About us

Performance and delivery

The performance of funded arts organisations and the Arts Council itself is very important. The public rightly expect the institutions they finance to be effective and efficient and to try to continuously improve. We work closely with our main partners, arts organisations and local government, to support their continued improvement. We also have our own programme of radical internal reform.

Arts Council

Within the Arts Council, in recent years we have made significant progress in delivering more efficient performance – for example, an administration cost saving of £6 million per year and in 2003 rationalising more than 100 funding schemes into five and will continue this by:

  • addressing our own efficiency and effectiveness through the 2006 review of the national office
  • introducing benchmarking for regional performance and seek external comparators for the organisation as a whole
  • significantly improving our approach to evaluation, data and evidence gathering, and using that knowledge more effectively to show how the arts contribute to public life

Arts organisations

Productivity by arts organisations has grown in recent years – helped by a 40% increase in direct spend on arts activity since 1997. Our stabilisation programme has invested £155 million in arts organisations since 1996, addressing endemic financial and operational issues.

We will:

  • continue to improve organisational performance in the arts sector, particularly in our regularly funded organisations
  • support arts organisations through a new programme, drawing on internationally recognised models for self-evaluation and our experience of running organisational change programmes
  • provide financial and business support to our regularly funded organisations so they can thrive in a fast-changing and technologically-driven operating environment
  • review the portfolio of regularly funded organisations in 2007 to ensure it reflects the cultural and artistic aspirations of the country

Local government

Local authorities will become subject to a new Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) regime for culture over the coming period and attention is being given to appropriate performance measures and a proper role for the Arts Council in evaluating performance.

We will work with the Audit Commission, DCMS, other cultural agencies and with local authority partners to provide support and guidance to assist local authorities in improving their performance in the cultural sectors.

Action

Arts Council

  • Implement the findings from the 2006 review of national office to ensure it is able to deliver the organisation’s strategic aims effectively
  • Complete the Comprehensive Spending Review exercise and budget planning for 2007
  • Complete our Case for Investment to allocate funding for the regularly funded organisations portfolio, including developing effective frameworks for assessing and improving quality
  • Deliver the ‘single system’ IT project to unify grants and information management, together with other IT projects in human resources and internal communications
  • Improve knowledge management to more effectively use the intellectual capital within the Arts Council

Arts organisations

  • Implement our programme of business improvement featuring advice, self-evaluation, and finance and business support to enable arts organisations to meet the challenge of a rapidly changing operating environment

Local government

  • Develop an improvement strategy for local government including providing regional commentaries and negotiating arts-based performance indicators

Our priorities:


Planning for the future - public value