The next Arts Council National Portfolio
What will it take to be funded from 2028?
By Jo Cox-Brown
Arts Council England has published the guidance for its next National Portfolio Investment Programme — five years of funding, from April 2028 to March 2033.
Arts organisations, museums & libraries can apply for at least £50,000 a year for five years. Applications open on 20 October 2026 & close on 15 December 2026. Decisions will be announced in July 2027.
For organisations that have spent years moving from one project grant to the next, National Portfolio status can feel transformational. It provides something that is painfully scarce across the cultural sector: the ability to plan beyond the next production, exhibition, festival or funding deadline. It can create the stability to retain people, develop audiences, build partnerships & invest in the organisation itself.
But this isn't simply a larger Project Grant.
The timeline
Applications open
20 Oct 2026
The window for the 2028–33 portfolio begins.
Applications close
15 Dec 2026
Less than eight weeks to submit.
Decisions
July 2027
Outcomes announced by Arts Council England.
Investment period
2028–33
April 2028 to March 2033, from £50,000 a year.
The wrong question
Not only the project.
The question isn't only whether an organisation has a good project.
The real question
The whole organisation.
It is whether Arts Council England should invest in that organisation as part of England's cultural infrastructure for the next five years. That distinction must shape every application.
What happened in the last round?
Demand far outstripped the budget, and the portfolio that emerged looked very different from the one before it.
Applications
Seeking just over £2bn, against a budget of approximately £1.34bn.
Organisations funded
Initially receiving £446m a year. Following subsequent changes, the current portfolio comprises 985 organisations receiving around £445m annually.
New entrants
Receiving more than £64m a year between them.
Extended
The current programme has been extended to March 2028.
The scale of the change mattered. The resulting portfolio included large national institutions, established producing companies, museums, libraries, festivals, galleries & arts centres, but also a much wider range of smaller & locally rooted organisations.
The Postal Museum, Midlands Arts Centre & Ledbury Poetry Festival sat within the same national portfolio as household-name institutions. Grassroots music venues entered the portfolio. In Stoke-on-Trent, organisations including Portland Inn Project & Claybody Theatre gained the stability to deepen work rooted in their communities.
Portland Inn Project, an artist-led organisation developing a community space in an area of Hanley, reportedly received £94,000 a year. Its inclusion showed that national significance doesn't have to mean national scale. Work can matter nationally because of the depth, quality & relevance of what it achieves in one place.
The last round also pursued a deliberate redistribution of funding. More investment moved outside London & into places with historically lower levels of cultural funding. That created meaningful opportunities, but it also produced difficult & sometimes damaging losses for established organisations. The lesson wasn't that history or artistic reputation no longer mattered. It was that neither was enough on its own.
Arts Council England was building a portfolio, not simply ranking individual applications from best to worst. Geography, artform, communities served, organisational diversity, scale, risk & the balance of the whole portfolio affected final decisions. That will be just as important this time.
What has changed for 2028–33?
A longer portfolio, a new strategic framework, a simpler application — and a higher bar for every claim.
Five years rather than three
The new portfolio will run for five years rather than three. This offers greater stability, but it also asks Arts Council England to make a much longer judgement about each organisation's relevance, resilience & ability to deliver.
A new Strategic Framework
The programme sits beneath ACE's new Strategic Framework, which replaces Let's Create as the immediate basis for decision-making. Its three objectives are:
Objective one
Support excellence
Objective two
Deliver for everybody
Objective three
Reach everywhere
For this investment round, ACE has identified two particular priorities:
A simpler application — but not a lower bar
The application process has been simplified following sustained criticism of the bureaucracy involved in the previous round. ACE says it will ask less of applicants & allow organisations to describe their ambitions in their own words. The application focuses on the organisation & its purpose, governance, experience of delivering excellent activity, financial & management position, and an outline of the work proposed during the investment period.
There will be no attachments or detailed delivery plan at the initial application stage. That may mean less paperwork, but it doesn't mean a lower evidential bar. In fact, when there are fewer documents & fewer words, every claim has to work harder.
Planning figures, and demand that will exceed supply
Current National Portfolio Organisations will receive a planning figure based on their present investment, including the recent uplift. They can request more, but the core proposal must be viable without relying on an increase. New applicants can apply for a minimum of £50,000 a year. There is no published maximum.
Demand will exceed the money available. In the previous round, applications exceeded the budget by hundreds of millions of pounds. A fundable application can therefore still be unsuccessful if it doesn't contribute strongly enough to the balance ACE is trying to create.
What is likely to be funded this time?
Nobody outside the decision-making process can produce a reliable list of winners. We can, however, read the direction of travel.
01
Excellence that matters to people & places
Strong applications are likely to come from organisations that can demonstrate excellent cultural work & explain why that excellence matters to the people & places they serve. ACE's emphasis on access doesn't replace artistic or cultural quality. The strongest proposals will make quality & public value inseparable.
02
Real, evidenced local relevance
Organisations based in Culture Priority Places, or delivering sustained work with communities in places that have received less investment, will be well positioned if their local relevance is real & evidenced. A postcode alone won't make a compelling case. Applicants will need to show knowledge of the place, trusted relationships, demand for the work & a credible role within the local cultural ecosystem.
03
Work with children & young people
Work with children & young people will be prominent. That doesn't mean adding a youth workshop to an existing programme shortly before submission. ACE is likely to distinguish between activity designed with young people, supported by appropriate partnerships & skilled delivery, and activity added because the guidance makes young people a priority.
04
Removing practical barriers to participation
Cost, transport, disability access, confidence, geography, representation & the absence of local provision all affect who gets to take part. Applicants who understand those barriers & have designed realistic responses will be stronger than those relying on broad statements about inclusivity.
05
Smaller & grassroots organisations
Smaller organisations, grassroots organisations & organisations led by people who have historically been underrepresented in cultural funding may have important opportunities. The previous round proved that an organisation doesn't need to be large to make a nationally relevant contribution.
It does, however, need the governance, financial controls, leadership capacity & evidence required to manage sustained public investment.
06
Sector-support organisations
Sector-support organisations can apply too, now within the same National Portfolio framework rather than through the former Investment Principles Support Organisation category. Their case will need to demonstrate what changes because of their work, who benefits & why their intervention is necessary over five years.
07
Organisational resilience
We should also expect scrutiny of organisational resilience. Five-year funding isn't a rescue package for an organisation without a viable operating model. ACE will want confidence that applicants understand their costs, workforce, risks, income assumptions & capacity.
Organisations need ambition, but the budget & management plan must show that the ambition can survive contact with reality.
What makes a good National Portfolio application?
A good application begins with a clear organisational proposition.
It must be specific about excellence. Awards, reviews & prestigious partners can help, but excellence is broader than reputation. It might be artistic quality, curatorial expertise, outstanding participatory practice, the development of new talent, stewardship of collections, innovation within an artform or the depth of an organisation's relationship with its community. The application needs evidence, not adjectives.
It must understand its audiences. That means more than reporting a total attendance figure. Applicants should know who engages, who doesn't, where people come from, what prevents participation, how audiences have changed & what the organisation has learned. Quantitative data matters, but so do consultation, participant experience, partner insight & evidence that communities influence decisions.
It must connect the programme to the organisation's purpose. A collection of attractive projects won't necessarily create a persuasive five-year case. Assessors need to see a coherent direction, with activity, workforce, partnerships, audiences, finances & impact all pointing towards the same ambition.
It must be honest about capacity. A credible application doesn't pretend there are no risks. It shows that the board & leadership understand them, have made choices & know what they will do if income, costs, staffing or demand change.
Above all, it must read like the organisation itself. Simplified questions create an opportunity to write with clarity, conviction & character. Applications weakened by generic funding language will struggle to stand out in a highly competitive field.
What planning should organisations be doing now?
The application may be shorter, but the thinking behind it cannot be rushed between 20 October & 15 December.
Organisations should be testing their five-year proposition now. That means reviewing mission, programme, audiences, geography, partnerships, workforce & financial model together, rather than asking one person to turn existing plans into an Arts Council answer at the last minute.
Involve the board early
Governance shouldn't appear in an application as a list of trustee names. Applicants should be able to show appropriate oversight, relevant skills, sound decision-making, financial scrutiny, risk management & a meaningful relationship between the board and the communities the organisation exists to serve.
Plan beyond one optimistic budget
Organisations should understand the minimum viable version of their plan, the assumptions behind earned & contributed income, the true cost of delivering access, realistic pay & freelance rates, inflation, reserves, cash flow & what happens if other income isn't secured.
Build the evidence base first
Audience data, evaluation, artistic outcomes, local needs, partnership results, workforce information, financial performance & examples of learning should all be reviewed before the writing begins. The aim isn't to include everything. It is to identify the evidence that most clearly proves the case.
Start partnership conversations
A long list of logos isn't a partnership strategy. Strong applications will show what each relationship contributes, what has already been agreed & how the partners collectively reach people or places that the applicant couldn't reach alone.
Make a contingency plan
ACE is explicitly warning organisations to prepare for an unsuccessful decision. Responsible planning means pursuing National Portfolio investment with confidence while understanding how the organisation will respond if it isn't selected.
National Portfolio applications are won or lost long before the final words are entered into the portal.
An organisational strategy, not just a funding form
Don't ask what the Arts Council wants to hear. Ask what you're here to change — and prove it.
At NTES, we help cultural organisations turn ambitious work into a clear, evidence-led & financially credible case for investment. We can support the strategic thinking, research, partnership development, programme design, budgets & application writing needed to bring the whole case together.
The application window is short. The planning period needs to begin now — if you need help with that, do reach out.
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