Who Matters Most In Our Society: Police Officers or Art Teachers?

Matt Bell , Director of Strategic Communications

In 2010, there were 172,000 police officers in the UK. This fell to 150,000 in 2017. All hell broke loose and in 2019, Boris Johnson promised to recruit 20,000 more.

In 2011, there were 55,000 teachers in the most commonly taught creative subjects in English state-funded secondary schools. By 2024, this had fallen to 40,000 and there’s been hardly a squeak.

We cut policing by 13% and quite rightly there is uproar. But you cut the number of art teachers by 27% and it’s simply a shame.

This is not a false dichotomy. Losing 15,000 art teachers from English state schools has consequences. We know from the research that childhood engagement in arts activities can predict academic performance across the school years; and the earlier the intervention starts, the larger the effect.?

We know that participation in creative education can improve school attendance. And we also know that 93% of 16–18-year-olds say studying a creative subject impacts positively on their mental health and wellbeing.

So fewer art teachers means worse academic performance, worse attendance, and worse mental health. We should be on the streets.

Now Heatherwick Studio is not yet designing placards, though they would be quite expressive! But it is helping out with some kind of fight back this week with the launch of In The Making, a major new creative education programme co-designed and branded with young people. It will bring more than 200 young people each year to Making House. They will take part in workshops run by our designers, aiming to inspire these 10-14 year-olds to see themselves as creative.

Alongside this programme, we’re publishing a ‘how to’ guide and the template for a 2-hour workshop that any architecture practice can take and use to run a workshop themselves. There are 6,000 architecture practices in England. If each did one workshop every term with a local school, that would provide creative education to 540,000 young people. One sixth of the 3.5m young people aged 10-14 in England.

This really matters because architecture has much greater geographic reach than most other creative professions in the UK. The Culture Secretary right wants to expand the choices available to ‘every child wherever they live and whatever their background’; and architects are literally better located to support this than people working in film, fashion or fine art.

The last crucial piece of this jigsaw is, of course, policy itself. Right now we have a farcical situation where the national curriculum requires schools to teach art and design, D&T and music from ages 5-14, and to offer at least one arts subject and at least one D&T subject from ages 14-16. But 81.9% of secondary schools in England are academies or free schools – so they don’t have to follow the curriculum!

To its credit, Labour made a manifesto commitment to address this, and the Department for Education has opened a hugely significant Curriculum and Assessment review. This could change school accountability measures, including Progress 8, and give more weight to creative education in the way that schools are assessed.

Please, please take a look and respond to the consultation. And if you need some stats, they’re in our latest Evidence Review.

Because art teachers matter to the health of our society, just like the police.

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