The National Centre – Funding and Ambition Gap

Music Mark CEO raises concerns about the gap between ambition and funding for the new National Centre for Arts and Music Education

Music Mark welcomed the Labour Party’s manifesto promise for a National Music Education Network, recognising the value of a coordinated approach by all music education providers, including Music Hubs. The announcement in March 2025 of a National Centre which would also support Dance, Drama and Art and Design was again welcomed, as it demonstrated continued recognition of the value of arts subjects in education.

Becky Francis’s curriculum and assessment review identified and celebrated the value of arts as curriculum subjects; the Schools’ white paper promotes creativity as a core pillar of schools’ enrichment offer. The National Centre for Arts and Music Education has the potential to transform the arts provision that students have access to in schools. The Centre is tasked with increasing both parents’ and school leaders’ understanding of the importance of arts subjects, building partnerships with the wider arts ecology locally, regionally and nationally, and most importantly, ensuring that there is appropriate, high-quality training to enable teachers to deliver the new curriculum for each art form.

These are all vitally needed; however, the new National Centre must achieve these ambitions after years of under-investment, missed teacher recruitment targets and low teacher retention.

The National Centre for Arts and Music Education’s funding will ramp up in its first three years, from £3.8M to a “stable” £5M. This profile partly recognises that it will only take on the fundholder role for Music Hubs from its second year, although in the first year, it will have to invest heavily in its set-up: recruitment, infrastructure, website and so forth, spreading its budget for its strategic system leadership functions in year one thinly.

Music Mark has consistently called on the government to match its funding for Music Hubs to its expectations, and we make the same call for the National Centre for Arts and Music Education.

We understand that the Maths National Centre receives c.£6M to provide national training, oversee the 40 Maths Hubs, and provide for 242k primary teachers and around 35k secondary specialist maths teachers. The National Centre for Arts and Music Education will have to do the same with less funding, and whilst it will be focused on supporting slightly fewer teachers (we estimate c31k specialist arts secondary teachers in addition to the 242k primary), the work that it does will be across four distinct subjects.

The National Centre for Arts and Music Education has additional requirements to advocate for the four subjects to school leaders and parents, and it has KPIs around extra-curricular take-up. Furthermore, most teachers have had considerably less CPD in these subjects than in Maths, so the National Centre will need to identify, support and/or develop significant CPD training for these teachers.

The government have been clear that they believe in and value the arts as subjects of study in schools, and we welcome this, as our members tell us every day how their provision transforms the lives of children and young people. However, without enough investment in the infrastructure and support that schools need, we will not see the transformation that the government has promised.

Music Mark, therefore, believes that the government must reconsider the financial resources for this new Centre. Just now, the gap between ambition and investment is simply too wide to ignore.