Government UK has updated on ‘Culture Priority Places’ and its methodology.
Government UK writes:
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is committed to making a difference in the places that need it the most, through investing to build social and community cohesion and to enhance opportunity where outcomes are poorest.
Evidence points clearly to economic and social outcomes being systematically worse in places where both deprivation and community need is highest; places experiencing ‘double disadvantage’… For this reason, across our programmes that aim to improve social and community outcomes, we will focus more of our activity and investment in these places of double disadvantage to ensure that our funding is concentrated in the communities where we can make the biggest difference.
Many cultural programmes supported by DCMS investment contribute to some social and community outcomes, alongside other outcomes relating to culture and growth, and we have therefore developed a set of Culture Priority Places, guided by the broader DCMS approach to place targeting. This list has been developed specifically for application (where appropriate) in programmes relating to museums, libraries, the visual and performing arts. It does not cover all areas of culture and the creative industries, and prioritisation lists for programmes focussed on other sub-sectors may be developed separately using specific and appropriate data.
DCMS will work with funding partners (including the Arts Council) and others to determine for which policies, programmes, and funds this list of Culture Priority Places will be used, and in what way. Those decisions will be taken on a case-by-case basis determined by the objectives of the programme or policy in question. How this list will apply in such cases will be made clear through published documents (such as funding application guidance) made public for each relevant programme or policy.
Notwithstanding this flexibility, it is our strong expectation that this approach will support a meaningful shift over time of investment and participation in culture in these Culture Priority Places, and we are clear about our high ambition in this respect with our funding partners. In our response to the Independent Review of Arts Council England (‘the Arts Council’), the government set out that it would work with the Arts Council to publish a set of additional Culture Priority Places.
This note sets out what those places are, the methodology used to determine that list, and how it interacts with existing place prioritisation frameworks. It should be read in conjunction with the wider guidance on the DCMS approach.
The broader DCMS approach focuses on places with high deprivation and high community need, as measured by the Indices of Multiple Deprivation and the Community Needs Index. Our approach (set out in detail below) builds on this by incorporating culture participation data and historic funding data to determine a list of areas that should be prioritised.
The methodology set out in this note uses the latest data to identify places with high deprivation and high community need, lowest participation, and without high cultural funding in the recent past. As it dovetails with available data-sources (in particular the Participation Survey) and existing approaches to place prioritisation, we have chosen to carry out analysis and prioritise at lower tier local authority level. The methodology creates a list of 81 local authority areas for prioritisation.
The Arts Council has been prioritising 54 Priority Places…. since 2021, and has a public commitment to continue that support until 2027. Since 2021, the Arts Council’s Priority Places programme has been effective in increasing the level of funding focussed on local authority areas with higher levels of deprivation…. Many of these areas identified by DCMS’s new methodology are already in Arts Council’s existing Priority Places – but 23 are new…. DCMS-commissioned research has recommended taking a long-term approach to cultural development in places… and DCMS has therefore decided to introduce these as additional places to the Arts Council’s Priority Places, resulting in a combined list of 81 places, rather than simply replacing Arts Council’s Priority Places.
Culture Priority Places will change over time, and places will no longer be deemed a Culture Priority Place when they have achieved real change in their cultural participation and provision. We will work with the Arts Council on a robust methodology to determine which places will leave the Culture Priority Places list, and when. We will set this methodology out in due course. While local government reorganisation continues we will also consider how this list or its practical application needs to be adapted to respond to boundary changes.
Methodology for Culture Priority Places
Summary methodology
There are three key steps to our prioritisation methodology:
- Focus on engagement
Our first step was to identify local authority areas with low engagement with culture. Lower tier local authority areas were ranked using three separate measures of physical engagement with culture. All of these engagement metrics are taken from the 2023 to 2024 Participation Survey annual publication, the relevant data tables are specified below:
Physical attendance at an arts event in the last 12 months
Physical attendance at a library in the last 12 months
Physical attendance at a museum in the last 12 months
- Focus on high deprivation and high community need
Our next step, in line with the DCMS approach to place targeting, was to identify areas experiencing the most ’double disadvantage’: Lower tier local authorities were ranked based on their share of neighbourhoods (LSOAs) experiencing both high deprivation (worst-performing quintile for IMD) and high community need (worst-performing quintile for CNI).
- Exclusion of local authority areas that have historically received high levels (top quintile) of the Arts Council’s funding since 2021
Finally, as one of the impacts of this prioritisation exercise will be to shape where funding is concentrated, we excluded areas that have had very high per-capita levels of funding in the recent past. Because most central government culture programmes are delivered through the Arts Council, this is the best single funding source that can be used to understand the distribution of central government culture funding. Detail on the steps we took to implement this methodology is set out below, along with details on the data-sources and metrics used to inform this analysis…
