Art education and austerity have never got along. But following over twelve years of Conservative government, art schools are coming under renewed pressure. Last year, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson announced cuts of 50% to arts and humanities funding in Higher Education, the money being redirected to STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and medical courses. As the country emerges from the pandemic, the government now claims it is prioritising education that benefits ‘key industries and the delivery of vital public services.’
Seemingly absent is any interest in innovation, or the creative economy, let alone art’s importance for mental health. In response, I have been taking a look at how some art schools are addressing this situation. I concentrated on the North of England, away from renowned London-based establishments like the Royal College of Art, the Slade or Central St Martins. I did this not just because I live in the North, but because the North is considerably poorer, economically, than the South East. So I was interested not just in how a northern art school can function in this extended age of austerity, but also how it relates to its locality.
First I met Jo McGonigal, a Manchester-based visual artist, and previous editor of Corridor8, who now teaches in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Leeds is unusual in having four art schools – the other three being Leeds Beckett University (formerly Leeds Polytechnic), and Leeds Arts University (formerly Leeds College of Art) and University Centre Leeds. On what she thinks is distinctive about the courses the University of Leeds offers, McGonigal outlined ‘A unique, practice-based Fine Art course in a research-based university. We’re in a school with fine art, history of art, cultural studies, and museum and heritage studies so all the staff are based here and we all teach modules across all programmes. So our Fine Art students sit in lectures in other subjects in the school, such as history of art.’
As McGonigal describes, this arrangement enables there to be a system with much choice for students, including ‘three Fine Art programmes, so you can study straight Fine Art, or Fine Art with History of Art, and you can study Fine Art with Contemporary Cultural Theory. So, fine art students have three options and we can allow a bit of flexibility between those programmes because it’s all within the same school.’
In addition, the School teaches fine art at postgraduate level, my visit coinciding with 2022’s MA Degree Show, occupying impressive studio spaces. ‘In addition to MA Fine Art, we have a really rich postgraduate research programme,’ McGonigal thinks, ‘Which is very international and includes a broad array of specialisms and research interests. And our Fine Art practice-based research PhDs were pioneered here with artists including Elizabeth Price (Turner Prize winner 2012). So in that sense we were ahead of the curve with testing out how Fine Art could be rewarded with PhD status through practice.’ It is difficult to find fault in this aspect of what the University of Leeds has pioneered, given the ever-increasing need for postgrad qualifications in art teaching at HE level.
McGonigal also has a lead role in an Employability and Industry programme which provides opportunities for students to work in the creative sector, possibly overseas. Able to ‘self lead’, they work in a professional capacity, perhaps for a gallery, or on a residency, or with archives and collections. ‘It acknowledges that not all of our students want to be artists at the end of our degree,’ McGonigal adds, ‘And really tries to identify and equip our students for a precarious, uncertain art world.’ As an artist herself, McGonigal knows perfectly well how precarity feels, saying ‘Certainly, my career zig-zagged and curved back on itself.’
McGonigal also described the important work done by graduates of the University of Leeds for the art scene in West Yorkshire. ‘Our students have gone on to set up the Tetley,’ she explained, referring to that establishment’s co-founder, Kerry Harker, who also works in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies where she did her PhD. ‘The university has very good links with The Hepworth Wakefield, Leeds Art Gallery, and the heritage sector as well, because of the programmes that we teach here,’ McGonigal says. All of which makes Leeds sound like fertile ground for young artists looking to find a career locally.
However, McGonigal ’s reference to a ‘precarious uncertain art world’ hints at the importance of the Graduate Outcome Survey. Compiled since 2017 by government-funded data gatherers and sent out to graduates fifteen months after finishing their studies, it has reflected the relative weakness of earnings reported by art school graduates who have moved into the professional art sector. This means that many of these graduates may not be able to pay back their student loans, reinforcing an argument from thinkers on the political right that art schools offer poor value for money for tax payers.
Countering this, I would point out that programmes like those offered at Leeds University School of Art do stress the importance of art education in dealing with some of today’s most acute political and socio-economic challenges, as outlined in a recently-published paper Realising Art and Design Research in Policymaking Decisions. This report on a policy workshop earlier this year between the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Design and Innovation (APDIG) and the Council for Higher Education in Art and Design (CHEAD), notes: ‘Art and design research is naturally interdisciplinary, focusing on knowledge and technology transfer, engendering a focus on solving the pressing issues of today.’ It adds another telling point about art education’s ‘Collective need to tackle societal challenges, such as the climate crisis, health and social issues, and opportunities around the use of emerging technologies.’
In Manchester I encountered a vision of future art schools that clearly does focus on technologies. Manchester Metropolitan University’s new SODA building proclaims its credentials on the front of a five-storey, hi-res LED light wall, dwarfing and outshining the historic Victorian pub, the Salutation, next door. SODA takes Manchester School of Art in a new direction, as Kirsty Fairclough, SODA’s Head of Research and Knowledge Exchange, explained: ‘The kind of jobs that are available now are very different from in the past, and you need a broad set of digital skills. But we’re also a creative, arts-based hub. So for example, our future media production students might be creating avatars using motion-capture. And that might go into a game engine. Also, we work with fashion design, and you think about avatars in the fashion world in terms of clothing and styling. There’s a huge market for that kind of work.’
Costing £35M, and funded jointly by MMU and Greater Manchester Combined Authority, SODA may be tiny compared to the Royal College of Art’s £135M hi-tech hub, which opened earlier this year, but the message is similar: art has to prove its relevance in a higher education world dominated by an emphasis on STEM subjects. In SODA’s case, Manchester’s importance as a centre for digital technology gives it an appropriate location. And SODA is proving popular with students. Since it opened last year, SODA has exceeded its student number target by 40%. ‘We’ve become a huge success very, very quickly,” says Fairclough, “We’ve got 1,500 students at the moment, but we’re going to have about 2,500 by next year. It’s a great problem to have. We’ve scaled up very fast.’
One of seventy-two staff, Fairclough’s main responsibilities include looking after ‘All industry partnerships because SODA’s industry connectivity is absolutely key to its success.’ SODA offers some courses that were already established at the School of Art, of which SODA remains a part. These include Film-making, and Photography and Animation, but now students can also choose from Games Art, Games Design, Music and Sound, and User Experience, from Foundation degree all the way up to PhD. Giving my age away somewhat, I asked what User Experience means. ‘It could mean how you move across an entire website,’ Fairclough explained, ‘Or it could be how someone navigates a game. It’s the whole user journey. There’s a huge amount of jobs available in UX.’ Consequently there Is a great deal of industry interest in SODA’s facilties, like their sound studios.
Nonetheless there are some art schools that have cut their teaching programmes, which is what happened, for instance, in Hull. It led to the setting up of an alternative – the Feral Art School, so called because it sees itself as ‘rewilding creative communities.’ I went to Hull and met the Feral’s two project managers and co-founders, Jayne Jones and Jackie Goodman.
The Feral Art School’s current spaces have been made available by Wykeland, a local property developer responsible for creating the Fruit Market area of the city as a cultural quarter. According to Goodman, ‘Wykeland understand the soft economic value of genuinely having artists working in the area. And they’ve been very supportive to the Feral,’ having lent them pop-up spaces for exhibitions, and what is now their Textile and Fashion Studio on Humber Street, also housing their darkroom. A former bank building on Alfred Gelder Street subsequently became available which is, for now, the Feral’s centre. Goodman explained how the company buys property with a view to long-term development and therefore ‘It’s better for them to have someone in here, as it keeps the building functioning. We’ve probably got it for three or four years, in reality, because that’s how long it’s going to take for the development to happen.’ As a result, the Feral does not pay rent, and only has to find the funds for basics like utilities and insurance.
With a total of 650 students having passed through their doors to date, and approximately twelve staff, the Feral has been increasingly busy since the end of lockdown, offering courses in painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, textiles, fashion design and marketing. On our walkabout I met tutor Andi Dakin, managing the print facilities, including an etching press and a storage area which used to be the bank’s strongroom. Upstairs I saw some studios where artists are free to come and go anytime, and a kitchen with a library of art books. At the top of the building there is a large, open room, used as a workshop by Hull Dance, overlooking Queen’s Gardens, where much redevelopment linked to the nearby Maritime Museum is now in evidence.
The Feral’s story began when Goodman and Jones both taught at Hull School of Art and Design, part of Hull College of Further Education. As Goodman remembers, ‘They invested a lot of money in it, to start with, and it went quite well, until about 2016, when the FE College revealed it was in significant financial difficulties. They then decided they would make redundancies that were going to affect the School of Art and Design. By July 2018 most of us were made redundant. That was getting on for forty staff. ’
Goodman and Jones were already aware of the work of Mike Neary and Joss Winn at the University of Lincoln, both advocates of co-operative higher education, who put them in touch with Cilla Ross, principal of the Co-Operative College in Manchester. ‘We’d become very interested in the Co-Operative model of learning,’ Goodman continued, ‘And how close that is to the spirit of Art and Design, in terms of the way we teach. So, once we’d all been released from our shackles as employees of the School of Art and Design, we decided that we’d set up something.’ The Feral began as a community interest company (CIC) with co-operative values and ‘got a little bit of seed funding from the 2017 legacy fund (arising from City of Culture), which paid for us to set up a new organisation, and we started our first course in 2018.’
The Feral’s courses are for adults over the age of 18. ‘We wanted as open access as possible,’ Jones explained, ‘So people don’t have to have had any past experience. We do charge a fee, but we can subsidise people on very low incomes.’ Participants vary in age from people in their twenties to those in their eighties. Initially the Feral taught twelve-week courses in painting, print, drawing, and textiles. But with the arrival of the the pandemic, they shortened the skills courses down to six weeks, ‘Which made us more agile during lockdown. So, we managed to weather Covid, because we didn’t have any overheads.’
Then something surprising happened. In Jones’ words, ‘What we began to see was that people were coming back on these courses over and over again. They didn’t want to stop.’ After discussions with the students, they set up the next stage: a Supported Studio Scheme, with room for eight people who take on a studio for a year, where they receive individual tutorials, artist talks or peer-led crits. After one year, five of the eight of those initial Supported Studio artists are now in another building, rented nearby: Feral Independent Studios.
‘What we’re finding is, through the courses, people are forming these self-generated groups, within the wider Feral community,’ Jones explains. A further phase, Feral Professionals, beginning next year, will be a year-long course ‘For people who want to work within the creative industries or maybe have already done a degree and want to get more experience.’ This Jones describes as the final stage ‘in taking someone from maybe having no experience or not having made art for a while, right through to having skills to work in art.’
But like most others in the alternative sector, the Feral does not offer a degree.
‘We did go through the process, in partnership with the Co-operative College and other learning co-ops, of applying to OFS (Office for Students, the independent regulator for England) for accreditation,’ Goodman says, ‘And it was clear that the only organisations who managed to get that had gone through existing universities. It was an expensive and slow process so we made a collective decision to abandon the application and see what we could do without formal accreditation.’
‘And I think that’s the big debate at the moment – are we getting to that tipping point where actually many people who are potential students for art schools, or who have been through art schools and might go on to do a little bit more study, have realised that the value is in what you do, not what you get at the end of it?’
It is not yet clear how the established art school approaches of Manchester Metropolitan University or the University of Leeds will be affected by government cuts: we have to wait and see how individual universities process the changes. But perhaps the difference between the pre-existing and alternative approaches to art education does represent a choice more meaningful than just expensive versus cheap. Degree level, fee-paid art school education, with critical theory built in, can be vital in developing a young artist’s future career, as we can see from what University of Leeds School of Art is doing. And the tech-focused approach that SODA specialises in at Manchester School of Art looks like it can generate jobs. But obtaining ‘value in what you do, not what you get at the end of it’ can benefit creativity, resilience and mental health for participants of any age. Important too, after all my visits, is the sense I have that art schools can make art relevant to the wider community, helping to reinvigorate a city like Hull and to become part of the cultural DNA of bigger urban areas like Leeds or Manchester. Art schools may be going through a dark period but they certainly have not had their day.
Bob Dickinson is a freelance writer based in Manchester
This exploration is supported by Arts Council England as part Corridor8’s 2022-23 commissioning programme.
With thanks to John Beck and Matthew Cornford for use of images from The Art Schools of North West England series (2019) to accompany this article. The Art Schools of the West Midlands is on show at New Art Gallery Walsall 17 February – 2 July 2023.
Published 04.02.2023 by Lauren Velvick in Explorations
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