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result of superior education or training or that the United Kingdom is short of “creative” workers bears no serious examination. Indeed the Gorham Report (Gorham and partners 1996) argues for an export push in part to mop up aboveaverage levels of unemployment in the sector. At the general level of education policy there is an argument that the shift to the service sector – and this is supported by detailed labour market analyses of which types of jobs requiring which skills are growing – has meant not the growth in the requirement for hightech skills, but for inter human munication and relational skills and analyses of information of the type a humanistic, rather than technical scientific, education provides. However, this is not an argument, as the arts college lobby is now trying to construct it, for an expansion of or for special support for arts education and training on the grounds that its products alone are “creative” (for an expansion of this argument, see Garnham 2020). Access, Excellence and Accountability Current creative industries policy is presented as a break with the past in two renaming of the Department of National Heritage as the Department for Culture, Media and Sport is intended, on the one hand, to signal a shift of focus away from support for the “traditional” high arts, with their association with the protection of the values of some golden age, towards the creatively new (often associated with young, trendy and “cool”). On the other hand, the idea is to signify a shift of focus from the marginality of the Ministry of Fun to a serious concern with the central business of economic policy – a shift from circuses to bread. Within this broad shift, the four key themes of creative industries policy are presented as “access”, “excellence”, “education” and “economic value”. In my view, in the pursuit of these aims the shift from cultural to creative industries marks a return to an artistcentred, supplyside cultural support policy and away from that policy direction, which the use of the term “cultural industries” originally signalled, that focused on distribution and consumption (Garnham 2020). It is for that very reason that the arts lobby favours it. The policy problems raised by this supplyside creative industries approach relate to deepseated arts policy dilemmas. Should support be focused on producers or consumers? Is there a restricted range of cultural forms or activities that merit public subsidy and, if so, why? This question of a hierarchy of cultural forms and practices that merit public support, and of judgements of quality, other than those of popularity, is hidden in current policy discourse under the notoriously fluid term “excellence”. The claim is made that current policy is focused on democratising culture by widening access or lowering barriers to the widest possible range of cultural experiences. And this widening of access applies not only to audiences, but also to the production side, thus allowing the maximum number of people to fulfil their creative potential. This is sometimes then linked to the human capital, international petitiveness argument. This pursuit of exce