I teach the value of reflexivity and awareness: what am I doing? What choices am I making? What am I taking for granted? Part of that process is the belief that sometimes you can only discover what you are doing when in the midst of doing it – the pattern, the rhythm, the game reveals itself only in the act of play.

I teach an awareness of impulse – that risk-taking, improvisation and play are key to creative problem-solving; I encourage students to be boring and obvious in the hope of giving even small ideas the chance to breathe and develop; I tell them that waiting for the Big Idea to appear, fully-formed, is nearly always disastrous. (I also tell them to stop acting, and not to entertain me.)

I preach that the creative process involves trial and error, and try to show that I mean it in my own process. And that sometimes your errors will end up as the best parts of your work.

I teach that analytical, theoretical or critical approaches can also be used as creative strategies – for example, that Elinor Fuch’s Visit to a Small Planet is an exercise for describing the world of a play and a model for creating the world of a play.

Part of the value of this process is watching and waiting for the moment when a particular system falls down: what isn’t being accounted for? What does this practice do that the theory doesn’t anticipate or can’t describe? Where does the promise of theory overshoot the restraints of politics, economics, the body? What can we invent in its place?

I teach through studying example: we watch other people’s work and try to discover why those decisions were made then, and how that relationship between form and content came into being. I tell students to watch professional practice and think about what they’d do differently, and what they’ll steal and re-format for use in their own work.

I teach – deliberately – through exercises and games which parallel that work, but don’t try to replicate it in the classroom or workshop. I’ll revisit other people’s choices and solutions but I won’t attempt to mimic them. I assume that there’s always something else to learn, another set of tricks to borrow, unearth, translate.

I ask myself, continually, how can I use this? Where might it fit?

First, there’s the repeated suggestion of “confusion and duplication,” a “blizzard of initiatives” that represent wasteful effort. Vaizey doesn’t actually provide any real support for that claim, but it’s the rhetorical basis for the call to spend arts funding more “efficiently and effectively.”

The big challenge I am putting to the whole cultural education world here – all of you in this room, and many more who are not, is this: I am asking you to have honest discussions about what in each of your areas really works and is worth enhancing, prioritising or replicating; and what could either done more effectively or efficiently by another organisation… or even not at all.

Perhaps reasonable enough, but it’s hard to work out what role “honest discussions” between independent practitioners and groups might take when Vaizey is clearly advocating a policy of heavy centralisation:

There is a clear role for central government here to act as a co-ordinator, resource, and funding organisation for these plans and strategies.

and

I am open to the idea of, at a national level, merging some of the plethora of cultural education initiatives and quangos into one coherent, national, agenda-setting funding body.

There’s no suggestion why a single, centralised national body should (miraculously) be less subject to bloat and over-administration, or what particular insight it might offer at a local level. More worryingly, there’s no recognition of existing national initiatives and frameworks: it’s also a speech given by a man who doesn’t actually seem to understand the reasons why – over a number of years – determined attempts have been made to decentralise control of cultural initiatives.

All of which leads to this confusing moment:

The cultural education sector is increasingly diverse and at grass roots level consists of thousands of statutory and non-statutory organisations offering all kinds of engagement with all kinds of culture. The key challenge for central government is to balance the enthusiasm and local nature of this bottom up activity with an overarching national strategy to ensure a much more coherent local offer.

There’s a genuine contradiction here – the praise of local diversity, followed by the declaration that we’re going to somehow improve that diversity by subsuming it to a national strategy. How are we to understand the relationship between diversity and “coherence”?

If the cultural life of this country is at the grass roots level, why is there a need for an overarching national agenda beyond those already in place? Is this about anything other than rationalising cuts to funding? If so, what might be on that agenda? Vaizey doesn’t seem to be able or willing to say.

As such, it’s hard not to read Vaizey’s stated support for “art for art’s sake” through the lens of this line:

We’re going to have to increasingly put a financial price on things in the year ahead.

Those working in the culture industries are already excruciatingly aware of the price of things: a call for any greater focus can only mean one thing. Prepare for cuts.