Funding to Study the Arts
July 9, 2026Reading time: 3 minutes
In a bizarre document, that simultaneously manages to be both ill-informed, impractical and contradicting Government policy, the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has instructed the Office for Students that 'funding should no longer be given to support nursing, computing, history, creative arts, performing arts, archaeology, and geography courses.' https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/nursing-and-computing-courses-hit-teaching-grant-cuts-confirmed#google_vignette.
It is worth noting that computing and performing arts are listed elsewhere in government publications as the most important sectors for growing the British economy, so pulling any form of support at this point is irrational. Also the reason given for this is to protect medicine, which raises the question of how to protect medicine when you penalise nursing.
I have skin in this game. My grand-daughter, who has been at a local stage school for fifteen years, has passed all her exams in musical theatre and ballet, and was dux at her school (winning prizes for both Physics and Mathematics as well as arts), has just been awarded a place at Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts. How do you treat a pupil of such outstanding gifts, achievements and diligence that her degree course is worthless? It turns out that this decision is so vague and impractical as to be almost impossible to implement, so I could have saved myself a couple of sleepless night. But the hostility to the Arts at large in this country is real, and the threat is serious. If we don't have to deal with it now - and many universities do - we are going to have to face it soon.
And then, this morning, I read this:
If we have the leisure and the capacity to read and write poetry, whatever our other individual and collective troubles, we might be seen as among the privileged, the relatively fortunate, compared to many people and other living creatures we know to be suffering, and to have suffered, appalling extremities. https://tearsinthefence.com/2026/07/08/crossing-the-hinge-by-mandy-pannett-tears-in-the-fence/
It is written by John Freeman, and he provides a justification for the luxury of poetry which isn't negligible. But the proposition itself goes a long way to explain why this government thinks that arts are a soft target for spending cuts. Poetry as something for the privileged with "capacity" (what does that mean? education? intelligence? class? taste?) raises the hairs on the back of my neck. Nobody else on the planet thinks that poetry is a luxury for the gently bred, and it's a howling insult to the rest of us to develop our arts policy and industries on that basis. Back to your two-up-two-downs you plebs and you can't go to the opera until you stop keeping your coal in the bathtub. Everywhere else in the world is comfortable with poetry as the expression of emotion, resistance, defiance, lament or insight. Personal, spiritual or political, everyone else turns to poetry as soon as the most critical needs of their society are met, and sometimes where they can't be.
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