Indicators of arts education

The arts form an integral part of human education. Arts education contributes to the development of the individual's expressive needs and interests. It serves to pass on cultural and aesthetic practices and enables active participation in the cultural life of society. Over the last years, the demand for data has been growing, and in 2012, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), together with the Standing Conference of the Lander Ministers of Education (KMK), commissioned the German national report on education with a specific focus on "cultural and aesthetic education over the life-span". The present contribution defines the scope of this thematic focus and presents an overview of available data sources for its operationalization. It describes the process of structuring the domain, the construction of statistics and indicators, and outlines ways for further improving the monitoring of arts education in Germany.