A government review of the Arts Council has called on the organisation to “collaborate with other relevant grant givers” to provide more “satisfying feedback” to grant applicants.
The tailored review of Arts Council England was published yesterday by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and said the grant giving body should be more willing to “collaborate with other relevant grant givers to identify whether any lessons can be learned about how to provide satisfying feedback to grant applicants”.
The government carries out tailored reviews to seek assurance of the continuing need, efficiency and good governance of public bodies.
The review found that the Arts Council’s services were “still required and were being delivered”, with 82 per cent of respondents to a public survey saying the Arts Council provided “good value for money” with a further 89 per cent saying it “added some or considerable value to the sectors it supports”.
In the foreword to the review, Matt Hancock, minister of state for digital and culture, said the review provided an “important opportunity for the government to examine the efficiency and effectiveness” of the Arts Council, which will invest “£1.1bn of government funding and a further £700m of Lottery funding between 2015 and 2018”.
The review concluded that the non-departmental public body model "funded by but operating at arm’s length from government, remained the most appropriate model to deliver these functions".
Arts Council should ‘clarify how it makes funding decisions’ says DCMS
However the review found that the Arts Council needs to clarify “how it makes funding decisions and how its investments feed into its wider strategy”, and that it should focus on “learning lessons from its own investments and those made by other grant givers”.
DCMS also said that, moving forward, the Arts Council should move beyond simply “measuring outputs” and instead focus on “understanding the outcomes of its grants and their impact on audiences and practitioners”.
The review concluded that there was also “scope for the Arts Council to better monitor and assess its performance as an organisation by developing a more systematic and challenging strategic performance framework”.
These were part of some 30 recommendations made by DCMS to the Arts Council as part of the review.
DCMS should review Arts Council key performance indicators
The review also made five recommendations to DCMS about how it interacts with the Arts Council, amongst which included a “wider examination of the Arts Council’s cultural property functions”.
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It also recommended that DCMS “review the current set of three key performance indicators” in the agreement it has with the Arts Council, signed on 1 November 2012, to ensure they remain relevant to the current grant making environment.
The government first announced it would be conducting a review of the Arts Council in August last year.
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