In 2024 AccessArt celebrates 25 years! Find out more about our journey, and how you can join in our celebrations below.
Team & trustees celebrate 25 years
“Far reaching, insightful, celebratory and ambitious” Team and Trustees meet in York
The 8 Values Which drive accessArt
Read about the 8 values which drive AccessArt, and see how we are commissioning artists to help illustrate these values
THe Model Accessart School
Find out about our collaboration with Postcard Models to build AccessArt Schools across the country!
shouting louder about art education
For a chance to win one of the AccessArt School kits, tell us what “art education” means to you and help us shout louder about the value of visual arts education.
Celebrating…
The AccessArt Primary Art Curriculum
Two years of the AccessArt Primary Art Curriculum
With thousands of schools now using our primary curriculum to develop understanding amongst pupils and teachers, find out more about our intention, vision and impact
Teenage Enquiry-based learning
Enquiry-Based Learning for Teenagers
AccessArt Enquiry-Based Learning aims to provide educators with a holistic, relevant and forward-thinking approach to visual arts education in formal education, preparing pupils for GCSEs and beyond.
One cold, rainy morning in January 1999, I received a phone call from the then DfES. The woman started the call with the words: “What is the best news someone could call you with on such a rainy January day?”
She went on to announce we had been awarded money from the DfES Museums & Galleries Education Programme (yes there was such a thing in those days) to set up AccessArt.
Great news indeed. Imagine a time in which the government valued art and design education so much that they were willing to give over £100,000 to a newly formed organisation, to invest in artist-led education. Forward looking indeed.
Just a couple of years later we also received money from NESTA, established by Labour as an endowment. This money helped us grow further, clarify our aims and establish ourself as a charity.
What a legacy has been created out of those initial grants, and out of that initial belief in the importance of visual arts education. We are now a thriving team, leading a self-sustaining, and growing, arts organisation, with 22,000 members. Each of those members uses our resources with their own audiences, to inspire and enable high quality arts education.
So, this year we celebrate 25 years, continuing to help define what great art education might look like, with vision and clarity. We have a feeling it’s going to be an important year – not just for AccessArt, but also on the cusp, hopefully, of a wider understanding about the importance of visual arts education, and what we need to do to prioritise learning in the arts.
As a subject association, AccessArt is working with many other arts organisations to help inform this shift. Momentum is growing and we are optimistic that despite pressures on politicians from so many different angles, there is shared belief that we need to rethink our education system.
So let’s all keep faith and trusting in what we know is right – that great art education empowers and enables. Good luck in 2024 and let’s keep moving forward with energy.
Paula Briggs, CEO & Creative Director, AccessArt
AccessArt Timeline
Explore…
Taking Control of the narrative
"I realised through conversations with school leavers that they could no longer use words like intuition, entitlement, dreaming, invention, play. These words are unfamiliar to them, and they no longer resonate. These words, and therefore the ways of being they describe, are not available to them right now."
Read why we need to change the narrative and speak with more courage about the purpose of education…
Why AccessArt Can't support oak national academy
"Like many educational publishers, we were concerned at the time about both the nature and quality of the resources created, the ethics of the creation of a curriculum by government, and also the potential impact of a so called “free” curriculum on commercial and charitable educational suppliers..."
Read why we think Oak is a flawed idea…