Royal Academy of Arts

Imagine the uproar if maths teaching stopped at 14. If you never stepped into a science lab again at that age. If English lessons vanished just before GCSEs. That’s exactly what has happened to art in our schools. The government’s focus on testing core subjects means state schools have little choice but to teach the subjects they’re measured – and judged – on, at the expense of everything else. This is the background to the Royal Academy of Arts’ campaign, “Art Is a Serious Subject”. Written with Molly at We All Need Words and designed in-house, the campaign highlights the effect of art being squeezed out of the UK’s classrooms and is running across London in October and November 2024.