Analysis: Leading questions for culture

It was the first of its kind in the UK - a programme for existing and emerging cultural leaders to build on their skills and abilities and help them become visionaries for the sector.

It's five years since the Clore Leadership Programme burst onto the landscape with the first round of Fellows, who spend one or two years on an intensive programme of tailored learning, including placements, residential tutoring and mentoring.

The Task Force that the Clore Duffield Foundation commissioned in 2002 to come up with a solution to the shortage of cultural leaders, defined leadership as the ability to conceive and articulate a direction and purpose, and to work with others to achieve that purpose in both benign and hostile circumstances.

The Task Force said the programme "would be judged by the efficiency of its implementation, the partnerships and participation it achieved, and the progress of Fellows. Above all it would be judged by its contribution to raising the confidence of the cultural sector and strengthening its leadership."

With more than 40 funding partners, including regional development agencies, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), the Clore programme has welcomed 157 fellows. It costs £55,000 for each Fellow to participate.

The funder contributes £35,000 of that sum and the remaining £20,000 comes either as a bursary from the funder to the Fellow if they have decided to take a career break or from the Clore Duffield Foundation to the employer as compensation for the period the Fellow is away. Out of the 157 participants to date, 49 people have got new jobs, nine of which were from the museum sector.

In 2008, an independent evaluation of the Clore programme found it was "causing a ripple in the jobs market". It concluded that employers feared the loss of an individual who makes an important contribution to their organisation.

But Sue Hoyle, the director of the programme, said it can also be beneficial, by allowing someone else to take on new responsibilities within an organisation and learn from the returning Fellow. The evaluation also indicated that the Clore programme was creating competition with other initiatives being launched.

The Cultural Leadership Programme (CLP) is government funded and a partner and funder of the Clore programme. It was set up in 2006 as a response to a lack of investment in training and development of cultural leaders. Arts Council England, Creative & Cultural Skills and the MLA take the programme forward under the umbrella of the Cultural Leadership Delivery Partnership.

The CLP funds Clore's short courses and its Board Development Programmes. One of CLP's major programmes is work-based opportunities under which sits Peach Placements. This allows applicants to spend up to a year in a leadership role in a different organisation to their own.

Munira Mirza, the Mayor's adviser on culture, spent her placement at Tate National with its director Caroline Collier to develop training and volunteering policies; and Diane Spiegelberg worked with Sandy Nairne, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, on a 2012 Cultural Olympiad project.

The work-based opportunities strand accounts for 5 per cent of participants on the CLP. Some 29 per cent of participants are involved in the governance strand, which is to become an increasing focus in 2010.

David Kershaw, the chairman of CLP, has said that the biggest challenge for cultural boards is to balance looking after the accounts and taking risks. "It would be a hideous trap if you start saying 'because of financial risk and public funding I can't take creative risk'," he said.