Where is Participatory and Community Arts in the Hodge Review?

The independent review of Arts Council England (ACE), led by Baroness Margaret Hodge, is now part of the policy landscape in which participatory and community arts will have to operate for the next several years. The review is candid about bureaucracy, uneven cultural investment, weakened local cultural infrastructure, and the need to rebuild trust in the funding system. It also points towards a structural shift, including stronger local and regional decision-making and a more explicit relationship between culture and place.

For participatory and community arts, however, one feature of the review is striking: there is no direct encapsulation of the field as a coherent artistic and civic practice with its own history, standards, and ethical disciplines. The review frequently addresses participation, access, and local cultural life, but it does not treat participatory and community arts as a distinctive practice domain in the way that (for example) touring, national institutions, or talent pipelines are typically treated in policy discourse.

This absence matters because what is named tends to become legible in funding criteria, local strategies, and evaluation expectations. What is not named is more easily reduced to a set of secondary functions: audience development, outreach, social cohesion delivery, “community engagement”, or “workforce support”. Those functions may be valuable, but they are not the same thing as participatory and community arts understood as art, as cultural democracy, and as a set of negotiated practices rooted in place and relationship.

There is a second reason the absence matters. The review is not simply a commentary on ACE’s internal operations. It is also a staging point for ongoing government engagement with the public about the purpose and shape of ACE. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport ran a call for evidence as part of the process, and ministers have indicated that a formal government response is expected in the new year. In other words, interpretation and implementation are still live, and the sector’s framing still has leverage.

At the same time, England’s wider policy direction is towards deeper devolution. The English Devolution White Paper and subsequent legislative work signal an environment in which local and combined authorities, and new local governance arrangements, may have greater influence over cultural priorities, partnerships, and (in some models) decision-making structures. If this trajectory intersects with the review’s proposals for stronger local and regional funding mechanisms, then participatory and community arts will increasingly succeed or fail because of local strategy, local evidence, and local coalitions, not solely on national rhetoric.

The question, then, is not whether the review is “for” or “against” participatory and community arts. The question is whether the field is ready to define itself clearly enough, and organise itself coherently enough, to shape what happens next.

Matarasso’s reminder: participation can be normalised without being understood

François Matarasso’s account in A Restless Art offers a useful lens for interpreting what is happening here. One of his central arguments is that participation has become normalised across cultural policy and practice, but that normalisation carries a risk: participatory practice can be absorbed into institutional agendas in ways that weaken its cultural-democratic character. In that framing, the core question is not whether institutions “include” participation, but whether participation is treated as a serious artistic practice built on shared purpose, negotiated standards, consent, and attention to power.

Put bluntly, participatory work can be widely praised while still being treated as structurally subordinate. It can be the thing that is expected to deliver access, inclusion, and local legitimacy, while being granted the least stable funding, the least policy attention, and the most burdensome reporting conditions. The review’s limited direct articulation of participatory and community arts as a field should be read in that context. It is not necessarily hostility. It is a familiar pattern of misrecognition.

The Centre for Cultural Value and The Audience Agency: how to make everyday culture legible without flattening it

This is where the interim work by the Centre for Cultural Value and The Audience Agency is especially useful for those working in participatory and community contexts. Their Cultural Indicator Suite project is premised on a practical problem that participatory and community arts professionals recognise immediately: traditional indicators overemphasise formal, ticketed, institution-based activity and underrepresent informal, community-driven cultural life. It also argues that culture should be understood ecologically, as an interconnected system of participation, infrastructure, access, diversity, policy context, civic engagement, and wellbeing.

This matters for England’s next phase because a more devolved environment increases the importance of what can be evidenced at local level. If local cultural strategies and local decision structures become more influential, then the field needs ways to demonstrate cultural vitality that reflect lived experience, not only venue attendance or high-level economic metrics. The interim report’s insistence on mixed-method evidence, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, is not an academic preference. It is a survival mechanism for everyday culture that is “statistically invisible” precisely because it happens in relational, informal, low-infrastructure ways.

For participatory and community arts, this is a strategic opening. It offers a sector-legible, policy-relevant way to say: if you want culture to reach under-served places, you have to measure and value the kinds of culture that actually live there, including participation that is not captured by ticketing systems, formal membership data, or institution-led programming.

The movement challenge, reframed as a membership and practice network challenge

The question raised here, then, is how might we, as a community of practice, focus on building a movement that can maintain open and inclusive membership while simultaneously dealing with the problems of being a network of practice? What is the right level of specificity? In the present English context, the idea of forming a “movement” is viewed within the lens of protest formation, rather than as a sustained, practice-based coalition that can do three things at once.

• First, it can provide a shared language and standards for what participatory and community arts are, and what good work looks like, without imposing a single aesthetic or method.
• Second, it can translate that language into governance and policy settings where decisions will increasingly be made: local cultural strategies, devolution-related boards and partnerships, combined authority frameworks, health and education collaborations, and local infrastructure debates.
• Third, it can produce credible evidence that protects practice from being reduced to either “nice to have” community engagement or a low-cost delivery arm for other service agendas.

This is precisely where a membership and practice network such as ArtWorks Alliance can add value. It can hold collective memory (what the field has learned), collective language (how the field describes itself), and collective infrastructure (how the field organises to be present where decisions are made).

The practical question is: what should the network ask its members to consider now, while the government response to the review is still pending and devolution trajectories remain fluid?

Questions for the sector, and an invitation to shape the discussion through ArtWorks Alliance

Question 1. If the Hodge Review does not directly define participatory and community arts as a field, what definition should we use in England (and learnt from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) that are clear enough to travel across local strategies, while still respecting local variation and artistic plurality?

Question 2. In a system that repeatedly returns to an “excellence versus participation” story, how do we describe excellence in participatory practice in ways that are assessable, ethical, and intelligible to decision-makers who may not have specialist experience of the work?

Question 3. If devolution strengthens local and regional influence over cultural priorities, who is currently in the room when local cultural strategy is written, and where should participatory and community arts practitioners be positioned to prevent “everyday culture” being treated as peripheral?

Question 4. What would it mean, in practice, to adopt an ecological model of cultural vitality locally, so that informal and community-led participation becomes visible without being forced into inappropriate metrics? What would we stop measuring, what would we start measuring, and what would we describe through narrative and lived experience rather than counts?

Question 5. How do we resist the pattern in which participatory and community arts are valued rhetorically but funded precariously, and what would a credible “minimum viable infrastructure” for participatory practice look like in an under-served area, beyond short-term projects?

Question 6. If government intends to respond formally to the review in the coming months, what should the sector ask for that is specific, implementable, and locally actionable, rather than an abstract call for “more recognition”?

Question 7. What should a membership and practice network commit to doing, collectively, that individual organisations cannot do alone, particularly in relation to shared evidence protocols, peer learning, ethical standards, and local governance literacy?

Question 8. If we accept that much everyday culture leaves no “paper trail”, what is our shared plan for capturing it responsibly, proportionately, and ethically, without turning participation into surveillance or collapsing it into administrative labour?

Question 9. Where do artists and educators sit in this picture, and how do we ensure that professional development pathways in participatory practice are not treated as optional extras, but as core infrastructure for quality and sustainability?

Question 10. If participatory and community arts are increasingly relied upon to contribute to wellbeing and civic connection, how do we safeguard the artistic autonomy of the work so that it is not reduced to non-clinical service delivery, while still being a credible partner across public services?

ArtWorks Alliance can host and structure this discussion as a membership and practice network, not as a single-position lobbying body. If the next phase in England is likely to involve both policy change and governance reconfiguration, then the sector’s immediate need is not only external advocacy. It is internal alignment: shared language, shared evidence practice, and shared readiness to engage locally as devolution accelerates. The invitation is simple: join the discussion by participating through ArtWorks Alliance membership, and help shape what the field says next, in its own terms, before other institutions define it for us.

Endnotes

1. Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Arts Council England: an independent review by Baroness Margaret Hodge (policy paper, published 16 December 2025).

2. Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Arts Council England review (call for evidence page, published 20 February 2025; last updated 23 April 2025).

3. The Guardian, reporting that the government plans to respond formally in the new year following publication of the Hodge review (16 December 2025).

4. UK Government, English Devolution White Paper: Power and partnership: Foundations for growth (published 16 December 2024).

5. House of Commons Library, English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill 2024–25 (research briefing, published 20 August 2025).

6. François Matarasso, A Restless Art publication page (Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian).

7. François Matarasso, “TL;DR: A Restless Art in 10 minutes” (summary page highlighting normalisation and appropriation themes).

8. Centre for Cultural Value and The Audience Agency, Developing a Cultural Indicator Suite: Interim Report (July 2025).