Levelling up won’t fix social mobility in the arts

The Levelling Up agenda isn't enough to improve social mobility in the arts without big improvements to infrastructure to support the cultural industries, academics say.

Researchers told MPs on Tuesday (March 22) that improving basic infrastructure like public transport and social welfare, better regulating freelance work, and devolving power – not just responsibility – to local authorities would lay the groundwork for the Government's goals. 

At its first hearing on the topic on Tuesday, the DCMS Select Committee probed current approaches to levelling up in culture and placemaking, including the UK City of Culture.

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Simply transferring the model popularised by the European Capital of Culture competition onto new places ignores what makes them special, the academics said.  

Simon Shepherd, Professor Emeritus of Theatre at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama cautioned against "flying in a fixer".

"I would get much more into the mindet of saying we start by listening; we start by actually feeling what's there and then develop the model accordingly."

Dave O’Brien, Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Sheffield, said that whilst regional inequalities are on the political agenda, inequalities within regions are less well understood: "London is an obvious place to start on this."

What a national arts institution looks like or should do hasn't been questioned, he added, and there is no guarantee Levelling Up funding will target places that have suffered the most severe cuts to cultural services. 

"I'm not entirely sure what levelling up is and it hasn't been entirely clear from the Government," O'Brien said.

"Just taking money out of one place and saying it has to go to other places is going to be ineffective to deliver policy aims unless it's in quite a different or rethought cultural policy generally."

Coventry University Pro-Vice Chancellor Professor Judith Mossman told MPs that every local area has culture to build on but "clearly there are some benefits in having a national [cultural] strategy and centres of excellence".

"It would be wrong to move entirely away from that but if part of that national strategy can be localism, then that might lead to happy medium." 

Redefining culture

Culture is a process, not a collection of places and things, Shepherd said.

Suggesting culture is "a more subtle word than we allow for", he sought to cast its regenerative power in discovering or establishing local activities – artistic or otherwise – and the networks that organically grow from those.

"By the time this process is finished, people have got very much a sense of what they did and what they did together."

He stressed the importance of wider economic security to levelling up via culture – people won't participate in the arts if they can't afford the basics – but cautioned against thinking of arts makers as social workers.

"We have got to be under no illusions that at some point we are going to bump into divisions in wealth.

"What we're doing wrong, I think, is we've got our heads full of a set of recognisable products and buildings that we call culture.

"Chuck them out of your brain and start addressing the sorts of things people are doing, start facilitating those and funding those, and you'll have a much more diverse, fluid, flexible, buzzy culture that's available to people."

O'Brien said definitions of culture are shifting, citing Arts Council England's Let's Create strategy.

"It's likely we'll see a broader definition of culture as we get more locally-grounded cultural activities.

"We might not see say, the definition of what theatre is change but we might see changes in the definition of good theatre." 

Education first

The speakers urged the Government to chage its rhetoric and policy on arts education: "Not talking about mickey mouse courses, not including graduate outcomes without talking about people who have freelance careers," Mossman suggested.

She spoke about the need to ensure arts study is not confined to private education and incentivise smaller apprenticeship courses.

"People like art, people like music, people like film… if they're not actively discouraged from doing them they will want to engage with them," she said.

"Just not putting them off will be a big help."

Jonty Archibald, Principal at Hayes Global Academy, said about a third of students at the arts and media-focussed senior school come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

He said 85% go on to work in the creative industries – half go straight into work, the other half attend university or other higher education first.

"What we do to level up here is we're giving the students the opportunity to enter a world they may not have before."