A new £1.5m awards scheme has been launched to recognise and celebrate visual art education in the UK – with £100,000 being awarded to three organisations a year for the next five years.
The Freelands Foundation announced the award on Monday for recent or ongoing projects “demonstrating commitment to progressive art education approaches with demonstrable impact”.
The scheme has been developed in response to the prolonged period of underinvestment and neglect of the art education infrastructure over the past 15 years. This has included a move away from art subjects in schools, an erosion of art courses at universities and significant reductions in art education programmes in galleries and museums.
But the foundation said despite increasing pressures from declining funding and rising operational costs, visual arts organisations continue to be important sites of teaching and learning.
It said the awards scheme sought to reaffirm galleries and museums’ founding principles as centres for public education, and would champion the organisations finding innovative ways to do this.
“We wanted to champion organisations that are still managing to do incredible work against the backdrop of 15 years of cuts and anti-art rhetoric,” said Henry Ward, the director of Freelands Foundation.
“Galleries and museums play a significant role, not just within the curriculum and school education, but as resources to educate all of us. Not only can they work with schools and universities, but they can work with local communities, artists, prisons, hospitals. There’s a whole world of extraordinary educational practice out there.”
The award is open to UK-based organisations run with a charitable purpose and offering a consistent public presentation of visual art.
The judging panel is chaired by Ward and also includes the artist Joy Gregory, the TV and radio presenter Gemma Cairney, the curator and writer Jenni Lomax, and the art historian and educator Ben Street.
As well as receiving £100,000 of unrestricted funding each, the winners will collaborate with Freelands Foundation on a case study film to share their art education work as a resource and inspiration to other organisations.
The open call for submissions begins on 28 January and closes on 24 March, while the announcement of the first winners will be at a celebration event in November.
The new award replaces the Freelands Foundation’s previous annual award focused on enabling a UK arts organisations to present an exhibition of new work by a mid-career female artist, which ran for eight editions between 2016 and 2023. The last winner of that award, Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey, is on display at Whitechapel Gallery in London until 1 March.
Last year, the government’s proposed shake-up of the national curriculum, which includes scrapping the English baccalaureate (Ebacc), was greeted with overwhelming positivity from arts leaders across the UK.
“We know the introduction of the Ebacc in 2011 had an impact on schools visiting galleries,” Ward said. “If you’re not taken into a gallery or museum as a child in a school, and your parents don’t take you, you’re unlikely to go as an adult. There’s a knock-on effect.
“Another thing we’ve seen is that very often, when the cuts come in, the learning specialists are the first to find themselves being made redundant. We want to celebrate those organisations that have managed to find a way to continue to do it.”
