most AI-proof sectors and it contributes hugely to the UK’s bottom line. It also undeniably benefits health, wellbeing, problem-solving, self-confidence and oracy — the ability to express yourself through spoken language — all of which are invaluable across every subject, in every industry, for every employer. Any education system that does not recognise and respond to this is denying future generations the chance to thrive.
The new government needs to feed our world-leading creativity by nurturing it, for everyone, at the source.
Rufus Norris is director of the National Theatre
