Arts and Cultural Education in Iceland : Professor Anne Bamford

The conclusions from this report indicate that funding for arts and culture in Iceland has
increased considerably during the last 10 years at both the state and municipality levels.
There is a co-operative agreement between the Ministries of Industry, the Ministry of
Education and the various areas of Iceland (West, North, East, etc.) that focuses on children and
youth. The agreement brings money from the state that is then distributed locally on various
cultural and artistic projects. There is some concern that this money tends to be distributed in
small amounts and over a short period of time, making substantial, long-term efforts in arts
education more difficult, as this comment suggests:
The government give one lump of money to the west and then they think “we have got it covered”. When
the money is distributed, they give too little money to too many people. Everyone only gets a little bit. They
change their focus every 6 months and then you have to change what you do to suit the themes where they
are giving money. It would be much better if they made longer term deals. Say for three years. Sometimes it
takes longer to get the money than to actually do something with the money. It takes a long time to do all
the paperwork. They want to see that it is value for money. We need to clarify and outline the
responsibilities of the state on the one hand and the city councils.
Another comment from the creative industries sector was concerned that in difficult
financial times there may be less discretionary money available:
Some money is labelled and some is not. It is a bit of a tension. The tighter the laws and regulations the less
experimental we can be. Discretionary funding via a facilitator or mediator might be a good approach.
Currently, cultural production is largely financed by the individual. This leads to more co-operation and local
level support. But the problem is it is not systematic. There is not any local cultural plan and there is no
marketing.
Despite these concerns, there was general agreement that in the current situation funding
for the arts was quite good. It was also acknowledged that it was not just government
expenditure, but rather private and public funding that should support arts and culture, as this
quote suggests, “Icelanders don't demand that the government pay everything; access is
important, be it can be provided by the government or the private sector.”
There was though, a real fear that the economic crisis would adversely impact on people’s
ability to support arts education. Many comments echoed the concerns such as the ones
expressed below:
At the moment, everything is fine; however, uncertainty looms, due to the economic situation.
We have not felt the impact of reduced funding yet, but I think it will affect the amount of trips we can do.
Buses are very expensive so I think we will have to cut down on that. But I will try to make sure that teachers
have anything they need to do good learning and teaching. I won’t cut down on that.
We have not noticed a decrease in the number of pupils in our music school since the financial crisis. I am
worried though. More are moving to just doing 30 minutes per week instead of one hour. Also there has
been a more than 20% increase in people paying with credit cards.
We have had a 12% cut in funding and if you have less money, well? We’ll find a way. We will make sure we
protect the standard of what we do. But even a loss of 30 minutes will affect standards. The local council
assumes we can adopt a business model. But this is education.
The budget will need to be reviewed. It has stayed the same for the past year but I feel it is going to have to
go down and there has been a lot of inflation over the past few months. However there has been no change
in the pupils dropping out and we are still having the same number of pupils as we used to have but we do
not know what the situation will be like in the future.
Other respondents took a more positive position suggesting that Icelandic society would
continue to support the arts and that the challenging economic climate might actually assist to
refocus the arts, as is indicated in the following comments:
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