Abstract Arts Council England is the national development agency for the arts. From 2003 to 2006 we will:
- prioritise individual artists
- work with funded arts organisations to help them thrive rather than just survive
- place cultural diversity at the heart of our work
- prioritise young people and Creative Partnerships
- maximise growth in the arts
Underlying all of these priorities is our central belief that the arts have power to transform lives and communities, and create opportunities for people throughout the country.
We recognise in particular the transforming power of the arts in relation to children and young people and the role the arts can play in developing confident, creative and articulate individuals. Our spending plan for 2003-6 announced major increases to national youth organisations and we welcome the increased investment in the Creative Partnerships initiative, a high priority across the organisation. We see children’s literature as the touchstone for a healthy and sustainable literary culture. Children’s writers and illustrators reach readers at their most dependent and travel with them through to young adulthood and beyond. This reading is among the most important – transforming – undertaken in any reader’s life. It affords the means by which children can ‘dialogue with their futures’, not only through the printed word, but also through children’s literature’s intimate connections with the visual arts and design, film and television, theatre and new technologies. Its value is private and public, cultural and artistic, and also social and economic. Children’s literature firmly belongs, as Philip Pullman notes, ‘with the rest in the general field, in the general market place for books and in the general conversation about books’. |
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