ABSTRACT
In 2009 the Arts Council in the UK announced a new nationwide scheme for artistic assessment of regularly funded organisations, starting in 2010. They proposed to ask a range of informed people to view individual pieces of artistic activity (a show or an exhibition or a publication, for example) and write a report assessing the work's artistic achievement. To some commentators steeped in the technical issues of educational assessment this approach might seem to be rather subjective, lacking any robust basis for reliability and impartiality. It will be the argument of this chapter that such criticisms are misguided and that the underlying philosophical and theoretical principles of this sort of approach are entirely sound. Moreover, the same principles that apply to evaluation of artistic programmes can be applied to assessment in schools.
