Beyond standardisation, subjects and syllabi: How primary schools organise for arts richness in an era of curriculum reform

Abstract As England embarks on its first comprehensive curriculum review in fifteen years, this paper offers critical insights from schools that sustained arts‐rich provision despite a policy landscape hostile to creative subjects. Drawing on data from the Researching Arts‐rich Primary Schools (RAPS) project—a mixed‐methods study of 76 arts‐rich primary schools in England—we analyse how these schools organise themselves to maintain robust arts provision. Using an organisational practices framework encompassing spatial, temporal, cultural, structural, communication and social practices, we show that arts‐richness is not simply about what schools teach, but also about how they organise time, space, relationships and resources. Our analysis demonstrates that successful arts provision requires reimagining the school as a ‘design’ that constantly adapts familiar organisational elements. These findings have implications for the current curriculum review in England and for international readers grappling with similar tensions between standardisation and arts education. The paper concludes that any curriculum reform must attend to organisational conditions, not merely curriculum content, if arts education is to be genuinely accessible to all children.