A voter who opens with “I'm hardcore STEM myself” wrote the most-respected argument in a vote that Yes won only just. The question was whether music and the arts should take a bigger share of school funding, and Yes voters kept insisting the choice was not a choice at all.
That top Yes case said to “refuse the false dichotomy”, and a second voter agreed there did not need to be a zero sum trade-off between STEM and cultural education. Others made it a question of fairness: without funding, one voter said, music and the arts “become exclusive to those who are better off”. A separate Yes thread was economic, pointing to the creative sector as one of the UK's biggest exports.
The most-respected No case was blunter: “Schools have limited budgets”, so English and STEM should come first. Many No voters were not hostile to the arts. One said they “deserve funding”, but not at the expense of core subjects, and another wrote that if more funding was available, “then absolutely”. A No voter also noted that increases would need higher spending and taxes or cuts elsewhere.
The two sides rarely disputed that the arts have value. They disagreed over whether the money exists without hurting reading, writing and maths, which Yes answered by denying any trade-off and No answered by pointing to scarcity. A few Yes voters even proposed paying for school arts by trimming arts degrees.
In the end, both camps argued from the same worry about children's prospects, and neither claimed that music was worthless.
54 Opinions
I'm hardcore STEM myself; it makes the world go round. But the arts are among the things that make life worth living. Which of the two is more important? We should refuse the false dichotomy. It's perfectly possible to teach physics and piano.
Without it, music and the arts become exclusive to those who are better off. Over the centuries, this country has had a wealth of creative genius — it cannot be unattainable for common people. Talent should be nurtured in everyone. There’s a real miserable attitude prevailing that says ‘if it doesn’t immediately lead to a job, why bother?’ — this is wrong.
Schools have limited budgets, they should primarily focus on English and STEM (inc computer algorithms)
I don't believe there needs to be a zero sum trade-off between STEM and cultural education. Schools already teach multiple subjects on a daily basis. I worry that the way we're going, those cultural pursuits will become an exclusive reserve of the very wealthy. Edited
Yes. They’ve been cut back beyond all recognition. The arts are a growth industry, and children in state schools are at a massive disadvantage now unless their parents can afford private tuition.
Music and the arts are valuable and deserve funding, but it shouldn't come at the expense of Core subjects. The priority must go to ensuring every child masters basic literacy, numeracy, and science. We need to guarantee all pupils can read, write, and do basic maths proficiently before reallocating funds away from core standards to expand arts budgets.
Yes many children excell in the arts & many times not academically &/or music helps stimulate the brain to learn. We are a nation of artist all throughout history we can't lose that talent.
Culture (particularly across music, design and sport) are among some of the UKs biggest exports and successes. Particularly in the advent of AI automating non-creative jobs, we should be looking to capitalise on this as much as possible.
Not everyone needs an engineering degree to be economically valuable. The creative sector is one of Britain's most successful exports, bringing in £145 billion annually. Defunding the arts at school level just damages the pipeline for one of our biggest industries.
The amount of unemployed people actually correlates with the amount of irrelevant degrees people have taken. Instead of getting a engineering degree they chose a niece arts degree.