CLA Briefing: The National Centre for Arts Education is taking shape: what we know so far

In March 2025 the Department for Education announced it would create a National Centre for Arts and Music Education. Eighteen months on, the re-named National Centre for Arts Education has been set up, with the DfE contract awarded to a consortium led by Etio, working with the Chartered College of Teaching and Birmingham City University (Royal Birmingham Conservatoire). The Centre begins its work on 30 September 2026.

This is a significant moment. After a long period of decline, Arts education in England’s schools now has a dedicated national body with a remit to champion it. CLA welcomes that this important investment in Arts education, and we look forward to working with the Centre to help it succeed.

This briefing sets out what we know so far, how the sector’s shared vision connects with the Centre’s priorities, and the questions our members are asking as the work gets underway.

Who is involved

Etio is the government services arm of Tribal Group. On 11 September 2026 Tribal agreed to sell its businesses, including Etio, to Main Capital Partners, a private equity and venture capital firm focused on investing in software businesses, subject to shareholder approval. The new owner has headquarters in the Hague and works across Northwestern Europe and North America.

The Chartered College of Teaching will design the quality assurance framework for professional development across all four Arts subjects, and will certify teachers who take part in the Centre’s CPD. Birmingham City University (BCU) is the lead research partner. The press release quotes the Principal of the University’s Royal Birmingham Conservatoire on behalf of BCU.

The Centre’s CEO is Dr Steven Berryman, a former music teacher and past President of the Chartered College of Teaching, whose most recent role was Senior Deputy Head at Sir William Perkins’s School in Surrey. Three Expert Senior Advisors have also been appointed, each experienced and known across our sector: Moira Sinclair, former CEO of Paul Hamlyn Foundation; Bridget Whyte, who has recently stepped down as Chief Executive of Music Mark and will advise on music; and Jillian Barker, formerly Director of Learning and Participation at the Royal Ballet and Opera, who will advise on cultural partnerships.

We expect the wider team to include four Arts Directors as leads for each subject area, an inclusion adviser and a research and evaluation lead. Governance arrangements will include a range of different boards.

What the Centre is for

The DfE says the Centre “will play a pivotal role in delivering the government’s ambition to revitalise Arts in schools in England, so every child can access a rich, high-quality Arts education that nurtures creativity, confidence, cultural understanding, and personal expression.”

It aims to be a strategic system leader, working at national, regional and local levels, convening partners from across the Arts, culture, education and philanthropy, and using data and evidence to target support where access to high-quality Arts education is most unequal. The contract award also commits the Centre to operating with “transparency, accountability, and a commitment to sector engagement, building trust and long-term partnerships across the Arts and cultural ecology.” That commitment gives everyone a strong shared starting point.

The Centre’s four published priorities, as previously set out, are:

• Priority 1: Providing strategic national leadership in revitalising Arts in schools, mobilising a coalition of national, regional and local partners to generate and direct investment to support equitable access to high-quality Arts in school, with a focus on under-served communities.
• Priority 2: Supporting excellent teaching, through a new online CPD offer for primary and secondary school teachers and support to access existing high-quality teacher development provision available from others.
• Priority 3: Promoting Arts education to school leaders, teachers, parents and young people, including promoting opportunities for children and young people to progress in the Arts and pursue their interests and career aspirations.
• Oversight of the Music Hubs network, including being fundholder for the network, monitoring hubs’ performance and delivery, and working with hubs to achieve the Centre’s three priorities.

Funding, timings and the Music Hubs

When the Centre was put out to tender, its estimated value was £13m (excluding VAT) over three years, with Music Hubs funding as separate. Etio’s winning bid came in slightly below that, at £12.225m excluding VAT (£14.67m including VAT). The DfE can extend the contract a year at a time for up to three further years, subject to affordability. If all three years were taken up at the same rate, the total would reach about £24.5m excluding VAT, or just over £29m including VAT, which is the maximum value set out in the contract details.

The Centre will introduce its programme in phases from 30 September 2026, and will take on responsibility for the 43 Music Hub partnerships from 1 September 2027. Arts Council England, which currently oversees the Hubs, will work with the Centre on that transfer. Future Music Hub revenue funding (currently £76m a year) will be confirmed “in due course” and sits outside the Centre’s contract, as does the DfE’s separate £25m capital fund for musical instruments, equipment and technology.

The DfE has also asked Arts Council England to help the Centre build relationships across the cultural education sector, with potential areas including “sector engagement; learning from previous and current programmes; data and evidence; and place-based alignment.” We look forward to hearing more about how that partnership will be shaped and resourced.

Etio as a commercial provider

Etio’s published accounts give a sense of its finances. In 2025 it generated revenue of £18.6m and an adjusted segment operating profit of £2.9m, a margin of around 16%. That figure is calculated before Tribal’s central costs, finance costs and tax, so Etio’s final net margin will be lower. It is also an average across all of Etio’s work in the UK and internationally, and it varies from year to year (just over 2% in 2024). The accounts cannot tell us what Etio will make on the Centre contract, which is why we hope the Centre’s commitment to transparency will extend to its financial reporting.

A commercial provider is likely to bring some operational strengths. Etio has led the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics for many years, coordinating a network of 40 Maths Hubs. Its model of national leadership working through regional networks of schools might offer useful learning for the Arts. Etio also has experience of delivering large DfE programmes, with the systems for data, reporting and quality assurance that come with them. The Centre now has the chance to bring that experience together with the deep knowledge already found across the Arts and cultural education sector.

How the sector’s vision connects

When the Centre was first announced as part of a wider package of support for Arts education and enrichment, CLA brought the sector together. We held consensus workshops in Birmingham, Bradford, London and online to shape an independent, sector-generated vision for what the Centre could be. We shared the resulting CLA vision and framework with the DfE in August 2025 and published it in October 2025 so that everyone could draw on it.

Much of that vision is reflected in the Centre’s priorities, from equitable access and excellent teaching to a strong evidence base. The workshops also reached consensus on two further points. The first was that the Centre’s name should embrace every art form, and we warmly welcome the DfE’s decision to change the title. The second was that the Centre should be a not-for-profit body, independent of government, as the sector felt this would help attract philanthropic investment. The DfE has appointed a commercial provider, and we look forward to seeing how Etio approaches its role in bringing philanthropic support to Arts education.

Who else bid to run the Centre?

There were four bidders in total. All the other bidders were not-for-profit organisations. Specialist cultural education organisation Curious Minds led a partnership bid to run the centre; Curious Minds has since been announced as the official “System Builder” for the government’s Enrichment Expansion Programme, where it will bring its arts and cultural education expertise to the national framework. The other bidders were Arts Council England, the funding and development body for creativity and culture in England; and the Education Development Trust, an international not-for-profit education charity that works to improve education and skills outcomes to increase life chances globally.

What the sector will want to see

The Centre is only just announced; it will launch formally in November. As its set-up period begins, we share some of the key questions raised by our membership, which we will look forward to exploring with the Centre as it develops.

As the Centre begins, our members have raised a number of questions. Most of them would apply whoever had been appointed. We share them in the spirit of helping the Centre make a strong start, and we would welcome the chance to explore them together.

• Openness about funding: School and cultural sector budgets have been under pressure for many years, so colleagues will want to understand how the Centre’s budget is used, including how much reaches schools, teachers and artists. Clear financial reporting from the start will help build that understanding.
• Scale of investment: £12.2m over three years is a welcome start, and it is similar in scale to the contract for the maths centre, at around £4m a year. The maths centre sits within a wider programme worth around £36m a year, most of which goes directly to Maths Hubs and schools to deliver professional development. Building equivalent regional capacity for Art & Design, Dance and Drama (alongside existing dedicated funding for Music) would help the Centre reach every school. CLA will keep making the case for investment that matches the ambition.
• Resourcing the sector’s expertise: Much of the Arts and cultural education sector is made up of micro and small organisations and freelance artists, many working on tight margins. As the Centre builds its partnerships, we would like to understand how the time and expertise of Arts education specialists will be recognised and resourced in order to support the revitalisation of the Arts in schools
• Mobilising philanthropy: Trusts and foundations usually fund charitable bodies, so it will be helpful to hear how the Centre plans to unlock philanthropic support for Arts education, for example by encouraging funders to invest directly in school programmes and in cultural organisations’ learning work. The Centre has one philanthropy adviser, the former director of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, which has funded CLA for many years.
• Careers and progression: As the Creative Policy and Evidence Centre has noted, the Centre was a key commitment of the Creative Industries Sector Plan. We are keen to see how Priority 3 will connect with the Creative Careers Collective (Futures For All, Creative UK and Creative Access) and its £9m Discover Creative Careers programme.
• Balance across the Arts: Music Hub funding is by far the largest sum connected to the Centre. We look forward to seeing Art & Design, Dance, Drama and Music all given equal weight in the Centre’s work and leadership.
• Equity, diversity and belonging: The Centre’s remit places under-served communities at the heart of its work. We would like to see that commitment reflected in how the Centre itself is led and governed. As the Centre makes appointments, there is a real opportunity for open recruitment that brings in people with lived experience of the barriers it exists to address.
• Technology and time together: The CLA vision called for brilliant online learning alongside in-person opportunities for artists and teachers to learn together. We are keen to hear how the Centre’s digital offer will be built, and where people will be able to meet.
• Evidence: We would welcome a conversation about how this the Centre’s evidence work connect with existing research and evidence across the sector, including CLA’s Report Cards, Rapid Evidence Reviews and wider evidence work.
• Fitting into the existing ecology: There is already a great deal of strong work across Arts CPD, evidence, advocacy and careers. We look forward to seeing how the Centre connects with and builds on this work.
• Governance: We look forward to learning who will chair and sit on the Centre’s boards, and how sector voices will help shape its decisions.

The CLA position

CLA stands ready to work with and support the new Centre. Our comment in the DfE press release said:

“The Cultural Learning Alliance warmly welcomes the government’s commitment to Arts education with the launch of the new National Centre for Arts Education. Based on our consultation with the cultural and education sectors, we believe the new National Centre can play an important role in addressing the inequity of access to the Arts highlighted in our annual Report Card. We look forward to continuing to work with colleagues across the cultural and education sector, and now with the National Centre, to realise the sector’s shared vision: that every school is an Arts-rich school and every child in every postcode benefits from a high-quality Arts education.”

National investment in Arts education is rare, and this Centre carries real hopes across schools and the cultural sector. It will succeed as a collective endeavour, drawing on the ambition, experience and expertise already found across our field. We look forward to working alongside colleagues at the Centre towards a shared ambition: equitable access to a high-quality, Arts-rich education for every child. 

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