The Roots of Foundations: A Recent History of Secondary Arts Education
By J C Kristensen
In 2016, a year after Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservative Government made the English Baccaluareate (EBacc) compulsory for all secondary school students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, I accompanied my daughter to a parents’ evening at her school to discuss her options for study in sixth form.
At the time, she attended a large state school in Central London, a stone’s throw from Westminster, where the decision by Cameron and his government was made. It was a phenomenal school, with an inspirational and committed headmaster and teaching body, and a long history and strong reputation in creative education.
Its Art Department was thriving, with a high number of students undertaking GCSE and A-Level Art, but it was mostly known for its music education. In fact, when my daughter started at the school in 2011, all 11-year-olds had to learn a musical instrument for a year with a large proportion of them continuing for their entire school career and a significant number taking GCSE Music. Its Music Department was vibrant and inspiring, and music infused every part of that school.
However, by the time my daughter and I attended that parents’ evening, just one year after the compulsory introduction of the EBacc, her school’s Art Department lay in tatters. Where in the previous year, they had 30 students studying A-level Art, in one year the number of students had declined to single digits.
The EBacc was never an official qualification; rather, it was a performance indicator. It counted the number of students who gained ‘good’ GCSEs in Maths, English, a Language, a Science/or Sciences, and either History or Geography, to produce a government metric. On the basis of that metric, a school could then lobby for increased funding. The target the UK government set for students achieving the EBacc was 75% for 2022 and 90% in 2025.
As you can see from the list of EBacc subjects, the arts were completely dropped as core subjects. Rather, they were a ‘nice to have’, a thing to do in your spare time, and unsurprisingly, the number of students studying arts subjects at GCSE and then A-level collapsed. I think it was the speed of the collapse which took my breath away, especially in a country with such a phenomenal reputation of world-leading arts education, a country which through its arts education produced artists and designers who broke the mould in so many ways and across so many sectors of the creative industries: Alexander McQueen, David Hockney, Zandra Rhodes, Sonia Boyce, Tracey Emin, Jonny Ive, Sutapa Biswas, Anish Kapoor, Pulp, Phoebe Philo, Joe Strummer…
In an article published earlier this year , the artist Rob and Roberta Smith reported that in 2024, fewer than 30 students took A-Level Art in Tower Hamlets, a borough he had been working with through an outreach programme. After some cursory research, I learnt that there were 17 schools and colleges for 16-18 year olds in this borough, and according to the 2021 Census, 50,613 children aged 5-19. Yet less than 30 students out of the thousands of young people in this borough studying A-Level Art was a startlingly statistic.
The collapse in secondary-level arts education has had a significant impact on tertiary arts education, and despite higher education institutions working hard to expand their offers through outreach and widening participation schemes, it is difficult to challenge the constant messaging that positions arts as an optional extra and not a real career option for young people, especially in the state school sector.
So one of my priorities when I became Academic Portfolio Lead for Design at the University of Greenwich in October 2023 was to lobby for a Foundation Year in my portfolio. A Foundation Year is undoubtedly one of the most powerful educational programmes for bringing people from different educational backgrounds onto art and design courses. Embracing the university’s strategic aim of ‘ Education Without Boundaries ’, I have looked to build something for all those young people who want a future in the arts and the creative industries, but who maybe have not had the opportunity to study an arts subject at secondary level.
This academic year, 2025-26, I am delighted to report that our Design Portfolio opened a Foundation Year for its BA Graphic and Design Digital programme and took in its first cohort of students.
And this same year, working with my good friend and colleague Dr Katie Appleford, we set up the Foundations project, which looks to locate the lost history of British Art and Design Saturday Classes.
My hope for this research project is that its findings and discoveries will help identify ways to strengthen the work of outreach and widening participation initiatives in arts education in the future.
Because, as William Morris said in 1877, nearly 150 years ago, 'I do not want art for a few any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.’ William Morris was right.