Once you've hit the bottom, the only way is up. Not so long ago the arts seemed all but dead and buried in schools. Years of back-to-basics literacy and numeracy strategies - reinforced by Sats testing - had reduced arts education to little more than a once a week, afternoon sleepy hour in most primary schools, and the average spend per pupil per year on arts resources wouldn't have run to a Big Mac. But now there are a few more signs of life. Spending is up - a little - and schools have started to treat the subject a tad more seriously. The arts are bouncing back. But no one is getting too excited. Arts professionals are waiting to see whether it's a dead cat bounce.  Five years ago, the Clore Duffield Foundation, an arts charity, launched Artworks as a response to the marginalisation of the arts in schools. It stemmed from the belief that art was far more than getting kids to make a few desultory daubs on a crumpled piece of paper, to keep them occupied when they finished their classwork early. Rather, it was as much a basic skill as literacy and numeracy, which, when taught well, offered an effective medium to explore not just other areas of the curriculum, but life experiences and the outside world.  It was hard to find many people who disagreed with this message. But equally, it was hard to find many people in education who were prepared to put the ideas into practice. The early Artworks reports reflected this split, with research indicating just how badly resourced the arts were in school and how urgently a rethink was needed into both the environments and ways in which they were taught.  The 2004 Artworks report, published this week, looks at the progress over the past five years. There is some good news: the arts are, generally speaking, better resourced, and many more primary schools have a dedicated arts coordinator. But that's about as far as the good news goes. For what the report reveals is the huge divide between the haves and the have-nots.  The minimum and maximum spend per pupil ranges from 15p to £30 in primary schools, and from £1 to £130 in secondary schools. Even within local education authorities there are huge discrepancies: in one LEA, spending per secondary pupil varied from 99p to £9.56. But more primary schools are reporting a decrease in their art and design budgets, compared with three years ago, while at secondary school those reporting an increase were mirrored by an almost identical number showing a fall.  "Good arts provision is now largely dependent on being in the right place," says Siobhan Edwards, Artworks research director. "There has been a great deal of government money going into initiatives such as education action zones, Creative Partnerships and specialist schools, and those schools that come within these 'golden circles' appear to be benefiting hugely. Conversely, the ones that fall outside tend to feel unloved and frequently neglect the arts."  No one is quite sure how to get round this one. The new buzz words within government are "cultural entitlement", which loosely translates to equal access to the arts for everyone, but, as Edwards points out, "achieving this is prohibitively expensive". Creative Partnerships is a case in point. It was launched two years ago, amid much razzmatazz and £40m of public money, in 16 deprived areas, to develop long-term partnerships between schools and cultural and creative organisations and artists. Since then, the pilot scheme has been extended by a further nine areas with another 10 due to come on stream within the next year.  A great deal of good work has emerged from all this, but even so there is dissatisfaction with Creative Partnerships. The visual arts feel they have lost out to the performing arts, which are an easier medium in which to work with large groups of people - and, with only 381 schools having benefited as of May this year, that the scheme has cost too much money to reach too few people. Its national director, Peter Jenkinson, resigned unexpectedly this year and, with no successor having been apppointed, it appears rather directionless. The government has indicated it has no plans to continue funding it beyond 2006.  There is a shared belief in the arts education world that the government has at least tried to redress the balance in primary schools. "The government has introduced some great initiatives for music and the arts," says Paul Brennan, chairman of the Association of Advisers in Art and Design. "However, too often they seem to be in competition with other agendas, rather than working with them. There's no point learning to read and write if you've got nothing to read and write about."  Here, though, the finger can be pointed towards the government, as the slavish adherence to league tables ensures schools will always prioritise the narrow curriculum of the core subjects tested in Sats, to the exclusion of all else. "Art has dropped off the agenda almost entirely," Brennan continues. "It's quite a depressing picture, especially when there are so many other positive things going in schools at the moment. We don't even know just how bad the picture is because art provision is no longer inspected either at local or national level."  The funding squeeze most schools have felt in the past two years hasn't helped matters. When resources are tight, schools are inevitably going to direct what they have towards those areas on which they are going to be judged. So once again, the arts slip through the net. "This is especially true of continuing professional develop ment," says Edwards. "What money there is will go to the core subjects. But many teachers in primary school would really benefit from the help; during their year's PGCE training they are unlikely to have spent more than 12 hours learning how to teach art. So it must be really scary doing it for the first time, and there must be a temptation always to cut lessons short or play safe."  Not that creativity is about to slip off the agenda, when the creative industries are worth £118bn a year and are growing four times faster - and producing more jobs - than the rest of the economy. Indeed, many in education believe it is this bottom line that is driving many of the government's arts and creativity initiatives and some believe it needs to think a little harder about what it is trying to achieve.  "If we're really looking at the arts as some form of vocational training, then we're concentrating on the wrong areas," says John Steers, general secretary of the National Society for Education in Art and Design. "There are plenty of job opportunities in web and graphic design, but these subjects are not reflected in the arts curriculum. In fact, schools have been slow to harness the art and design curriculum to ICT.  "If we believe in creativity as an end in itself, how far are we prepared to go to pursue it? Most lessons are fairly linear, with set learning objectives, but a creative approach would demand something more open-ended, with children free to ask questions and to pursue their own lines of enquiry."  What Steers and many others think is required is a demystification of the process. Creativity isn't something that happens in a vacuum in art lessons: it's an approach, an attitude, that should feed across all subjects. Paul Abbott, a design and technology teacher for more than 20 years, argues that science, engineering and technology demand as much creativity as the arts. "If you want to understand why so few young people want to study science, then you have to look at the way it's taught," he says. "The curriculum stresses the factual and makes it dull."  Abbott has taken matters in his own hands and, with a £2m grant from the north-west development agency, is opening the Bolton Technical Innovation Centre (TIC) this September. TIC will be open to all pupils in Bolton and its remit is to enthuse children for the sciences by giving them an opportunity to apply the knowledge they've learnt, using the latest technology. "We want to instil a sense of wonder and mystery," Abbott insists.  There are strong arguments for taking this method a step further, as the advantages of a cross-curricular approach are well known. Anecdotal evidence suggests that overall attainment levels have gone up in those areas where there has been a large cultural investment.  Gateshead has been on the right end of more lottery money than any other area outside London, and the community is alive with new buildings and structures, such as the Baltic, the Millennium bridge, the Angel of the North and the Sage. In 1997, the year before the Angel of the North went up, the percentage of 16-year-olds achieving five or more A*-C GCSEs was 39.2%; by 2003 that figure had leapt to 59.8%.  "The increase is unparalleled and is seen across all schools, not just a few," says Paul Collard, creative director of Culture10, the programme that took over from Newcastle's unsuccessful bid to be the European capital of culture. "You have to ask yourself what has happened to create such a dramatic change. Now, while Gateshead has worked hard to improve its educational services, the main change has been the investment in cultural initiatives. People have started to change the way they think about themselves: they feel Gateshead is a place to be proud of. When you raise people's aspirations, you also raise their performance."  Having won the race to be capital of culture 2008, Liverpool has seen a similar increase in school standards, but the bottom line is the arts are important in their own right, and not just for what they contribute elsewhere. For the converted, this is a statement of the obvious. But, for the rest, there will always be reservation, as there will always be parts of the subconscious that defy quantification. You can have all the initiatives, you can have all the Artsmark signs hanging in the school foyer, but if the imagination isn't there, you're lost. There's a fine line between a disciplined approach and trying to control and stifle creativity. Tread the wrong side and the cat gets it.  'All too often art is sidelined in schools ... but we mustn't give up' (Interview with Marc Quinn by John Crace)  'There has never been a better time to be an artist. The contemporary arts have become more mainstream and accessible, and people can now consider them as a serious career option. Sadly, though, all too often art is still sidelined in schools and children are being limited by the lack of opportunities. But we mustn't give up, and the piece that Artworks commissioned from me as a prize for the competition is intended to be an optimistic work showing that young talent can blossom from an unpromising environment.  For the past two years I've been delighted to support Artworks by inviting schoolchildren into my studio to create a piece of art, as it's more exciting for them to explore a professional artist's workspace than it would be if I were to go into their school to work with them. The children seem to respond in a more uninhibited manner when they're in the studio: it's as if they feel a sense of freedom when they leave the classroom. They no longer have to perform to a teacher's preconception of art.  In the first year I worked with a group of five-year olds. We traced around their silhouettes on to a large sheet of paper, and coloured all the figures in. The children then took the work back to hang in their school. This year, I was working with some much older kids and we created life casts of everyone's hands in different positions, and used the casts both to make individ ual pieces and an ensemble work.  These days are just as inspiring for me as they are for the children. It brings art back to its true basics, of making something just for the hell of it without having to think too deeply about what it all means. They also look around the studio and give me feedback on my own work, and it's really refreshing to get comments that are uncorrupted by ideas of intellectualism and professionalism.  It's also very important for me to hear what they have to say. I have always tried to create art that connects on all levels and to which everyone can respond in some way. So having the 11-year-olds as critics is a good test of whether something is working. And I do respond to what they say and the work we do together. The hand casts have fed back into my own work and have been the inspiration for some of my latest pieces.  If we want to encourage more kids into the arts, then we have to provide financial encouragement. This could be done quite easily by - as is the case in the US - giving private donors a tax break for giving works of art to a public gallery. Not only would this mean that British galleries had the same richness of art as US galleries, which would be an inspiration in itself to young people, but also public money that now gets spent on acquiring art for galleries could be diverted to arts education instead.'
To open a special issue on arts education, John Crace examines whether warm words from ministers about 'cultural entitlement' are being matched in reality. And, artist Marc Quinn, says children thrive in the art studio