Children starved of art lose their creative spark – and the country its cultural future

Stirring words that make you imagine schoolchildren elbow-deep in clay or ministers reciting poetry in the Commons bar. And yet, one year on, Britain’s arts renaissance looks more like a doodle in the corner of a maths book.

According to the charity AccessArt, the average amount spent on art materials for a primary school child is £1.80 a year. In some schools it’s 14p – barely enough to buy a single crayon.

Since 2011, recruitment of art teachers has fallen by 27%, and despite the government’s ambition to train more, only half of the number needed signed up last year, put off perhaps by the £10,000 bursaries – substantially less than the £29,000 available for subjects such as maths and physics.

GCSE entries in all arts subjects have fallen by 42% in the past decade. In design and technology, the practical cousin of art, uptake at GCSE fell by 71% between 2010 and 2023 and teacher numbers have halved.

So much for Cool Britannia. The country of Turner, Brunel, Tate Modern and Burberry’s trench coat has become a place where one in four people cannot even sew on a button, according to a British Heart Foundation survey. This is not just about losing our artistic heritage; it’s about losing the hands, eyes and imagination that made our culture in the first place.

A recent YouGov survey found that only 12% of primary school teachers are able to provide more than an hour of art each week, even though they recognised it was leading to declining standards in pupils’ handwriting, problem-solving and wellbeing.

In England, the number of children excluded from school has risen by 21% on the previous year to nearly one million, and though they may not all be budding Banksys or Tracey Emins, many could benefit from channelling their energy and emotions into something other than the three Rs.

They may even find a career out of it – 65% of hard-to-fill vacancies in the creative industries are due to a shortfall of skills. Making art can act as an anchor as well as a catharsis, in a world where minds are hijacked by technology.

Yet the national curriculum seems designed to regiment and quash any nascent creative spirit, rearing generations that are materially and culturally illiterate.

Although the art curriculum states that children should use a “range of materials” and gain technical “mastery” of them, it does not specify how. Meanwhile, the government sustains its acute focus on training up the young for jobs that look increasingly at risk from AI. The English baccalaureate mandates that all children must study maths, English, sciences, a language and history or geography until the age of 16, yet excludes the arts or anything haptic. Progress 8, which measures and scores children compared to their national peers, encourages conformity over exploring.

Why the £124bn that the creative industries added to the economy last year is ignored remains baffling. Just as puzzling is the failure to see the arts as one of the most effective engines of social mobility. Damien Hirst, Steve McQueen, David Hockney and countless others from working-class backgrounds prove what happens when creativity is nurtured rather than starved.

To overlook this is not only short-sighted – it is to deny Britain the chance to shape a future as bold and inventive as its past.

The school accountability system has prioritised “learning to count over learning to create” says Sally Bacon, co-chair of the Cultural Learning Alliance.

Jony Ive, co-designer of the iPhone and former chancellor of the Royal College of Art, says: “I’m incredulous that in an evolved society there is complete disregard for practices which are not academic. The lack of diversity does such a disservice to the young. It undermines them.”

For Ive, the problem is bigger than the loss of a few painters or designers. “Making art and designing objects encourages curiosity and helps people connect to the physical world. Drawing is a wonderful skill. It encourages you to look, to see, to judge elegant proportions. Without it, you stop developing your own opinions. If everything is predigested, you just consume.”

He points to Ken Robinson’s experiment with 1,500 school-age children who were given paperclips and asked to imagine different uses for them. At five years old, 98% of children were deemed “geniuses”, but by 15, only 12% were. By adulthood, it was just 2%. Curiosity fostered by making art is, says Ive, “the fundamental enabler of everything from structural engineering to chip design”.

Tom Dixon, design entrepreneur and former creative director of the retailer Habitat, fondly remembers tinkering in the school ceramics department, making the clay hash pipes he sold to classmates. Today, he runs a company with a £27m turnover, producing lighting, furniture, interiors, perfumes – even buildings.

“The big gap, then and now, was any understanding of how artistic skills transfer into jobs,” he says. “There needs to be a stepping stone into trades, architecture, design.”

His employees come from all over the world. “If we want to preserve and grow skills, we need to build the same respect for craft and making that you find on the continent,” hesays.

Skills England, the government body launched to “kickstart economic growth,” focuses principally on the need for better training in IT. Likewise, the creative industries sector plan, which maps the government’s strategy until 2035, defines skills almost entirely through the prism of tech, highlighting film, music, video and “createch” – a hybrid of creativity and technology.

“Software has eaten our brains,” says Bob Richmond, a member of John Ruskin’s educational charity and project manager of the Motor House arts hub. “We need to reclaim our humanity before centuries of culture are vaporised. Tech is robbing us of our intelligence.”

James Knight, a peer and former schools minister, says: “There is an infatuation with knowledge at the expense of applying it. Thirty years ago, 46% of school-age children did DT. Now it is less than 14%. With AI advancing, our ability to compete on knowledge alone is eroding, yet all we are educating children for is to know more.”

Dixon thinks the UK should adopt Germany’s dual education system, where students split their time between school and apprenticeships, earning while learning from the age 15, or the French Compagnons du Devoir system – a nationwide network of technical masters who teach young people a trade. Unlike the UK system, where apprenticeships are often short, narrow, and largely employer-driven, these continentalversions are increasingly linked to cross-border programmes that boost skills, mobility and employability.

Tony Ryan, chief executive of the Design and Technology Association, says: “There is a unique snobbery in the UK about being practical – which is not the case in France. The next generation needs to becomeproblem solvers.”

Prof Becky Francis, leading the government’s review of the national curriculum, which is due to be published in autumn, admits the current set-up is “overstuffed” but insists on “evolution, not revolution”, disappointing those hoping for radical change.

Art students are left to flounder between oils, watercolours and digital media with little guidance, while an obsession with neat sketchbooks, endless annotations and research stifles imagination.

The shortage of teachers makes the problem worse. According to a report from the all-party parliamentary group for art, craft and design in education, 67% of art and design teachers are considering leaving the profession. Most primary school teachers are generalists, with rarely more than a day’s training in art and craft skills during their PGCE.

“Children must get their hands messy with paint, clay, fabric and glue,” says fashion designer Zandra Rhodes. “Whether or not they are artistically minded, art lessons are a necessity. Art records our civilisation. Without it, we are denying our legacy. Without art, we are not whole.”

And the problem spills far beyond the arts. Surgeons, for instance, rely on the fine motor skills developed in childhood. Roger Kneebone, professor of surgical education at Imperial College London, worries students can no longer be assumed to leave school able to draw, cut, stitch or build. “It’s shortsighted to think of art as a piece of paper.It’s about how you relate to others and what you can do with your hands.”

We may still congratulate ourselves on Turner prize winners, West End musicals and leading architects and designers, but at ground level, in classrooms, the future is being starved.

A country that once turned out visionaries, engineers, inventors and artists is raising a generation that can swipe, scroll, and like – but not make, see or imagine.

Ministers must act: properly fund art teachers, give them the time to teach, and let every child be taught the skills needed to vividly bring their imaginations to life.

Starmer’s “new, hopeful, modern story of Britain” is still waiting to be written. And unless we rescue art from the margins of the curriculum, there may soon be no one left who knows how to sketch it out.

Catherine Milner is an art curator and consultant and member of the all party parliamentary group on art, craft and design in education

Photographs by Richard Pohle/WPA Pool/Getty Images and Justin Sullivan/Getty Images