Creatives Across Sussex / News / Creative Kirklees / News / 2017-05-02T00:00:00Z / DCMS: Tailored Review of Arts Council England

DCMS: Tailored Review of Arts Council England
ACE has been told to focus on financial resilience, transparency and digital engagement in the first review for seven years. Arts Council England (ACE) must operate as a development agency and focus on developing financially sustainable arts organisations, a wide-ranging review by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has concluded. For ACE to fulfil this role, the review presents a series of recommendations in areas including partnership working; digital development; place-making and relationships with local authorities; diversity; and the environment.

Overall, the review team heard a positive message about ACE from interviews with key stakeholders and from the public survey consultation. 82% of survey respondents thought ACE provided good value for money, 89% thought that it value to the sectors it supports, and 75% thought it added some or considerable value to local communities.

The review makes recommendations for some changes in the relationship between ACE and DCMS, its sponsoring department. DCMS has a positive and collaborative relationship with the ACE, and it is right that the Arts Council should retain the independence of its decision making at arm’s length from government. However, the Arts Council receives £1.1 billion of government funding (2015-2018), and the system of holding it to account for spending that public money should be as robust as possible. DCMS should take a more structured approach to monitoring the Arts Councils performance and should work with the Arts Council to ensure it is delivering the governments priorities for arts and culture.

The theme of financial sustainability runs throughout the whole report, which makes a broad series of recommendations for measures that ACE should take to build the financial resilience of the sector:
• further integrate financial sustainability into its grant applications
• support the sector to build financial skills that will help organisations diversify further their revenue streams and explore “alternatives to pure grants”.
• embed commercial skills and commercial leadership, and support organisations to become ‘investment ready’
• facilitate the sharing of best practice so that organisations can learn from each other how to “strengthen their respective financial resilience models”
• innovate around business delivery, such as touring models, fundraising and digital skills
• encourage partnerships to reduce costs, “for example by providing capital grants for organisations to share space, storage and/or services”.

It implies that continued funding should depend on organisations’ success at reducing their reliance on grants, and ACE is asked to set “more stretching targets” for National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs) to further diversify their sources of income.

Partnership working is important to ACE’s future development. The tailored review continues a push towards a “place-based approach”, identified as a priority for ACE in the Culture White Paper. By engaging in and establishing more local partnerships, the Arts Council is told it will satisfy calls for “a more tailored approach to regional needs and priorities” when making policies, setting priorities and distributing money. The review therefore calls on the Arts Council to “be creative” in identifying diverse partners with whom to collaborate, and should set an “ambitious focus” on finding expertise from other sectors to build skills capability in the arts.

Singled out for particular attention is ACE’s approach to digital engagement. It should set “much more stretching targets” for NPOs to increase their digital content and encourage audience engagement, which should be robustly monitored through “compulsory reporting”, the report advises. ACE is also being encouraged to collaborate on the Digital Culture Project with DCMS and other stakeholders, on issues such as digitising collections and developing the sector’s digital capacities. Driving wider participation through digital engagement, distribution and content is identified as a priority. As part of its development agency role, ACE should be should be sharing best practice to develop the sector’s digital capabilities, including in intellectual property, data usage and digital leadership.

Read the full report here: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/610358/FINAL_Arts_Council_England_Tailored_Review_Report.pdf?mc_cid=04b0fe2930&mc_eid=87072c426b