Declaring a ‘polycrisis’ is bearing down on our arts and creative education, new research by Professor Sandra Gattenhof from Queensland University of Technology and Dr John Nicholas Saunders from Australian Catholic University has sounded the alarm.
While the drive to engage students in STEM has been highly publicised and absorbed a huge focus both in recent policy initiatives and within schools, the arts has been deprioritised and essentially left to wither away, the pair argue.
Flagging the significant year-on-year decline in the number of Year 11 and 12 students opting to pursue arts subjects, Saunders says that Australia is very much at risk of becoming an artless country.
”[The data tells us] that it’s basically across every art subject: dance, drama, media arts, music and visual arts,” he tells EducationHQ.
This has clear flow-on effects down the line, he adds.
“When a school is seeing a drop in enrolments in Year 12 music for example, and there’s only a handful of students [selecting it], a school might decide then that they don’t have capacity to deliver that subject and so it will be cut.
“And once it’s removed from Year 11 and 12, then often it’s removed from Year 9 and 10, then often the [elective] in Year 7 and 8 then gets reduced – that all goes…
“And so, we’re really concerned about … what else is happening within these schools as well.”
Data from primary schools is invariably patchy, Saunders says, but certainly teachers are reporting that “things are going backwards and backwards quickly” for the arts.
And with such low student numbers at senior levels, classes are being combined in the name of efficiency, Gattenhof adds.
This is not an appealing prospect for prospective arts students, she says.
“The students are not getting the full range or scope of what the syllabus should be offering. They’re getting kind of a half-half version.
“That is also off-putting for students, where they know they’re in a combined class and they’re not actually going to have the full suite of curriculum materials delivered to them.”
Drawing on the state of Year 12 drama, Saunders says more and more students are turning away from the subject because of poor assessment practices, low quality curriculum and the subject’s penalising ATAR scaling.
The recent drama syllabus reform in NSW has had a significant negative impact here, Saunders says.
“[NSW teachers in particular] have been talking about a reduction of the quality of teaching and learning, the practical and creative nature of their subject, and that there are fewer creative and authentic options for assessment as well.
“The assessment becomes written and becomes very limited, and rather than actually the students working as an artist, as a musician, as an actor, as a director, as a playwright – instead of creating music or creating drama – they’re actually writing about it rather than doing it.”
In Queensland, where the decline in drama enrolments is the sharpest, an “inauthentic” syllabus and assessment tasks that “really could be out of another subject area” are helping to drive the spiral, the researcher flags.
“We’re also seeing those subjects in many states being scaled down through the ATAR calculation.
“A student might work really hard and get 100 per cent, which is very, very difficult. But actually that 100 per cent gets scaled down, that raw scale moves.
“And so it is impacting students’ ATARs and then limiting their pathways into post-school options. That’s certainly another deterrent for students thinking about going into a particularly competitive area in university…”
Declining senior secondary enrolments, shrinking tertiary pathways, and reduced institutional support have converged to form a polycrisis that threatens the future of arts and creative education in Australia, Saunders and Gattenhof say.
There is a clear bias in how the arts subjects are scaled across the states and territories, the researchers contend.
There’s an assumption that if a lot of students are performing really well, then the subject must be easier.
Yet in the case of dance, for example, this could not be further from the truth, Saunders says.
“Dance tends to scale not very well, but the students who are doing dance have been dancing since they were four years old.
“They’ve been dancing after school. They’ve been dancing in school. So, they’re highly specialised and the cohorts studying dance are going to perform pretty well – lots of them will be in those top bands rather than just scraping through and passing.
“So, it looks very different when those small cohorts in the arts are being compared to really big cohorts with English and maths.”
Saunders and Gattenhof are frustrated by the ‘lip service’ given to arts education within policy circles, which they say comes without any real funding investment from governments or adequate focus within schools at scale.
They are quick to call out the ’profound incongruity’ between rhetoric about a thriving arts and cultural sector, and the explicit winding back of arts education across the board.
For some 25 years Gattenhof has been working to save arts education in our schools and tertiary institutions, which have also scaled back arts and creative courses.
“It’s always been a persistent problem to advocate for the position of the arts in education. It feels like we have never stopped doing it.
“And it’s more urgent now.”
The only way out of the current predicament is for a federal minister to take up the charge, she says.
“The Australian National Culture Policy … kind of falls between two ministers, the Minister for Education and the Minister for Arts.
“And the experience we’ve had is that neither want to take responsibility for it, unless they have an event and then they say, ‘can you provide some artists?’”
If current tends continue Australia is starting down a bleak creative future, the researchers warn.
“My fear is that with the decline in arts participation in schools and university, and in this AI world, that actually we’re losing the things that make us human, the things that are going to make us competitive in future decades,” Saunders says.
Gattenhof predicts within five years we will see a diminution of the arts workforce, which she says will carry significant cultural consequences.
“The arts is a specific way of knowing and being in the world, and particularly for First Nations communities.
“Arts is the way in which stories are told, are kept. And if we decrease that ability to tell a story beyond the written word through what we call non-textual form, which is what First Nations communities use, we are reducing the ways in which young people can narrate their story and their experience…
“I think we will see less artists, we will see less Australian voice and less Australian stories told.”
The researchers agree that without significant reform effort, the ambitions outlined in Australia’s National Cultural Policy Revive: a place for every story, a story for every place (2023) will be ‘null and void’.
