The V&A’s Urgent Warning: Creative Education Is a Civic Duty Britain Is Failing to Meet

On a Tuesday morning, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s main entrance hall—the Cromwell Road entrance, with its terracotta arches and the scent of old stone—makes an argument. Every gallery, item, case of textiles, ceramics, and furniture makes the case that creating things well is a serious human endeavor and that design is thought given physical form rather than decoration. This argument has been made by the V&A since 1852. The director of the museum, Tristram Hunt, has been making a more pointed version of it since at least 2019: that Britain is systematically eliminating from its state schools the very education that creates the next generation of people who can think and make like this, and that the cost of doing so is not cultural but rather civic, economic, and profoundly unfair.

It is easier to ignore and more difficult to argue away the numbers because they are uncontested. In England, the percentage of GCSE entries in the arts decreased from 13.4% of all subjects in 2010 to just 7.1% in 2024. That is not a slow decline; rather, it is a halving that was accomplished covertly and gradually through a number of accountability measures that never explicitly stated “cut the arts” but instead provided every school striving to survive an Ofsted inspection and a league table with precisely that incentive. Last year, over 40% of English state schools had no students enrolled in GCSE Music or Drama. Not a decrease. Nothing. In those buildings, the drama studio, the orchestra, and the art room essentially vanished from the curriculum.

The argument was presented with scholarly care in the Durham Commission on Creativity and Education, which was published by Arts Council England in 2019 and supported at the time by Hunt in his V&A blog. The commission pointed out that creativity is not the absence of rigor; rather, it is based on persistence, experimentation, critical thinking, and teamwork—qualities that employers consistently rank among the most sought-after and that the current exam-focused curriculum consistently fails to develop. In particular, the commission was worried about inequality. Young people from underprivileged backgrounds were the ones losing access the quickest, according to ACE Chair Nicholas Serota’s foreword. The commission stated that when arts courses are eliminated from schools, they become “the province of the privileged”—available to people who can afford private instruction, live close to a museum, and have parents who know where to look for the opportunities that the state no longer offers.

Beyond the writing, Hunt’s response was to focus the V&A’s Design Lab Nation program on the areas where that disparity is most apparent. Sheffield. Trent Stoke. Coventry. Sunderland. Blackburn. These are not cities with well-funded school systems or flourishing arts infrastructures. The claim that creative education is a luxury seems almost obvious to some budget managers in these post-industrial communities where public sector cuts have had the greatest impact. This is precisely why the work matters most in those locations, according to the V&A’s stance, which was influenced in part by William Morris, whose belief that art shouldn’t exist for a few runs through the museum’s founding philosophy.

The same idea has been illustrated from a different perspective by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. In a building where 540 students participated in OAE projects in the past year alone, the OAE, the only professional UK orchestra permanently housed in a state secondary school, Acland Burghley in Camden, has developed an arts curriculum with the school that has increased the uptake of arts subjects at GCSE, defying the national trend. Acland Burghley students, OAE musicians, and choreographer Kim Brandstrup created their 2025 production Breaking Bach, which sold out at the Edinburgh International Festival and went on tour to Bucharest. Nowadays, a number of students are pursuing careers in dance. These are not extracurricular accomplishments; the students received compensation for their labor. By all standards, it was a professional commission.

It appears that the public has not been convinced that any of this should be eliminated. According to research commissioned by the OAE and carried out in the summer of 2025 with 2,000 UK adults, 82% of respondents think that every child should regularly have access to high-quality creative activities in school, and 64% concur that reducing arts education negatively affects children’s communication and self-esteem. 69% of Gen Z claims that having access to the arts in school increased their resilience and self-confidence. The gap between what the public thinks education should include and what the accountability system actually rewards is growing and unsettling. Whether the current government’s curriculum review will significantly close that gap is still up in the air. It is evident that the Durham Commission’s researchers, the V&A, and the OAE have been stating the same thing for years, albeit with less patience and more urgency: this is not an aesthetics debate. The topic of discussion is Britain’s intended social structure.