UK artists competing against despotic nations? The muddle of enlisting artists to develop a creative workforce

The Robinson Report in the late 1990s argued that the structure and delivery of schools needed to be updated for the United Kingdom to remain competitive economically. The argument assumes that the United Kingdom needed to develop a workforce adept at working in the creative industries to drive economic growth. Required capabilities include generating and delivering intellectual property, symbolic meaning and other goods and services in unprecedented ways. UK education policy from 1997 to 2010 enlisted so-called creative practitioners – workers in the creative industries that include artists, musicians, and performers – to foster creative practices in schools and contribute to their structural change. But this economic rationale and its policy implications for arts education have not been examined in great detail. I argue in this article that the ambiguities and contradictions of creative industries policy rhetoric and its implementation obscure and mitigate artists, musicians and performers’ pedagogies.