Sharing our consultation findings
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Back in 2018, we started work on developing our new strategy for 2020 to 2030.
Listening to people has been at the heart of that development process. We’ve heard from more than 6000 people from across the country; from different types and sizes of cultural organisations; independent creative practitioners and from freelancers; those funded by the Arts Council and those whom we’ve not funded to date. We have sought the views of funders and policy makers and from our partners in local and central government. Most importantly, we have talked to those who have most to benefit from our new strategy – the general public, including children, young people and their parents and carers.
We’ve carried out a large-scale public conversation, two formal consultations and numerous workshops. We’ve commissioned new research and undertaken an extensive data and evidence review. And we’ve published reports summarising everything we have heard along the way.
Bringing together all of these insights, we set out a draft strategy in June 2019 which was built around three Outcomes and three Investment Principles.
We then went out in person and online to people working in arts and culture as well as children and young people, local authorities, policy makers and our own staff to test our proposals in our second consultation.
Today we’re publishing what we heard from the 1,472 people who joined one of our 52 workshops, and the 545 people who took part online.
We heard passionate and often conflicting views. Our report aims to reflect as accurately and neutrally as possible the breadth of responses to the consultation. Our inclusion of contributors’ comments or views does not mean that we endorse them.
As with our first consultation in autumn 2018, what came through most strongly was a sense of collective ambition to embrace the opportunities and tackle the challenges that lie ahead of us.
Everything we heard has been considered as we finalise the new strategy, which will be published early in 2020. In the consultation, we also received a wealth of ideas for practical steps that we might take to implement the new strategy. We will use these in the preparation of our 2020-23 Delivery Plan, which we plan to publish in the spring of 2020.
Thank you to everybody who has contributed to this consultation. Your time and your input have been extremely valuable to us and will, we believe, result in a strategy that is both stronger and more likely to realise its ambitions.
We began this journey by asking people what they thought the future of arts and culture in England should look like. From the beginnings of that conversation in 2018 to this point now, on the cusp of publishing our strategy for the next 10 years, we have been inspired and excited by the shared appetite for boldness and by a widespread understanding that for creativity and culture to flourish in this country it must touch everyone.
