Click here to download a PDF of Building Blocks? An Investigation Into Building Schools for the Future (Katharine Quarmby and Anna Fazackerley, Policy Exchange, 13th July 2009).

For more information, and to download a free copy of ixia’s review, please click here.

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[2] ‘Questions on education policy for the new Con-Lib Dems’, Mike Baker in The Guardian, Tuesday 18^th May 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/may/18/coalition-education-policy-cuts

[3] ‘Questions on education policy for the new Con-Lib Dems’, Mike Baker in The Guardian, Tuesday 18^th May 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/may/18/coalition-education-policy-cuts

The new coalition government, formed by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats on 12^th May 2010, has announced that £6 billion will be cut from public spending in the financial year 2010-11, with a plan for deficit reduction being set out in an emergency budget within fifty days. In the meantime, there is widespread speculation and uncertainty. The overwhelming feeling is that the cuts will be made to ‘non-front line services’[1] where funding has not yet been formally allocated. In an article published in Building Design on 14^th May, the Former RIBA President George Ferguson’s verdict was that: ‘”severe spending cuts are inevitable.”‘ He ‘warned new-build health and education projects would be thin on the ground.’[2] Building Design’s view is that ‘the [architectural] profession’s major worry is the future of the £55 billion Building Schools for the Future programme’,[3] which is considered to be ‘the major lifeline for the construction industry.’[4] Ferguson’s observation that government spending cuts will lead to ‘”making the most of what we’ve got rather than everything having to be brand and spanking new”‘[5] has already been made by ixia, who believe that, increasingly, the focus has been on the refurbishment of the existing estate rather than new-builds.

The Ministerial appointments include Jeremy Hunt MP, the new Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, and Michael Gove MP, who took over Ed Balls’ former position as Secretary of State for Education.[6] The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) has been re-named the Department for Education.[7] For the BBC’s verdict on how the coalition will affect culture, please click here. [8]

ixia’s research into public art and education, and public art and health has been conducted in response to the growing number of public art commissions within hospital and school building programmes, as well as to recent amendments to national guidance. ixia will, as always, continue to monitor the considerable changes to the political landscape and the updates to public sector building programmes in light of producing future advice.

Art & the Public Sphere invites contributions from artists, theorists, historians, curators and cultural activists. We seek interdisciplinary articles, which confront orthodoxies, propagate debate and reflect on art’s role in the public sphere. We encourage fresh approaches to research arising from practice, theory, philosophy and politics, and welcome contributions from new and established researchers, scholars, practitioners and professionals. The first issue of the journal will focus on the ‘Intersection of Politics, Art and Urbanism‘ but we also invite contributions for future issues on any aspect of art and the discourses related to the public sphere, such as ‘public’, ‘publicness’, ‘making public’ and ‘publishing’.

For more information, click here.

Art & the Public Sphere provides a new platform for academics, artists, curators, commissioners, art historians and theorists, whose working practices are broadly concerned with contemporary art’s relation to the public sphere. Art & the Public Sphere also presents a crucial examination of contemporary art’s link to the public realm, offering an engaged and responsive forum in which to debate the newly emerging series of developments within contemporary thinking, society and international art practice. It will be peer-reviewed and edited by Mel Jordan.

For more information, click here.

Click here to view ixia’s response to the Department for Communities and Local Government’s (DCLG) consultation document, Community Infrastructure Levy: Detailed proposals and draft regulations for the introduction of the Community Infrastructure Levy, published in July 2009. ixia’s response has been developed in discussion with, and endorsed by, Arts Council England.

For more information, and to download a free copy of ixia’s review, please click here.

As part of ixia’s ongoing review of the relationship between public art and the planning system we are profiling the government’s latest consultation document on the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL), Community Infrastructure Levy: Detailed proposals and draft regulations for the introduction of the Community Infrastructure Levy: Consultation, published in July 2009. ixia is currently working on a response. For more information, click here. For ixia’s published review of policy, guidance and practice regarding public art and the planning system and process in England, click here.