The government has just launched a scheme for apprenticeships in the cultural industries to allow non-graduate routes into the sector. Pauline Tambling, managing director of the National Skills Academy for Creative and Cultural Skills (NSA) explains why this is a breakthrough moment

Widening access to the arts for young people and developing new audiences remain two key issues for the sector, and ones that I’ve been committed to addressing throughout my career.

But despite numerous initiatives, as a sector we have never managed to come up with an answer to two questions. What can we say to an enthusiastic young person, who has benefited from an arts education programme and wants to work in the sector, but doesn’t want to go to university? And how can we ensure that the people who work in our cultural organisations reflect the wide diversity of our society?

One reason for this is that there are very few non-graduate entry routes into the cultural sector.

The NSA (a wholly owned subsidiary of Creative & Cultural Industries plc) has secured funding from the Learning & Skills Council (LSC) to put this right. Through the development of an apprenticeship training service we are, for the first time, able to create a structured means of bringing non-graduates into our sector.

This will complement existing recruitment practices, not replace them. Importantly, it will mean that young people, who for one reason or another are not destined for higher education, can find jobs in the cultural sector, and access high quality training as they work, and get a qualification.

Over the next three years we aim to introduce 1,125 apprenticeship opportunities. Any approved apprenticeship pathways that are relevant to the sector will be on offer. Currently there are six recognized pathways in the creative apprenticeship, including live events and promotion, music business, technical theatre, costume and wardrobe, cultural heritage venue operations and community arts, and these will remain.

Now for the first time there will also be less arts-specific pathways in business and administration, finance, marketing and communication, customer service and IT.

One of the challenges in developing this programme is that traditional government funded apprenticeships don’t always fit the needs of the cultural sector. They tend to reflect old ways of taking on apprentices, in sectors like construction, hairdressing, plumbing and carpentry where there’s a predictable number of places every year. As a result funders, like the LSC, tend to work with further education colleges that have yearly contracts with employers and take a fixed number of young people.

This won’t work in our sector. Finding annual apprenticeship opportunities across 70,000 small businesses working in the subsidised, commercial and not-for-profit parts of the advertising, craft, cultural heritage, design, literature, music, performing and visual arts, which align directly with the relevant colleges offering day release courses, isn’t easy for colleges and funders but will be part of what we’ll do.

The National Skills Academy will work with employers in the creative and cultural sectors to identify apprenticeship opportunities on an ongoing basis. Apprenticeships can be shared, if appropriate, across two or three employers. We’ll match employers with one of our 19 NSA founder colleges around the country who will provide flexible training opportunities and organise training funding for each learner with the LSC.

Employers will be required to pay their apprentice the national minimum wage. There’s been some resistance in the sector to paying unqualified young people when there are so many graduates willing to work for free as interns, but as one employer recently said, “We spend around £8000 on advertising in the national press for an administrator, take on a highly qualified graduate and lose them to a better opportunity three months later when we actually want someone from the local community who stay with us for a few years”.

The apprenticeship training service within the NSA will sort out job descriptions, training partners, payroll and qualifications for employers to minimise their workload.

As a result of the programme, we are confident that we will see some of the talented young people becoming employees and the diversity of our local communities better reflected in our staff. We are also confident that we’ll create some really strong relationships with our network of further education colleges throughout England. With equivalent pilot projects starting to happen in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, the approach is set to spread across national borders.

As many people know, our sector is among the fastest growing in the UK economy. To keep pace with this growth we need to be taking steps to ensure that a diverse range of young people can access new job opportunities as they emerge. Apprenticeships will help us do this.

From the Clore Leadership Programme’s fifth birthday, director Sue Hoyle looks at what has been achieved and ahead to its future

What is a Clore Fellow? Someone who is not taught to be a leader but finds leadership in themselves, who undergoes a largely self-directed programme of workshops and courses, an extended placement, original research, and mentoring and coaching, and who has courage to explore the unfamiliar.

Above all, the Clore “experience” encourages fellows to take risks but does not specify how they do so or what they choose to learn en route. It is non-prescriptive, flexible but very intense. As one Fellow said recently, “How do you describe something that is liberating and focussed, terrifying and nurturing, tailored and completely unstructured? Clore!”

The Clore Leadership Programme has just celebrated its fifth birthday. The idea of Dame Vivien Duffield, the programme is the UK’s first cross-disciplinary leadership initiative for the cultural and creative sector.

What distinguishes the Clore programme from previous leadership projects is not only the focus on customised in-depth learning, but the diversity of participants, ranging from archivists to film and theatre directors. Fellows have come from across the UK and, increasingly, from overseas: from Canada, China, Egypt, Iran, Ireland, Hong Kong, India and the United Arab Emirates.

The immediate response to the fellowship programme was overwhelming, in terms of both the number and quality of applications. Since 2004, 157 fellowships have been awarded in response to around 2000 applications. In addition to the fellowships, the programme has run 21 short courses across the UK, each lasting two weeks and reaching nearly 500 artists, administrators, producers, curators, librarians, policy-makers and many others in the cultural and creative field. With support from the Arts Council’s Cultural Leadership Programme, we have also led board away days for 21 organisations and provided training courses for individual board members, chairs and senior executives.

The high level of demand for all of these strands, and the positive feedback we have received, demonstrate how greatly this initiative was needed. It has also proved extraordinarily influential in the UK and beyond, attracting partnership funding from over 40 different public, private and charitable sources and stimulating comparable initiatives in the Netherlands and the USA.

In achieving all this, it has been generously supported by many from across the arts and creative industries as well as from business, education and the public and social sectors: individuals and organisations who have contributed as speakers, mentors, advocates and advisers,

For many of the Fellows, the Programme has indeed been life-changing. “I believe in myself, I didn’t before. I believed I should - now I know I can!”

Some have moved on to head up museums, theatres, orchestras, festivals and library services; some have returned to their jobs with renewed confidence, more extensive networks and enhanced skills. Some fellows are working independently: others have set up ground-breaking new charities or independent businesses which focus on 21st century issues, such as Tom Andrews, whose arts charity People United promotes social cohesion and kindness, and Bev Morton, whose work focuses on leadership and well-being.

From the beginning, one of the unanticipated benefits has been the way in which each group of Fellows has formed strong bonds amongst themselves, supporting and learning from one another and cascading their learning beyond the programme as mentors, coaches, employers, board members, educators and consultants.

Perhaps the programme is already helping not only to change the leadership of culture, but is also having an influence on the culture of leadership, creating an environment where the leaders who have completed the Clore Programme are less isolated than their predecessors and more able to learn from one another and provide peer support. They also collaborate creatively and strategically across what have sometimes in the past been apparently unbridgeable divisions between different arts forms, sectors and professional hierarchies.

Looking ahead, changes in the economic environment, digital advances and increasing globalisation will continue to provide more and more new challenges and opportunities for cultural leaders - and for our Programme too.

We have already made some adjustments to the way it works and will continue to fine-tune, develop and extend it. Next year, for example, we will be publishing articles by Fellows on a range of issues including leadership and the creative economy; and, in partnership with the British Council, we will be running a three-day course in the UK for international cultural leaders.

We will be refreshing our website, with regular e-newsletters designed by guest editors and developing new content and learning styles for all our residential courses, including more contributions generated by participants.

We are introducing greater focus to the Fellowship programme, with most Fellows able to complete the core of the Programme in a concentrated seven-month period.

Recognising that financial pressures may impact on people’s ability, and willingness, to take time away from work for leadership development, we expect this to make the programme more accessible for some potential leaders and their employers, and look forward to receiving an ever-widening range of applications in the new year when we advertise the 2010-11 Fellowships.

AI Profile: Harriet Bridgeman, president, The Bridgeman Art Library

She is a viscountess, married for over 40 years to the third viscount, but she is universally known as Harriet Bridgeman with no lapse of respect at all. In the publishing, art and museum worlds Harriet is close to royalty.

She is the creator and now president of the Bridgeman Art Library whose publicity boasts of it being “the world’s leading source of fine art, cultural and historical images”, and nobody argues with that.

At the touch of a keyboard button the Bridgeman has more than a quarter of a million images available, representing 29,000 artists and 8,000 collections. Every subject, theme and style is covered, from 15,000 BC to now, there’s portrait photography, maps, architecture, furniture and ceramics, and even anthropological bits and pieces. Started in London 37 years ago, there are offices now in New York, Paris and Berlin.

The Bridgeman provides a service for publishers and writers, and a half of what it earns goes back to the artists or museums, about £2m a year.

But now she and her team have taken on a new challenge on behalf of artists and collections. Three years ago the European Commission issued a directive that living artists would be entitled to “droite de suite” – a cut of any on sales of their work after the initial sale, less attractively known formally as Artist’s Resale Right – followed by UK legislation.

The Ashmolean, Britain’s oldest museum reopens tomorrow as one of the most up-do-date in the world after a £61m remake. Simon Tait reports

It began as a cabinet of curiosities, a strange collection of botanical and ethnographical objects gathered together by two eminent gardeners, John Tradescant father and son, and put on public display in their house in Lambeth.

Now, after years of tinkering and juggling with inadequate funding, it is reopening as a spacious repository of art and antiquities with a new mission o connecting cultures and civilisations for the better understanding of them by both students and the international public. The oldest public museum in the oldest university in the English speaking world has had a 21st century remake designed by the architect Rick Mather and costing £61m, to create an international facility for both students and public.

The Ashmolean first opened in Broad Street in 1683, the Tradescant collection having been passed on by the family to the scholar Elias Ashmole adding to his own, and eventually outgrew the building and moved in the 1840s to Beaumont Street to a neo-classical building designed by Charles Cockerell.

Only the galleries and facilities at the front of the old museum remain. The extensions behind the Cockerell building, completed in the 1890s, have been replaced by the new Mather designed open spaces, with natural light serving each of five levels from an atrium, and bridges linking them.

“It is” said Professor Andrew Hamilton, Oxford’s new vice-chancellor, “a powerful statement of the way in which Oxford’s dynamic future is being fuelled by the richness of its past. Today, as a result of the effort, commitment and generosity of so many – and as part of the Campaign for Oxford – the special role of the Ashmolean has been secured for generations to come”.

The museum is a teaching and research department of the university as well as being a public museum, for which admission is free.

The Ashmolean has been completely recast to a strategy of “Crossing Cultures Crossing Time”, said Christopher Brown, the museum’s director. “From the outset, our ambition has been to create not just an improved and expanded version of Britain’s oldest public museum, but something significantly different in kind: a new way of showcasing the Ashmolean’s remarkable collection, for the benefit of the widest possible audience”.

CULTURE LABEL RADAR
The great new Editions section at the Zoo Art Fair got the CultureLabel team thinking about the applications of exclusivity in creating new commercial opportunities for cultural organisations. Peter Tullin explains.

Of course, limited editions are nothing new in the arts and famously retailers have borrowed the technique to employ this tactic on the high street to get punters to pay a premium.

From a Hermes helicopter ($10 million USD, apparently) if you really want one or, at the other end of the spectrum, novelty Champagne Marmite to make eating toast more romantic on Valentine’s Day.

But now the practice is being reclaimed and reinvented by artists and institutions in a new generation of limited editions and co-creations and collaborations between brands, musicians, designers and fashion. The common bonding point is that they all seek to tap the arts premium.

It starts with the classic gallery fundraiser: selling a limited edition or multiple by an artist, which appeals to the mentality of “collectable not disposable”. Over the years, the Whitechapel Art Gallery has developed a considerable portfolio (prominently displayed in its new entrance, a la Summer Exhibition) that is now a significant revenue generator. Works range from a £25 script by text artist Mark Titchner to an Anish Kapoor at £4,700.

Artists themselves are also directly selling to consumers through limited edition product. Langland & Bell’s watch “Frozen Sky” is a tangible extension of their Terminal 5 commissions.

Back on the high street, we have recently witnessed some of the most innovative uses of this technique. As Dan Ariely puts it in his book Predictably Irrational, the psychological challenge is make it more difficult for consumers to attain in order to encourage a higher level of coveting.

While there may have been a recent dip in traditional sponsorship of late, more and more brands are seizing opportunities to connect with consumers hungry for cultural experiences. Sponsorship has started morphing into “cultural branding” – much of this is increasingly orientated towards limited-edition products or experiences.

Sometimes this can be about the enjoyment of the brand and product in its existing format (albeit within a new cultural context); the crowds enjoying a G&T whilst hanging out at Somerset House’s new Bombay Sapphire bar would attest to this.

Moving up a notch, you have co-creations. On IntelligentNaivety.com we have explored a number of these such as Hans Ulrich Obrist and The Serpentine’s foray into this territory with the creation of The Reality Bag in partnership with Puma.

Then there is the cross-fertilisation seeping into other industries, like music. Earlier this year through our retail portal CultureLabel.com we worked with YBA Stuart Semple to promote his collaboration with the UK dance act The Prodigy. Semple had created the cover of their recent single Thunder and produced both limited and super limited editions designed to appeal to both art and music fans alike. It follows a trend for this artist’s foray into music. With the bottom having fallen out of the market for physical CD singles, he worked with the indie rock band Subliminal Girls, attempting to revolutionize the music industry by releasing just ten copies of their single Self Obsession is An Art Form - featuring sleeve art designed by Stuart Semple - costing $2,115 (£1,410) apiece.

The band have inevitably since split (you can never legislate for that as many a music exec will tell you), but the artwork sold well and sales of the download were far higher because of the PR generated by the novel approach.

Luxury publishing has also grown in prominence in the music industry for the same reasons. Sir Peter Blake has recently collaborated on ‘That Lucky Old Sun’ Brian Wilson as “a spiritual record”. This limited edition publication presents 12 new, exclusive artworks created by Blake as numbered, fine art serigraphs. – a snip at £900.

Finally, the growth of online retail has allowed retailers to develop niche aggregation sites of exclusive and limited editions. 20ltd is one example offering exclusive, super rare, limited edition design pieces and fine art photography. All items are created in very low numbers and will never be produced again.

The Olympics will be an opportunity not just for disabled sports people but for disabled artists, through the £3m Unlimited programme

If our disabled sportsmen and sportswomen are going to make an impact in the Paralympic Games in 2012, the artistic counterparts will challenge them neck and neck.

Certainly, if the enthusiasm with which the announcement of Unlimited was greeted is anything to go by.

“We have been rather slow to show inroads in the whole artistic area” said Jenny Sealey, the artistic director for Unlimited and of the theatre company for disabled peroformers, Graeae. “But, oh my god, are we rolling now!”

Unlimited is a £3m programme to create new work for the Cultural Olympiad, and as such will be the largest ever disability programme.

The money comes from a range of providers, including the Olympic Lottery Distributor, Arts Council England, the arts councils of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, London 2012 and the British Council.

There will be a £1.5m commission fund to support the work of disabled and deaf artists and arts organisations; a training and mentoring programme for the successful applicants, tailor-made for each individual’s needs; the commissioned work will be showcased in London and across the UK up to and including the Games; and, in a programme being set up by the British Council in a unique partnership with the UK arts councils, there will be collaborations to showcase the Unlimited work abroad, and promote an international debate among young people about disability rights.

It was the first announcement to be made by the new chairman of the new 2012 Cultural Olympiad Board, Tony Hall. “This is real history being made” he said. “There’s never been anything on this scale in the area before”.

In Beijing, he said, ours was he first organising committee to have disabled artists in the hand-p0ver ceremony. “The UK produces some of the best disability arts in the world, and by using the power of the Olympic and Paralympic Games we can help the movement grow, foster young talent, enable collaboration between disabled and mainstream arts organisations and provide platforms to showcase excellence in the UKL and around the world.”

And if the project needs a cheerleader, he was doing it at the press launch at the Southbank Centre. Chris Holmes is the director of paralympic integration for 2012.

When he was 14 Holmes went to bed one night able to see and woke up next morning blind. He was still able to win a place at Cambridge and get a politics degree, while also becoming Britain’s most successful paralympic swimmer, winning nine gold medals in Barcelona, Atlanta and Sydney.

“Sport isn’t here for everyone in London 2012” he said, in between getting all those present to shout “Unlimited” gleefully. “There haven’t been similar challenges for disabled people, but now we will have a fantastic new dimension.”

Artists or organisations can apply for commission through the Arts Council England’s grants for the arts programme, and there are three funding rounds. The deadline for the first is January 4 next year with results on March 12; the second on October 1, results on December 23; and the last on 18 April 2011, results on July 8.

The commissions will go to work led by disabled or deaf people or organisations, and collaborations are being encouraged. Partnerships can be with mainstream presenting organisations, venues and events. The showcases will be at arts festivals, open weekends and at live sites across the UK.

Officers from the four arts councils will make the first assessments of bids and forward their assessments to a commission panel, half of which will have disabled representation.

Decisions will be made based on the standard grants or the arts criteria:

high quality that can be performance ready from late 2010
work that can make new partnerships with venues and events
work that corresponds to the three or values of Cultural Olympiad, of celebrating the UK’s internationalism and cultural diversity, of involving young people, and of generating a legacy.

The commission should reflect Olympic values, but do not have to be sport themes.

The effect on the disabled community will be deep and lasting, believes Jenny Sealey, who is herself deaf. “The disability community has been on tenterhooks waiting for Unlimited to be unleashed” she aid, because the arts crosses all boundaries that even sport can’t, and force change.

“It enables disabled people to strive for artistic expression, champion their own destiny and combat prejudice. Unlimited is an opportunity like no other for an extraordinary programme of art, performance and spectacle – a chance to speak to the world about the quality of what we do.”

“It’s engaging with things you’ve never engaged with before, never tried before” said Deb Williams, a disabled artist.

Or, to put it he way the newly reinstated culture minister Margaret Hodge did: “We’re going to see what disabled people can do, not what they can’t”.

AI Profile, Ed Vaizey, Shadow Minister of Culture
The man who would be Minister of State for Culture next summer if things go according to his party’s plan makes no secret of his belief that although it will be the best job in government that will be only be true until he gets his boss’s job. Ed Vaizey wants to be Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. He’s told Jeremy Hunt, the man currently in the slot, so that there can be no mistake.

For a man who, at 41, has been an MP for all of four years he has vaulting ambition, but his provenance suggests that he can justify his self-belief. His father was John Vaizey, the economist and educationalist who was made a life peer by Harold Wilson only to cross the floor and join Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives a couple of years later. He died in 1984. His mother is the art critic Marina Vaizey.

He is a law graduate of Merton College, Oxford, where he met and became close friends with the shadow education secretary Michael Gove, and went on to get a law diploma from City University. A year later he was called to the Bar and practiced for three years specialising in family law before briefly running the Public Policy Unit PR company, then, having stood as a Conservative candidate in Bristol East at the 1997 general election, joined the public affairs agency Politics International, and then a mobile phone and internet company, Consolidated Communications. He spent the 2001 election he put his own parliamentary ambitions on hold for a session to act as Ian Duncan Smith’s gofer.

Meanwhile he had been advising Ken Clarke and Michael Howard, the Leader of the Opposition, on employment and education issues and in 2004 he became Howard’s chief speech writer. In less than a year was elected for Wantage, and a few months after that he married his wife, Alex. They have two children, Joseph and Martha.

The Hon Edward Henry Butler Vaizey is close to the Tory high command as a member of Cameron’s Notting Hill set, and edited the Blue Books of 2001 to 2003 that set the tone for early Cameron policy, beginning with A Blue Tomorrow in which he worked with Gove and Nick Boles.

As well as being politically hyperactive Ed Vaizey is frequently in the public eye either as a regular contributor to The Guardian and Sunday Times newspapers or on radio and television, as likely to appear on Radio Five Live as Newsnight. He gets impatient when asked the standard arts reporter’s question, “what did you last see”, responding dismissively, “Oh, can’t remember”. In fact, he turns up to most things, concerts, exhibitions, theatre, though he admits to not being particularly keen on opera and dance.

Having done the apprenticeship, he expects to be doing the job as culture minister within then next few months, and the good news appears to be that nothing will change, immediately at any rate. He hints that that there might be more radical remoulding of the arts subsidy system later on, within the arm’s length model

In 2007 he commissioned Sir John Tusa to chair a working party looking at potential arts policy, and while the resulting report stopped short of calling for the abolition of the Arts Council it recommended that the government should take on the direct funding of the five flagship companies. Although Vaizey had earlier said ACE’s future was not guaranteed, he and Hunt neither adopted the abolition stance nor the direct funding proposal. When the think tank New Culture Forum produced a paper in June calling for Ace’s national office to be abolished “because a managerial culture has poisoned the Arts Council”, he demurred decisively: “I want to put on the record that the Tories are not going to abolish the Arts Council” he said.

He has spent several weeks working with the Arts Council and admits to having been impressed by Alan Davey and his team. He told The Guardian earlier this year. “One of the goals I have set myself is, if the Tories win on a Thursday, there will be far fewer people in the arts world waking up in a cold sweat on a Friday”. One thing he is determined to do is to enhance the teaching of music in schools, which he believes to have been badly neglected.

Nor does he work in a vacuum in the shadow government. When Hunt predecessor, Hugo Swire, suggested that the Tories might abolish re admission to national museums and galleries, introduced by the Labour culture secretary Chris Smith in 2001, he was fired. Vaizey is keen to confirm that free admission is safe, and when Ben Bradshaw accused the London mayor of mooting the reintroduction of admission charges, he was howled down.

But that doesn’t mean to say there won’t be pain to come. Although he sees arts budget cuts as sensible policy as it might have been in previous Conservative governments, he believes the frontline arts organisations have proved their worth and cuts would cause pointless damage. He believes substantial savings can be found within the cultural bureaucracies which may mean some ACE programmes being chopped. Indeed, if the economical situation allows he wants the Arts Council to identify certain “cornerstone” arts organisations who must be subsidised, and give them longer term funding deals.

And although he is thought to be an admirer of Roy Clare, the CEO of the Museums Archives and Libraries Council, there are likely to be changes there, such as the separating off of libraries, and probably of archives too.

That would lie in what he terms “good management”, but there may in fact be more money for the arts under a Conservative government. The declared policy is to return to the four “good causes” to benefit form the National Lottery, as originally declared in the 1993 Act. Labour have at best blurred the divisions, at worst done a “smash and grab” in favour of the Olympics and other projects, and that would stop. Arts and heritage could stand to get another £50m each a year on top of the £180m they have been allocated for this year.

He is a champion of “cultural entrepreneurship”, and of the mix of subsidy and private funding when he believes allows it to thrive, as he write in The Guardian in August: “… there are clearly opportunities to identify smart savings to ensure the continued vitality of our cultural and creative sectors” he wrote. “This process is not just about efficiencies but about identifying and nurturing opportunities for creativity and innovation off-stage and beyond exhibition. Where there is entrepreneurial activity and flair, and a structure supportive of innovation, the most interesting work – cultural and commercial – occurs”, and he went on to praise the initiative of our associates CulureLabel, “applying the best commercial minds to the business of culture”.

Vaizey is a strong believer in the value of private arts support, and is likely to support tax breaks for living donations of works of art. “I believe in a mixed cultural economy in which private and public funding work together” he says. “It’s very important not to get fixated on conflict with the Arts Council, but we’re starting the question: What’s the best way forward?”

CURRICULUM VITAE

1968 Born, June 5
1979-86 St Paul’s School
1986-89 Merton College, Oxford
1989-91 Desk officer, Conservative Research Department
1993-96 Practices at the Bar
1996-7 Dirrector, Public Policy Unit
1997 Parliamentary candidate in Bristol East
1997-98 Politics International
1998-2003 Consolidated Communications
2004 Chief speech writer to Leader of the Opposition
2005 Elected MP for Wantage
2005 Marries Alexandra Holland, two children
2006. Appointed shadow arts spokesman

The Arts Council has made folk music and dance a client, just as its lead society is responding to a folk revival. Simon Tait reports.

Most folkies won’t care. They’ll still stamp and strum and scrape and jingle and bellow, and even stick their fingers in the ears if they’re of that generation, but it is official: folk music and dance are art.

Confirmation comes with the English Folk Dance and Song Society – Efders for short, according to its CEO Katy Spicer, but look for a name change soon - being admitted to the pantheon of regularly funded organisations. It’s got £400,000 over the next 18 months to get folk on a national footing, properly taught, promoted and integrated.

The news brings folk into a focus it hasn’t ever had before, even in the days of Cecil Sharp, the composer and musicologist who a century ago began to collect and archive the songs and dances of working people.

The EFDSS has been struggling to make itself heard as the national development agency, confined as it is to a Grade II listed fortress in Camden, built six years after Sharp’s death in 1924 as his monument. Cecil Sharp had been the centre of teaching, mostly of dancing, housed an unmatchable library and archive and was hired by enthusiastic clubs for ceilids and concerts. But there was little impact beyond Cecil Sharp House.

Meanwhile, the truth is that despite the natural habitat of the folk club, the pub, closing at the rate of 27 a week, folk is on a high with more young people learning instruments and performing than ever, more high level performances at main venues and continually growing audiences.

A measure of how folk is featuring more and more largely is in the fact that one of the National Theatre’s biggest hits for some time is Warhorse, now in the West End, in which the music and performance of Tim Eyken, the rising star of English folk, is integral.

Cecil Sharp had become a folk convert after an incident that’s as famous for folk music historians as St Paul’s experience eon the road to Damascus. On Boxing Day 1899 at Headikngt5on Quarry near Oxford he met William Kimber, musician to the Headington Quarry Morris Dancers, and from then on he devoted himself to researching the roots and expanse of the genre.

The English Folk and Dance and Song Society was created in 1932 with the merger of the Folk-Song Society (founded 1898) and the English Folk Dance Society that Sharp formed in 1911. Hence the tortuous name.

A century ago folk music was a fascination for composers led by Sharp but including Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth and Henry Hammond and there was fevered collecting of songs, music and dances in what is still seen as a golden age. Vaughan Williams’s great library came to the society in 1958.

It was he EFDSS that nurtured the birth and growth of the folk festivals which began to proliferate, a conscious effort to take folk back to the folk, and events at Sidmouth, Whitby, Holmfirth, Chippenham and Cambridge are meccas for thousands of followers.

Twenty years ago the EFDSS almost moved out of London. The board had decided to rationalise by selling the House at the top of the North London property market and using the proceeds to buy or even somewhere in the country, develop its teaching, expand its library space and generally move with the times, but he plan collapsed. “It simply didn’t happen because the members wouldn’t hear of it” says Katy Spicer. “The emotional attachment to this place was just too strong”.

So folk was stuck with it. There were suggestions and half-hearted attempts to sell off assets that also foundered, and the EFDSS soldiered on as best it could.

Then, two years ago, the board knew things could not go on as they were. “It was a realisation of the board that although the organisation had been around for 75 years, it had lost its way” Spicer says. “It’s supposed to be a national organisation - or an England-wide organisation - and they used to have regional offices which died the death as funding changed. But it had become an organisation that as very centred around the activities in this building”. They decided a major remodelling was required if the society was to meet the evident growing demand and serve it properly.

Katy Spicer has no background in folk, having been in dance administration for all of her career, latterly at Arc Dance in London and with spell as an Arts Council advisor and assessor.

“The building, which was bustling, had become essentially a hires venue. The society was Static, very dance orientated, and it wasn’t fulfilling any sort of role of developing, either the organisation or the folk world” she says.

Her job was to appoint heads of the new marketing, education and operations departments, and together to re-establish the EFDSS as national body and looking outside the folk world. First, though, she redecorated the building, clearing the walls of the random posters and objects that had been hung there over the years (“a hotchpotch of things, like a museum room someone had forgotten about”).

The society has just finished Take Six, an HLF funded archive, outreach and education programme which involved putting the archives of six collectors on a website and linking with half a dozen primary schools in Hampshire and Lancashire – at Andover the scheme discovered a child who was the direct descendent of a farmer who had contributed to a collection a century ago.

Spicer met the artist David Owen who had been creating ironic images around the notion of the society, and he mounted an exhibition on the CSH’s newly pristine walls a year ago. It was a popular success, and led to the appointment of a visual artist in residence Matt Cowan, who is now working on his third visual art exhibition there. “We want to engage with contemporary artists who don’t usually engage with folk audiences” Spicer says.

The task is much wider, however, and the ACE money will help to fulfil it. A third of the money will go on artists’ development - mentoring, showcases for emerging artists, and performing artists in residence; a quarter go on education, including teacher training modules because few teachers are qualified to teach folk music and dance; they need to expand the communications and information service, and are developing a large new website; and they will run an annual conference, an important networking opportunity where venue managers and producers can mingle with the artists.

But there have already been valuable links forged. There was a recent collaboration with Sadler’s Wells when dancers were joined by folk musicians for a week – classically trained ballerinas dancing the Cotswold Jig had to be breaking at least one mould – and there are connections now with the Southbank Centre and Youth Music.

They formed a link with the National Gallery with Hidden Voice that matched folk artists with paintings in the collection for performances, and with the Royal Opera House for shows in the Linbury Studio.

And one of the most heartening rapprochements was over Mary Neill, a great teacher of dance who was one of the first to connect art and social reform by teaching poor girls he joy of dance. She had been a close collaborator with Sharp but they fell out over teaching methods, and the schism was never healed. Until earlier this year, that’s, when Mary’s great niece Lucy- co-founder of the London International Festival of Theatre, inherited her archive and decided to endow Cecil Sharp House with it, in a day of music and dance which Lucy Neill herself programmed.

“What we can say now is that the Arts Council has trust in our ability to deliver high quality art, and that we are open for business in all meanings of the phrase” says Katy Spicer.

For 40 years the Centre for Young Music has given young Londoners free quality music teaching, but not it’s moving into a new league

It is a rather belated coming of age that arrives at 40, but that is what has happened to the Centre for Young Musicians. The centre, once described by the Times Educational Supplement as “one of London’s most valuable musical assets”, is leaving its most recent parent, Westminster City Council, and joining the City of London Corporation’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the grown-up world of the Barbican Centre.

At last one element of the CYM is already familiar with that august venue. The London Schools Symphony Orchestra is one of its ensembles and is an habitué of the Barbican Hall, but the formal link – announced at the Barbican during the LSSO’s concert two weeks ago – moves the centre into a new realm with infinite new possibilities.

The CYM was created in 1970 by the old Inner London Education Authority to give Saturday morning music training to talented young musicians between the rages of eight and 18 from London boroughs, for free: lessons and access to instruments were provided.

It has been a unique catalyst for young Londoners, some of whom could not be reached by conventional education but have found inspiration through music. Most come from inner city state schools, one on three from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, half from black or ethnic minority families.

The CYM Saturday Centre gives weekly tuition in instrumental work, ensembles, orchestras, singing and general musicianship - 72 ensembles meet on a Saturday and 7 choirs. There are also open access holiday courses and CYM-associated junior centres in 13 London boroughs, as well as the LSSO and London Youth Wind Band advanced ensembles.

It is the closest thing we have to Venezuela’s sensational Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra which thrilled sell-out audiences at the Royal Festival Hall earlier this year, and the move could bring it even closer.

AI Profile

Gregory Nash Artistic director, The Point
Well, today Gregory Nash is artistic director of The Point at Eastleigh. On Monday he will be executive director of the Young Vic in the kind of translation from regional local authority arts management to a national role that, until quite recently, was considered impossible.

He will be back at Eastleigh, though, in November for the opening of the latest development phase of The Point, the performance venue set in the old council offices of Eastleigh, the 19th century Hampshire railway town.

Nash has not only fulfilled the borough’s ambitions for The Point, he has changed them and created a unique cultural facility in the four years he has been there. The new building has a sprung floor studio with movable seating for 80, living accommodation for eight artists, a foyer, conference room, roof garden and outdoor cinema, designed by the Hampshire practice of Chaplin Farrant Wiltshire.

His move with 17 years as a dancer and choreographer in his background to the Young Vic, another modern phenomenon of a venue under the hand of David Lan, comes as a surprise to at least one section of the cultural community.

“No-one in theatre thought it was in any way weird” he says. “People in the dance world were very surprised because they assumed dance people can’t cross over, and there is a slight gleefulness that here’s a sign that they can actually get out of the dance ghetto”, something to which we will return.

Actually, Gregory Nash’s career has dodged between theatre and dance in a hitherto unconventional way. Born the son of emigrants – first from Ireland to England, then to Australia and finally back to England – he was brought up in Worthing where the then important Connaught Theatre had a powerful youth drama section, which he joined. An inspirational movement teacher helped the physically agile boy who was not interested in sport to find his way, “so I came to dance through theatre”.