BLOG - THOUGHTS ON A PAGE....

New year and new blog. Welcome back readers. As I have had a bit of a freelance flurry, I haven’t posted for a bit. I’ve been mainly supporting colleagues with funding bids – it must be that time of year. This has included grappling with ACE’s new portal and its demands and deliberations. I avoided at the end of last year blogging about the publication of the Hodge Review of Arts Council England, as there were many out there who summarised and explored with clarity what it wa

I’ve just finished almost my final piece of work for the year, supporting an arts organisation to take a step back and look at how it operates on a day to day basis: policies, procedures, rhythms of work, and the often-unspoken habits that shape how people feel inside the organisation. It was framed as an operational review, but what kept circling back was something I’ve started to think of as ‘organisational well-being’. I wasn’t there to give neat answers or prescribe solut

Every so often something happens in our sector that feels less like an announcement and more like a quiet shift in the weather. This month was one of those moments: PiPA (Parents and Carers in Performing Arts) marked its 10th anniversary by launching the PiPA Pledge ( click here ) – and 80 organisations have already signed up. That’s a sizeable chunk of the UK’s creative ecosystem saying: “Yes, this matters, and we’re going to do something about it.” And it does matter. Becau

Earlier this month, Arts Professional and Baker Richards published  Arts Pay Survey Report 2025  - a weighty, 174-page assessment of pay, conditions and culture across the UK arts workforce. It’s a sobering read. And for those of us who’ve recently crossed the threshold into freelance life, much of it feels uncomfortably familiar. Access the report here . Worth a read if you haven’t already. After thirty years in organisations, leading teams and commissioning hundreds of bril