If politicians are serious about rebuilding our communities, they need to recognise that art and creativity are not the finishing touches. They are part of the foundations.

Andy Burnham recently said that culture is too often dismissed as a distraction, a “nice to have”. Yet, as he put it, “it’s about making sense of your own reality”.

Culture is not something we add once the work of rebuilding communities has been done. Culture is part of how we rebuild them. It creates places where people meet, gives them agency, opens doors into careers they might otherwise never have imagined, brings life back to empty buildings and struggling high streets, and gives communities the opportunity to tell their stories.

But we have been steadily stripping away the infrastructure of arts education that makes this possible.

New horizons … an Artist Lab walk and talk organised by Signal. Photograph: Courtesy of Signal

In schools, provision for arts subjects has declined. The Cultural Learning Alliance reports a 42% fall in arts GCSE entries since 2010. At universities, art education has faced an increasing battle to justify its existence in relation to future economic validity. And in museums, learning teams are often the first to face cuts when funding is stretched.

The government’s curriculum review and renewed commitments to museum funding suggest an appetite to think differently. But if we are serious about changing the direction of travel, we should look beyond policies to the organisations already doing the work.

The new Freelands awards are one way of doing that, committing £1.5m over five years to recognising progressive visual art education across museums, galleries and arts organisations. It’s central to Freelands Foundation’s mission to champion art education.

Our first three winners, each of whom receive £100,000, demonstrate what is possible.

In Barrow-in-Furness, Signal has become an essential part of a community dominated by the shipyard and now building nuclear submarines, that is remote and culturally underserved. Their artist development programme gives local people the agency to respond to their surroundings and create opportunities for others. After years of occupying temporary spaces, Signal has transformed a vacant building in the town centre into a place with real community purpose.

More than one route into cultural life … Wolverhampton Art Gallery. Photograph: Tyler Whiting. Courtesy of Wolverhampton Art Gallery.

Burnham has ambitions to revitalise high streets and give communities back the spaces they value. Signal shows what that looks like. An empty building becomes a cultural space, which becomes a community asset, and this becomes part of the renewal of a town.

The programmes for young people at Wolverhampton Art Gallery demonstrate another essential principle: that there is more than one route into cultural life and creative employment. They’re giving opportunities to develop projects, build confidence and explore careers outside conventional academic pathways. If we are serious about widening access to the creative industries, we need programmes like these.

In rural North Devon, the Burton at Bideford has responded to a very practical problem. Teachers told the gallery that their schools could no longer afford trips. Their answer was the Burton Art Box: a converted horse box that takes art directly into primary schools. It is wonderfully simple. And it tells us something important: access to culture is not just about whether an institution exists. It is about whether people can get to it.

These organisations are working in places where opportunities to engage with art, develop creative skills or enter the cultural sector can be severely limited. They are not waiting for perfect conditions. They are finding imaginative ways around the barriers in front of them. We should be paying attention.

We need to rebuild the infrastructure of art education. That means schools, colleges, universities, museums, galleries, libraries, studios and community organisations. It means ensuring that the people of Barrow, Wolverhampton, North Devon and every other location across the UK have the opportunity to encounter and make art. We need an education that equips us not only to know things, but to imagine, question, collaborate, make and contribute. And we should put the organisations already embedded in our communities at the centre of that ambition.

Because if art really is about making sense of our own reality, then access to it cannot be a luxury reserved for those who happen to live in the right place, attend the right school or can afford to pay.

Culture is not what we can afford once everything else is fixed. It’s one of the things that will help us fix it.