Why has the government declared war on the creative industries?

Even considering the gravity of recent events (Partygate, the pandemic and the Ukrainian crisis), the government’s recent announcement on university entrance criteria and funding was, for me, one of the most worrying things to come out of Whitehall in recent weeks.

As a father of two young daughters (eight and five), I spend a lot of time discussing the benefits of education, the importance of understanding and the self-empowering joy of knowledge. Knowledge gives us the tools to affect the world around us, sometimes for the bad, but primarily for the good. More educated people are happier, kinder and more productive people, who will lay the foundations for a more cohesive society.

The idea that education should be valued solely or even primarily on your potential earnings is a woeful misunderstanding of the advantages of schooling. The concept that the government should prioritise the funding of degree students based on their likely earning capacity is wholly misguided and uncovers an uncomfortable truth of a deeper problem in our society: we don’t value creativity or art unless it has a price tag.

This potential new government policy is tantamount to a declaration of war on the creative industries, and architecture will be on the front lines of the battle. With long periods of study, a general misunderstanding of the profession, and notoriously low pay levels, architecture is already suffering. Architecture consistently fails to attract a diverse (in all senses of the word) cohort and this new announcement can only further disadvantage the less privileged.

It is challenging to assign a fiscal value to creative output. What monetary sum do we assign to happiness, wellbeing, travelling through a train station with ease? What is the economic value of providing excellent educational spaces for our children? Incredible high, I would think, but admittedly very difficult to measure.

We can’t let the government reinforce an already problematic ideology, an ideology that tells us that our work has no value unless we are paid a lot of money to do it. I do understand that the government needs to balance the post-pandemic books. I am nothing if not pragmatic. However, perhaps they would do better to subsidise the arts instead and increase student fees for professions with the highest wage-earning potentials. After all, these are the people who will better-placed to repay higher levels of loans.

You may think that these views are socialist, but the truth is, politically, I am an agnostic. Linking the value of an education to earning potential is simply wrong and endangers the primary tenet of schooling, a tenet that we should never lose sight of: in the words of the author Andy Mcintyre, ‘If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.’

Analysis of Google search data by the School of Marketing reveals that online searches for ‘Not going to uni’ skyrocketed 989 per cent on the 24 February, following the announced changes to the university tuition fee system.

Equally worrying is the government’s refusal to allow students lacking qualifications in English and Maths to have access to student loans – a blow that further prejudices the creative industries. English and maths deficiencies can be made up relatively easily throughout an educational voyage. An architect I met recently told me that in his search for new talent, he simply asks candidates to draw something, a building they like, for example – nothing to do with maths or English but everything to do with a critical skill needed for architecture.

In formulating their potential new policies, the government has failed to understand that the skills required for a career in the creative industries are different from those in the medical or legal professions. Sure, we need doctors and we need lawyers, but we also need architects. This recent announcement makes it even less likely that the most talented people will come forward and begin their journey to becoming an architect and shaping the world we live in.

Kunle Barker is a property expert, journalist and broadcaster