Why you cannot be truly educated without the arts

Arts & Culture

Art at the heart of education: why you cannot be truly educated without the arts, and why their decline affects us all - Andria Zafirakou, MBE

To experience the arts is to experience aspects of humanity which cannot easily be defined or understood in another context. In whatever medium it comes, the importance of ensuring young people have – to coin a phrase – access to the best that has been thought, and said, and created in the arts has never been more pressing.

Yet while some schools manage to maintain a broad and rich cultural offer, others find that they are having to turn away from arts education, driven by among other things a restricted funding environment and accountability pressures that act to narrow the curriculum.

Such a trend, if it continues, is of real concern. It threatens to become yet another factor which divides the more privileged from the less. And it takes away from the majority of the next generation the opportunity for them to experience and feel the power of art, and to have it shape their development.

IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society