Does government policy do enough to encourage organisations to increase accessibility?

The contents of a lecture and seminar for my MA Arts and Cultural Management prompted me to think about how government policy attempts to promote people from disadvantaged backgrounds to engage in the arts in terms of my own experience.

I believe that it is important that everyone gets the opportunity to engage in the arts, and as set out in The Culture White Paper, organisations which receive funding from Arts Council England should seek to include people from all backgrounds. (Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, 2016).

Derby QUAD is an organisation I have been involved with for a number of years, attending workshops as a teenager and currently through volunteering as a gallery invigilator. QUAD is a charity organisation which consists of a gallery, cinema and café, and is funded both publicly by Arts Council England, and privately through membership purchases and donations (Derby QUAD, n.d. a). In adherence to this government idea that everyone should have access to the arts, QUAD has offered free workshops for a number of years. Being from a low-income background, these workshops in digital art and painting which I attended was my first form of engagement with the arts outside of education, and are ultimately what prompted me to pursue a degree in fine art and a career in the cultural sector.

While engagement in culture and the arts can be viewed as a means of social mobility (Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, 2016), it is also important that everyone has the same opportunities to be involved with arts and culture because it can be enjoyed, regardless of whether this is used to ‘move up’ in the class system.

The government has also begun to encourage organisations to become more accessible to people with sight and visual impairments (Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, 2016). In my job supporting these people in education, by taking notes during university lectures, I have come to realise just how important captions and audio and written descriptions are. QUAD also takes note of this by offering subtitled viewings of films in their cinema (Derby QUAD, n.d. b). This is important because it removes barriers to access for key cultural experience, and for films in particular this means that people with hearing impairments can engage more with the people around them through going to the cinema with friends, and by finding common ground with others.

References

Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (2016) The Culture White Paper, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/culture-white-paper

Derby QUAD, Our Funders. (n.d. a). Retrieved October 13, 2021, from https://www.derbyquad.co.uk/about/support-us/our-funders

Derby QUAD, What’s On. (n.d. b). Retrieved October 14, 2021, from https://www.derbyquad.co.uk/whats-on