Counting the cost

 Creativity, Culture and Education (CCE) has always been committed to developing a strong evidence base, and indeed The National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) and the Ofsted report referred to in Liz Hill’s piece (News comment, AP226), were both commissioned by CCE. The value and quality of CCE’s research has also been recognised in the DCMS’s extensive Cultural and Sport Evidence programme which, in reviewing research literature that exists across the world on the impact of the Arts, singled out CCE’s approach, rigour and focus.

In the meantime the Treasury, in its guidance to departments, as to how they should make the case to Government for funding, consistently ask for evidence of economic impact, using a set of tools and multipliers it controls.
The PricewaterhouseCoopers report, ‘The Costs and Benefits of Creative Partnerships’, simply took the research that Creative Partnerships (CP) had already done and submitted it to the Treasury model of assessing economic impact. If Liz Hill is not convinced about the approach, it is not because of an approach we devised, but one taken by the Treasury. The message to be taken from the work is that when using Treasury tools, the economic impact of CP competes easily with other programmes submitted for review.