Arts-based Learning Fund

• Arts and cultural organisations working in partnership with formal education settings (including state-funded primary and secondary schools, SEND specialist schools, Further Education colleges, alternative provision settings such as Pupil Referral Units, and some types of state-funded Early Years settings) 
• Arts organisations can be charities, community organisations, social enterprises and not-for-profit companies active in the arts and culture sector
• We particularly welcome applications from organisations led by people most impacted by oppression, including racism, ableism, classism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and/​or transphobia
• Organisations that are developing established programmes of work and/​or testing new approaches

We warmly encourage arts and cultural organisations to book an enquiry call to find out more about the Arts-based Learning Fund.

We want to support organisations which:

• use arts-based content and approaches to support children’s learning. These can involve the following art forms: crafts; creative writing, including poetry and spoken word; dance; design; film; music; opera; photography; digital arts and media; theatre and drama; the visual arts; and cross-arts practices;
• have high-quality practice in terms of expertise and resources;
• contribute to the development of teachers’ practice in the educational setting;
• respond to specific pupil and / or education setting needs
• co-construct work with their education setting partners;
• have a commitment to developing an evidence base for their work through reflection, organisational learning, continuous improvement and evaluation;
• ensure that their work and workforce are representative, respectful, and relevant to the lived experience of the pupils they are working with;
• are committed to anti-racism, which we define as the active work to identify and oppose racism, which includes changing systems, structures, policies and practices, as well as attitudes to create a more equitable society. Organisations will centre anti-racism in the planning and delivery of work and ensure that the processes and approaches are considered through an antiracist lens; and
• recognise that inequity plays out in ways that connect and intersect across race, gender, class, disability and other characteristics, which will also be linked to local and personal context.

We want to support work which:

In addition to our general exclusions, we are not able to fund:

• applications from schools and other formal education settings (however primary schools may directly for the Teacher Development Fund);
• applications from universities. (We recognise that some arts and cultural organisations are under the organisational umbrella of a university in which case they are eligible to apply. Universities may also be a project partner – for example involved in learning and evaluation work);
• work with formal education settings that are not state-funded (although we understand that some SEND and alternative provision specialist settings have different funding arrangements, and we encourage a conversation about this via our enquiry call process);
• recently registered organisations which have not yet produced a set of accounts;
• work that is or should be a statutory entitlement, and you may wish to discuss this in more detail in an enquiry call;
• work that is therapeutic in its practice and intended outcomes; or
• work which is focused on developing pupils’ creativity, through approaches that are not arts-based.

Please note that we rarely consider financial requests representing more than 50% of an applicant’s annual turnover.

The Arts-based Learning fund operates on a rolling basis. This means organisations can apply at any time as there are no deadlines.