Measuring the impact of Creative Partnerships

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has concluded that, for every £1 invested in the Creative Partnerships (CP) scheme, approximately £15.30 worth of benefits will be generated specifically by the work that CP has done. According to its new report, ‘The Costs and Benefits of Creative Partnerships’, a total benefit valued at around £4.4bn will accrue to society from the scheme, which has thus far has cost around £276m to deliver.

The report was commissioned by Creativity Culture and Education (CCE), which for the past 18 months has been running the CP programme. Prior to this it was under the direct management of Arts Council England: since its inception in 2002, around one million learners in more than 5,000 schools are estimated to have been exposed to CP’s work.
The financial benefit projections contained in the report are based on a 2006 study by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), which suggested that young people who attended CP activities could make, on average, the equivalent of 2.5 grades better progress at GCSE than similar young people in other schools. However, the NFER adds the caveat that this improvement cannot be robustly attributed to CP’s work, as “other variables, not included in the model (such as parental support) may be influencing the observed results”. An Ofsted report published in January, ‘Learning: creative approaches that raise standards’, praised CP’s work but concluded that “the effective promotion of creative learning depended on the quality of leadership and management and on teachers’ subject knowledge being secure and extensive”, rather than being attributable to outside influences. A 2006 Ofsted report, ‘Creative Partnerships: initiative and impact’, said that “some of the schools offered evidence to suggest a correlation between pupils’ involvement in Creative Partnerships and improved achievement more widely, but this was largely anecdotal”.

PwC’s report for CCE uses the NFER’s suggestion of 2.5 grades improvement to estimate that of the 54,232 students who worked with CP in 2009/10, 3,518 pupils achieved 5 GCSEs at grades A* to C who might not otherwise have done so. The report then extrapolates this figure to estimate the numbers of students who will go to A Levels and subsequently to higher education. There is evidence that those with higher education attainment earn more, on average, over the course of their lifetimes. The figure of £4.4bn economic benefit that the PwC report attaches to CP’s work is based on projected lifetime earnings of pupils who perhaps achieved higher GCSE grades due to their involvement with CP. This estimate of lifetime earnings, coupled with an estimate of the cost-savings to society if CP leads to reductions in school exclusions and the related social implications, is used to calculate the total benefit.