Tessa Jowell speaks at Culture and Creativity conference

Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Tessa Jowell, recently spoke at the Culture and Creativity conference organised by the National Campaign for the Arts (NCA). The conference was part of an ongoing campaign by the NCA to introduce the arts as a learning tool across the education curriculum. Arts Hub is pleased to be able to present her address.
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Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), Tessa Jowell, recently spoke at the Culture and Creativity conference organised by the National Campaign for the Arts (NCA) – part of an ongoing campaign by the NCA to introduce the arts as a learning tool across the education curriculum. Jowell highlighted the extra £75 million allocated for the arts in England, and initiatives like Creative Partnerships, as examples of the government’s commitment to culture and creavity for young people.

Thank you to the NCA and NESTA for inviting me here today. I can’t think of a better place to discuss culture and creativity than the British Museum. It is a repository of the human race’s collective memory. A compass for our collective identity.

It is a centre of learning and teaching. It educates millions of people a year. It is a major economic attraction for the London economy. An institution that promotes all that is fine in the human spirit.

The subjects we are discussing, culture and creativity, become all the more important to us in these difficult and distracting times. I am sure that each of us coming here today felt that our thoughts are elsewhere. That, perhaps, a conference on culture and creativity is of out of step with the times we are in.

But in these troubled times it is more important, not less, to be aware of the value of culture and the spring of creativity. Great art emerges and engages in even the most troubled times.

It is a tribute to the human spirit that perhaps I can say that it emerges in especially the most troubled times. In troubled times, people look more deeply into themselves and more closely at others. People who are fortified by culture find the resources to draw on in particularly difficult times.

My theme today is about giving people the means to deal with whatever life brings. This is not wholly, or even largely, a utilitarian vision. It is at heart about passion, emotion, and understanding. It is about helping people to be the best that they can be, as people, as individuals. Let me explain.

New Labour politicians – all politicians, come to that – are sometimes not unfairly characterised as technocrats, only concerned with outputs, targets, all the magic potions of management consultancy, as if they were ends in themselves. But I hope that’s not the whole truth.

I know the place of politicians working with the arts is to bring about the right conditions to release creativity, but not to tell creative people how to go about their business, how to be creative, or how to practise their art.

Not to define art or define taste but to provide the space for the debate to take place – I may not agree with everything Kim Howells says about art, but I’ll defend to the death his right to pin his views on the Tate Britain noticeboard!

So the first of my aims is to give artists and cultural institutions the ability to practise their art, and give as many of us as possible access to the liberating achievements of that art.

We need artists to have ambition and to innovate. For too long our cultural sector was treated with indifference: funding that would just about keep institutions open, but would not allow them to reach out, to innovate, to expand.

The fact that during that period, particularly in the ’80s, so many were still able to create or to present great art is a tribute to the creative impulse in this country. But it shouldn’t have to be a struggle. We’re trying to put this right.

We’re putting more money in:

  • Free admission to our great national collections – a huge success by any measure.
  • On Tuesday Arts Council England announced how they’re using the £75 million of extra money that I won from the Treasury. Chamber orchestras like the Britten Sinfonia are receiving significant increases. Organisations working with young people, like Cumbria Arts in Education and the National Youth Theatre, have shared in the new money, as have dance organisations like Merseyside Dance Initiative. So we can now aspire to something more than just scraping by.
  • Under David Puttnam’s chairmanship, work in pioneering ways of supporting and promoting talent, innovation and creativity in science, technology and the arts has already helped over 300 people and projects whose ideas would often, in the past, have either ‘died’ due to lack of support, or who would have had to go overseas to find help. That’s what we want to encourage.
  • DCMS are sponsoring Culture Online, a £15 million project which will soon make cultural resources, and the means to participate in culture, available to all by means of IT.

    The Arts Council in making their allocations have been bold and creative as I asked them to be. They have rewarded those institutions that are striving to change and to reach out to different audiences while maintaining world-class standards and pushing forward the boundaries of creativity.

    Doubtless some people will argue that the money could have been used differently – that is why we have an Arts Council – to make these very, very difficult decisions.

    To be entrusted with precious public resources, of course, brings with it responsibilities. Chief amongst them to ensure that all our people have the opportunity to share in the rich cultural life that this subsidy supports. This exposure must start early.

    Many middle-class children and young people already have this exposure. They have ballet lessons, they have houses full of books, trips to the theatre, music lessons. It gives them the opportunity to explore various artforms, to find things they’re good at.

    They have those things for the rest of their lives. They might not come back to them until later on in life, but what they’ve had is an investment in personal capital allowing them to express themselves through art, to appreciate it, to experience the transformation that contact with culture can bring.

    People respond in different ways to this contact. They might be calmed, excited or enraged, but they are in some way sparked by it and their personal capital is increased. Some may go on to practise it as a career, most will just keep it with them as something personal to themselves that will stand them in good stead at key points in their lives.

    This personal capital is a tremendous advantage for those who have it. It gives them more personal resource by which to cope with life, more material by which to measure and articulate the experiences they have.

    They have a hinterland. It makes their lives more worthwhile, it makes them more content, it contributes to their real mental health, their well-being.

    Consider those who don’t have those opportunities. We know from the myriad of research, and from the evidence of our own experience, that you lose so much, you miss out on culture in all its forms. Aspiration is deadened. Potentially creative citizens are lost. This, I think, explains the government’s legitimate interest in culture and creativity.

    We invest in both for their own sake. It’s more than the icing on the cake, the means to another end, it is an end in itself.

    The encouragement of creativity in our children and young people is an investment in their personal social capital that is good in itself and makes possible the production of new forms of culture in the future.

    The stimulation this new culture brings breeds further creativity and so on. If ever there were a virtuous circle, the relationship between culture and creativity is it.

    We should be clear about that and not be frightened of saying it again and again. Even politicians – although sometimes I think in this country we lack the language to be able to do so.

    What Kim, or I, or Tessa Blackstone, think of the Turner prize matters not a jot. But the row was wonderful – art on the front pages and talked about in pubs. That’s part of the point.

    Culture when it is vibrant stimulates, inspires and enrages. We shouldn’t be afraid of that. This kind of debate shows how culturally engaged we are.

    The intrinsic importance of culture and creativity is why we’ve introduced programmes such as Creative Partnerships, which is an investment in the personal social capital of young people in 16 deprived areas.

    We’re piloting it at the moment, we’ve given some money to expand it and early indications are that it is going well.

    I want to look more precisely at the data emerging from the current experience, but I have high hopes for the programme and hope that, together with David and colleagues at the DfES, we can expand and develop it.

    One of the measures of its success is the number of new areas who want to buy into the scheme. I think that’s very encouraging.

    Already, events throughout the country have been showcasing some of the fantastic work going on in Creative Partnerships – the spectacular ‘Europhonics’ – where composer Robin Jarvis worked with Kent children and showcased their work on a Eurostar train given over to them for the day – is one example.

    And I want more spectacular examples, so that we can really show how this stuff works for children and young people, so that when we celebrate the first full school year of Creative Partnerships in September we will show very clearly what it has achieved, and win over any doubters that remain.

    There are lots of other examples around this country of transforming work taking place with young people every day:

  • The LSO’s Discovery programme;
  • Graham Vick’s Fidelio in Birmingham, involving all kinds of people who might never have come across Beethoven before
  • In Newcastle the Sage – even though the building is not yet finished – is already a key part of the educational scene in the North East.

    These are cultural projects transforming lives.

    In Britain, we are at the cutting edge of this work. Our influence is being felt abroad in a way that’s notable for its scale, audacity and risk.

    The Rite of Spring that I saw recently in the Treptow Arena in Berlin, involved 200 young people, most from poor backgrounds, many brought up in families that had lived in the old Communist part of East Berlin, many with severe drug and behaviour problems.

    They were trained by Royston Maldoom and Denise Mellion in an amazing and disciplined way to produce a work of art that would have stood on any stage anywhere in the world, backed by the Berlin Philharmonic.

    These projects illustrate perfectly what, in part, I want our cultural institutions to be about. Education treated not as a sideline, something that has to be done to fill in forms to return to the Arts Council, but something that’s at the heart of the organisation. It is part and parcel of the institution’s agenda to create art, attract audiences and to be excellent at it.

    Those of us who have witnessed a cultural programme like Splash in action know all this already. How it can transform young people’s lives, that it can improve learning, that it can help reduce crime, that it can lie at the heart of building new communities. We all know this works, and I take these instrumental arguments for granted.

    But I believe our approach must be centred first in the need to support cultural activity as a means and an end in itself. My argument is simply this: While I will continue to work closely with David and with my other colleagues, as Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, I should not have to explain what I am about in terms of the agenda of the Home Office, the Education Department or the Health Service. I do not do so.

    I also know that people like Nicholas Hytner or Clive Gillinson are not running an alternative education system or health service.

    I know that, but perhaps don’t say it often or loudly enough. They can, and do, contribute to those other outcomes, but that is not the only reason why government funds them, or why they deserve cultural subsidy.

    We fund them to produce art, to create new, beautiful, challenging things, which transform the lives of those who come into contact with them.

    For years without end, public debate in this country on the arts has boiled down to a sterile ping pong. Is it art? Is it elitist? Is it dumbed down? This circular argument gets nobody anywhere. Access and excellence in my view are twin pillars supporting the same building. That’s why you can have your cake and eat it. You can support elite, innovative, world-class culture and still widen opportunity to that wonderful product. It’s not access or excellence we’re talking about: it’s access to excellence.

    Only with access to excellence will our young people truly reap the personal benefit that is their right. This is what we should all be working for.

    Richard Crossman famously said that any politician could only hope to achieve three things in their career. I want one of my three things to have two parts, if that isn’t cheating:

    To make sure government takes culture as seriously as it does the economy or employment policy, but for the right reasons.

    Because love of culture and the arts is everyone’s birthright.

    Because it is the mark of a civilised country that it promotes culture for its own sake and on its terms.

    Permission was kindly granted to publish this speech by the National Campaign for the Arts.

    CLICK HERE to read an Arts Hub feature article about the NCA’s campaign.

  • Tessa Jowell
    About the Author
    Tessa Jowell is the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.