The government has confirmed that performing and creative arts courses in England will no longer receive support through the Strategic Priorities Grant from 2026/27.
In a letter to the Office for Students, Secretary of State for Education Bridget Phillipson MP instructed the regulator to stop providing high-cost subject funding to courses including creative arts, performing arts, archaeology and geography. Nursing, computing and history will also lose funding through another part of the grant.
The Strategic Priorities Grant is one of the government’s main ways of supporting subjects that are expensive to deliver or considered strategically important. Its overall budget will fall to £1.252 billion in 2026/27, a reduction of £50.9 million compared with the previous year.
The government says the changes are necessary to protect funding for subjects including medicine, dentistry, veterinary science, chemistry and engineering, which Phillipson said have “materially higher delivery costs”. She acknowledged that removing funding from other subjects would be challenging, but described it as a necessary trade-off.
The costs do not simply disappear
This decision does not mean that all funding for creative courses is being withdrawn. Universities will continue to receive tuition fee income, while funding for some specialist institutions is being maintained.
However, performing arts courses can be expensive to provide. They need rehearsal rooms, studios, workshops, technical facilities, equipment and performance spaces. They also rely on intensive practical teaching and access to specialist practitioners.
Removing the additional funding does not remove those costs. It leaves universities to absorb them, find money elsewhere or reduce what they offer.
That could mean larger classes, fewer productions, reduced access to facilities, fewer specialist teaching hours or courses being consolidated and closed. The Office for Students has warned that the reductions will be felt more sharply by some institutions than others.
For freelancers, the effects could be felt at both ends of the workforce. Many freelance artists, technicians and creative practitioners teach, direct, design, mentor and support productions within higher education. Reduced provision could remove paid work from people already in the sector, while also weakening the routes through which the next generation enters it.
A question of access
When publicly supported training opportunities contract, access becomes increasingly dependent on what an individual can afford.
Those with the resources to relocate, pay for private training or support themselves through unpaid opportunities may still find a way into the industry. Those without that financial safety net face a much narrower range of choices.
The result risks being not only fewer courses, but a less diverse and less representative creative workforce.
This matters in a sector where entry is already shaped by geography, income, disability, caring responsibilities and access to professional networks. A sustainable workforce depends on talented people being able to enter the industry from every background, not only those who can afford to overcome gaps in public provision.
A contradiction in government policy
The decision is also difficult to reconcile with the government’s ambitions for the creative industries.
Its Creative Industries Sector Plan describes the sector as central to economic growth and commits to building a resilient, skilled and diverse workforce.
A recent Skills England assessment of the creative industries projects that employment in 30 priority creative occupations could grow by 416,000 between 2025 and 2035. When workers expected to leave the sector are included, total demand could reach around 909,000 people.
The same analysis found that 81% of projected additional employment in these occupations will require qualifications at Level 4 or above. It also identifies creative arts and design courses as an important route into the workforce.
It is hard to see how the UK can develop that workforce while reducing support for the educational routes that sustain it.
At Freelancers Make Theatre Work, we recognise the importance of training doctors, nurses, engineers, scientists and other essential professionals. But creative subjects should not have to compete against healthcare or STEM for recognition as valuable and strategically important.
The Office for Students has said it will consult later this year on how the grant should be allocated from 2027/28 onwards. That consultation must provide a meaningful opportunity to reconsider how creative education is valued and supported.
The creative workforce of the future is being educated and trained today. Creative education is not separate from the future of the creative industries. It is one of the foundations on which that future will be built.