The Freelands Foundation has unveiled a new £1.5 million awards programme aimed at one of the most overlooked areas of the UK’s cultural landscape: visual art education. Launched this week, the Freelands Awards mark a decisive shift in focus for the Foundation, placing galleries, museums and visual arts organisations at the centre of a national conversation about how art is taught, shared and sustained.
Over the next five years, three organisations will be recognised annually, each receiving £100,000 in unrestricted funding for recent or ongoing projects that demonstrate ambitious, forward-thinking approaches to art education and a clear public impact.
Over the past decade, the Freelands Foundation has watched how visual arts organisations have increasingly stepped in where formal education structures have faltered. As public funding has shrunk and operational pressures mounted, galleries and museums have become vital sites of lifelong learning—spaces where education is not only delivered, but constantly reimagined. The Awards are designed to acknowledge that work, and to bring it into sharper public view.
Rather than prescribing a single model of best practice, the scheme recognises the diversity of approaches already in play. Across the UK, visual arts organisations are developing programmes that reflect the communities they serve—intergenerational, socially embedded, experimental, and often operating beyond the classroom. The Freelands Awards aim to celebrate this breadth, at a moment when such activity is too often undervalued.
Eligible organisations must be UK-based charities with a consistent public programme of visual art. An independent judging panel, chaired by Freelands Foundation Director Dr Henry Ward, will review submissions before visiting a shortlist of organisations later in the year. The panel brings together a mix of artistic, curatorial and educational expertise: artist Joy Gregory; broadcaster and writer Gemma Cairney; curator and writer Jenni Lomax; and art historian and educator Dr Ben Street.
Beyond the financial support, each recipient will work with the Foundation to produce a short case study film documenting their education work. These films will form part of a growing resource intended to inform, inspire and challenge others working across the sector.
Dr Henry Ward describes the Awards as a response to both urgency and opportunity. While investment in art education has declined sharply over the past 15 years, he argues that this has not diminished the quality or ambition of the work being done. “There are still outstanding programmes happening across the country,” he notes, “and we want to champion them properly and publicly.”
Artist Joy Gregory, who joins the panel as a judge for the 2026 Awards, brings a long-standing commitment to education shaped by decades of teaching alongside her artistic practice. For Gregory, education is less about transmission than exchange, an ongoing conversation across generations and contexts. Having been the final recipient of the Foundation’s previous award scheme, she now returns in a different role, keen to see how organisations are responding creatively to today’s challenges. “It is more important than ever,” she says, “that art education is supported not just in schools, but across the wider cultural ecosystem.”
The open call for submissions for the 2026 Awards opens on 26 January and closes on 24 March, with the first cohort of winners to be announced in November. The new Awards replace the Foundation’s earlier annual programme, which between 2016 and 2023 supported exhibitions of new work by mid-career women artists. That scheme concluded with Joy Gregory’s exhibition Catching Flies with Honey, currently on view at Whitechapel Gallery until 1 March.
The Freelands Foundation’s broader mission remains unchanged: to champion art education, argue for its intrinsic value, and promote the central role of making. Through grants, fellowships, research and public programming based at its Errol Street home in London and online, the Foundation continues to position education not as a secondary function of the arts, but as one of its most urgent and generative forces.
Winners will be announced at an awards event in London this November.
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