Access in Theory, Endurance in Practice: What ACE’s Funding Portal Might Reveal About the Moment We’re In

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 was saying and what might happen in the time ahead. But maybe the reason I’m coming back to it now is to highlight that it didn’t really reference strongly enough how complicated and off-putting the sheer act of making applications to ACE can be. It takes a certain mindset, energy and real commitment to get to the point of pressing submit. It isn’t necessarily the questions – it is more the clunky, slightly illogical and repetitive tech structure. There is something about the portal that is a bit of a micro window into the thrust behind the Hodge Review. As this blog's title suggests - Access in Theory, Endurance in Practice: What ACE’s Funding Portal Might Reveal About the Moment We’re In - is there something here that should concern us? Is access really being addressed in a way that supports genuine inclusion?

A familiar argument has re-emerged: that work made with communities is somehow a distraction; that participation has become a tick-box exercise; that Arts Council England should stop worrying about inclusion and get back to backing “excellence” – often framed in quite a narrow, traditional way. Yet Let’s Create was, at its heart, a deliberate attempt to recognise something that has always existed across this country: serious, high-quality artistic practice rooted in grassroots contexts. It made an explicit case that excellence didn't only sit within established buildings, traditional hierarchies or familiar practices. Questions about who art is for, who gets to make it, and who feels welcome in cultural spaces became harder to ignore. New organisations entered ACE’s regular funding portfolio, often bringing different values, working practices and relationships with audiences. Programmes like Creative People and Places have continued to support work that begins with local need and curiosity, particularly in areas that had previously seen little sustained cultural investment. This isn’t about lowering artistic ambition; it’s about widening the frame, allowing shared ownership, collaboration and different forms of excellence to coexist, reflecting the reality of the places the work is embedded in - artists and organisations working with people who are too often sidelined or unheard creating work that brings people together, builds pride and challenges isolation; culture that is something made with people, not just presented to them, creating spaces for connection, dialogue and shared humanity, and reminding people that culture can still be a place where difference is held, not feared.

So, while there may well be a case for reforming ACE’s systems and processes, if that reform involves abandoning the principles that underpin Let’s Create, we risk sliding backwards – towards an arts ecology shaped by fewer voices, serving narrower interests, and increasingly disconnected from the society it’s meant to reflect. Turning away from socially engaged practice doesn’t just shrink the cultural landscape; it leaves space for more intolerant, exclusionary narratives to take hold. And getting a portal that is truly accessible and inclusive must surely be part of this journey. I’m starting to wonder then that ACE’s new application portal is, unintentionally, a metaphor for the moment we’re in. A system that talks the language of access and inclusion, but in practice requires resilience, time and institutional fluency to get through - qualities more readily available to some than others.

So, if you’re tackling that dreaded portal and would welcome a bit of support, please do feel free to be in touch. I promise I can offer more than simply helping to fill in boxes with stats and words, by getting alongside your creative project and bringing a producer’s perspective that can help shape, challenge and progress something important, and so support access to great art for communities, artists and audiences who genuinely need and deserve that encounter. I hope to hear from you.

Until next time.