A Failure to Join the Dots: What Teaching Funding Cuts Mean for the Creative Industries

This week, reports emerged that the Department for Education (DfE) intends to remove teaching grant support for creative and performing arts courses in English universities as part of a wider reprioritisation of the Strategic Priorities Grant (SPG). The rationale is that scarce public funding should be concentrated on subjects considered most critical to national skills needs, particularly healthcare and high-cost STEM provision (though, grants for nursing are also being cut). At first glance, this may seem like the familiar debate about the relative value of arts and sciences. In reality, it raises a much bigger question, that is how coherent is government policy across higher education, skills, research, innovation and economic growth?

Just over a year ago, the UK Government's Modern Industrial Strategy identified the Creative Industries as one of eight priority growth sectors. The accompanying Creative Industries Sector Plan described a sector contributing £124 billion in GVA and supporting 2.4 million jobs, while emphasising the importance of talent development, workforce skills, world-class education providers and regional growth. Alongside this, the government announced £380 million in support for the sector. The message was clear. The creative industries are not just a cultural luxury, they are a strategic national asset. Their value extends beyond direct economic impact, contributing to tourism, place-making, international influence and soft power. This is where the DfE decision becomes difficult to understand. If creative industries are a national growth priority, why are the university programmes that educate future employees, entrepreneurs, innovators and researchers in that sector losing public teaching support?

Government increasingly expects research funding, innovation investment and university activity to align with strategic growth sectors, and UKRI has undergone substantial reorganisation around this. That is a reasonable expectation (though is also important to recognise the value of ‘blue skies’ research, as many of the most significant applied innovations and societal benefits have their origins in curiosity-driven fundamental research). The difficulty arises when different areas of policy appear to be moving in opposite directions.

Universities do not operate separate systems for teaching and research, the two are deeply interconnected. Undergraduate programmes provide the foundation for future postgraduate researchers and skilled professionals. Academic departments recruit and retain staff through a combination of teaching and research activity. Laboratories, facilities and specialist expertise are sustained through a mixture of education, research and knowledge exchange, and in many cases commercial activity. When teaching provision becomes financially unsustainable, research capacity often weakens over time as well.

This is particularly important for strategically valuable but relatively small disciplines. Archaeology, geography, heritage and related subjects may not recruit students on the scale of medicine or engineering, but they underpin sectors linked to cultural tourism, environmental management, heritage conservation and regional development. As someone working in archaeology and heritage science, I find this particularly frustrating. There is growing recognition of the value of heritage, place-based investment, cultural tourism, digital heritage and the wider creative economy (see also this new Historic England report on how the historic environment directly contributes to local economic growth). Yet many of the departments delivering this work continue to operate under intense financial pressure, and many are under threat, detailed clearly in this recent British Academy report.

The contradiction is that one part of government is investing in the future growth of a sector while another is weakening the educational infrastructure needed to sustain that growth. Indeed, concerns about this disconnect have already been raised by specialist creative institutions, which argue that reductions in teaching support threaten the talent pipeline that the Industrial Strategy is explicitly designed to strengthen.

While many of us working in universities will understandably focus on the immediate financial implications of these changes, there is a risk that the debate becomes framed as a plea for the protection of particular subjects. This debate is not just about whether particular disciplines deserve support, it is about whether government policy is operating towards a coherent set of objectives. The issue is not simply that creative arts, heritage or humanities disciplines have intrinsic value, although they undoubtedly do. It is that government cannot simultaneously identify a sector as a national growth priority while weakening the educational infrastructure that supplies its workforce. This is creating a situation in which one department invests in generating demand for future skills while another reduces the capacity to supply them. There is also a strong regional development argument. Creative, cultural and heritage programmes are deeply embedded in local economies and contribute to creative clusters, tourism, innovation ecosystems and place-based regeneration. Reducing educational capacity in these areas risks undermining wider ambitions for regional growth that sit at the heart of the Industrial Strategy itself.