 In the early days, before the 60s, there was very much a viewing and appreciation approach to the arts where students would go into an art gallery or they'd go and listen to an orchestra or a band. What's happening now is that the students are at the very centre of the art making process. So they're making films, they're making paintings, they're creating drama that they put on stage. And that's actually the centre of what the Australian curriculum's about. It's about putting young people at the centre of the making process. And I think that's a really strong part of what's changed over the years. We study the arts not to train a generation of artists, but to stimulate a way of being in the world, considering, reflecting, analysing, communicating. So there've been a lot of research before, but it tended to be small, it tended to be international rather than Australian. This study brought together a lot of elements that hadn't been studied before and turns out to be one of the largest and most comprehensive study into the arts ever conducted. Historically, arts has been pushed to the side in education when other things crowd in, when literacy and numeracy agendas become more important. But what this research shows is that's a bad choice and the arts should be at the centre of the curriculum because it has benefits across all areas of learning for students who are involved. And we found that students who more frequently participated in the arts, be it music, art, drama, dance, they were also tended to be more academically engaged, more academically motivated in other school subjects and also had higher self-esteem, higher life satisfaction and also a greater sense of meaning in life. It teaches students to think for themselves, to undertake their own research, to help them understand why they do things, how they do things and how that is communicated to a wide audience. If you ignore the arts, it's going to impact not only on arts learning, but it's going to impact on the possibilities for students to do well in all sorts of areas. What the research is showing is that students who do the arts can do really well in other areas as well because of that transfer of abilities. The arts and things like literacy and numeracy are not mutually exclusive and so the arts can not only sit comfortably alongside literacy and numeracy related activities, but also augment those activities. So my advice would be to schools to consider putting the arts really at the centre of the schooling experience, not at the periphery, and to think about how the arts can be strengthened in schools using what's available through the Australian curriculum. I think one of the strengths of a national curriculum is the universal provision of arts education that goes beyond home factors, that goes beyond community factors and allows all students, irrespective of background and irrespective of prior experience, to enjoy the benefits of studying the arts.