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Artists, writers, arts organisations and parents are deeply concerned that the arts in secondary education are being diminished to the detriment of future audiences, future cultural innovation and most paradoxically, future British design and product development. So this weekend I have organised with Crescent Arts Centre in Scarborough the first ever Art Party conference, a joyous experiment in a new kind of advocacy for the arts.
We hope to unleash the artist's voice into a debate about the position of art in society which has principally been dominated by museums and galleries and funders. We have taken over the beautiful Victorian Spa in Scarborough where, like a seaside Hogwarts, every niche, corner, theatre and a grand hall will be filled with artists advocating that art become centre stage in a school curriculum based on creative thinking.
Today there will be a number of provocations from a large structure I have built, christened the Summit. Leslie Butterworth from NSEAD (the National Society for Educators in Art and Design) will say that the current proposals for the curriculum are the most toxic for the arts she has encountered during her lifetime. In 2013, 14% fewer children chose art and design GCSE than did in 2000.
I want our kids celebrated by their teachers when they choose art at key stage 4; we don't want children discouraged. If creative kids are offered an exam structure seen to be below other GSCE subjects then they are being structurally reprimanded and punished for being inventive and creative.
Michael Gove probably thinks art is important. Here it's a case of "preach what you practise" and not "practise what you preach". Every private school in the country has terrific art rooms. Eton, Harrow, Ampleforth, Westminster. So far from not valuing art themselves, people with access to private education understand that art makes people powerful: Boris Johnson is a decent portrait painter; Winston Churchill liked to paint.
But art rooms, with kilns, print rooms and plaster sinks, are expensive and that is the real reason why the government does not want to encourage state funded schools to offer a decent arts education to children.
If you want to set up a free school in an old fire station, it's going to be a lot pricier if you have to provide a kiln and a screen-printing bed.
Gove thinks education is protected by building gates around experience and knowledge. But the way to preserve great education is to pull down the gates. Get more people to pass exams, not fewer. We want a rich vocal society where all people feel their voice is important, where people feel emancipated through knowledge. Private education is all about creating specialised groups of the learned that are protective of their experience.
The challenge in education is to introduce new students to the world, show them things they did not know before and spark the engine of curiosity. The boring and easier task is to hothouse the privileged. Opening up education opens up society. Dynamic developments in the economy, design, music and the arts happened in the 1960s because progressive thinking after the second world war gave new groups of people power.
The Browne review, which made university fees unaffordable, coupled with Gove's reforms closes down opportunity.
We want a society where people feel they have the ability and right to contribute to British culture. The Browne review, which was a Mandelsonian creation, is concerned only with fracking cash out of students at the expense of the purpose of higher education to broaden and deepen understanding. It undermines kids aspirations, giving the banks a failproof source of revenue, year in, year out.
Charging kids the earth for education stops working class kids from climbing the ladder and it's their journey up the ladder that has always kept British culture so amazing.
The education secretary has made what choice there is in education a complex Chinese puzzle of eight best: double weighted EBacc subjects with different codes that creates perverse incentives – all without seeking primary legislation, all without creating a new education bill scrutinised by parliament.
Gove has become an under-the-wire dictator seeking to avoid due process. There should be a new education bill that sorts all this out and puts a big A for arts into the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths).
STEAM. It sounds appropriate. The arts make people powerful because art and design is about creating new desires. It inspires people to create their own reality, to get their own thing going. Fundamentally, though, art makes people powerful because art is about our freedom of expression.
The Art Party conference takes place on 23 November at the Spa, Scarborough – follow the event on Twitter @ArtParty2013
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