"Get a real job!" on Arts and Education

For my main hustle, I work in youth theatre. I love my job and I am passionate about bringing creative opportunities to people who might not otherwise have access to them. Back in May, as part of my role as Education Lead at a youth arts charity, I attended a conference about arts in education and, yes, as you can probably imagine, it was the classic echo chamber: a room full of people passionately agreeing with each other about the slow collapse of the education system while collectively trying not to spiral.

However, the conversations felt especially poignant. Maybe because of the local elections being around the corner. Maybe because of the general political mood in this country right now. Or maybe because I am currently in that very specific mid-(late to some)-twenties state of constantly asking myself: what the hell am I actually doing with my life?

The older I get, the more I realise how many people were never encouraged to imagine themselves as artists. In my line of work, we talk constantly about the decline of the arts in schools, but what we are really talking about is an erosion of possibility.

Who gets to imagine themself as an artist?

In the UK, entries to creative GCSE subjects like drama, music and design have fallen dramatically over the last decade, with schools increasingly prioritising subjects tied to the EBacc system (recently binned, yay!) and measurable economic outcomes. Arts teachers and advocates have been warning about this for years, but there is still this strange tendency to talk about creative subjects as though they are optional little extras rather than fundamental parts of how people learn to understand themselves and each other.

The refusal to properly teach the arts means entire generations will grow up believing creativity is not for them, or worse, believing they themselves are not creative. Which is ridiculous because everyone can be creative. Yes, even you, even if you think you can't. Creativity just doesn’t always look the same, and that is one of the first things you learn when you are given the opportunity to engage with the arts. It teaches you there is no right way to think, make or express yourself.

A family member of mine trained to become a dance teacher. She loves to dance and wanted a career in education. She started teaching at her old secondary school, then the school became an academy specialising in STEM subjects. Funding priorities shifted and now she teaches English and occasionally Dance. She is a great teacher, her care for the students is unmatched and her passion for creative subjects is evidenced through her continued commitment to making sure her students have opportunities to be creative through attending dance competitions, running after school clubs and being one of the leading members of staff on the school musical.

These are all things she chooses to do above and beyond her paid role. Which is commendable, but there is a big difference between teaching something you care about and teaching something because the system decided your passion was no longer economically viable.

And I think young people can feel that.

Schools have increasingly become places where success is defined almost entirely through productivity and employability. But what happens if you cannot sit still in an exam hall? What happens if you find it difficult to translate a written word into a thought process? And to be honest, what happens if you're the kind of person that needs to find out instead of being told in order to learn?

I think about this all the time because I am that person. Firstly, I hate being told what to do. Secondly, I have never been able to learn from a textbook. I was never particularly good at being the “right” kind of student. Don’t get me wrong, I love learning, and I got good grades, but the traditional school environment was not built for opinionated, active learners like me.

Drama classes were different. It was one of the only places where I felt allowed to take risks and get things wrong without shame attached to it. I didn't have to scribble out my mistakes and look at the mess on the page, I could just shake it off, learn something and try again.

The ability to fail, and try again, is an important lesson that young people should be learning.

I have run arts projects in schools where I have seen the teacher-defined “naughty, you won’t get them to participate” kid turn into the star of the show and the most capable learner of them all because the content was delivered differently. The arts in schools not only provide access to creativity but also open up new, and in some cases, better learning opportunities.

That said, access to the arts as a stand-alone concept is also important.

For me, working in an arts or social context is the only thing I have ever truly imagined myself doing. Yet I was always discouraged from pursuing it. I was actively disallowed from taking Drama or Art GCSEs by both my parents and teachers. The same thing happened again at A-Level until I eventually decided, as an incredibly stubborn seventeen-year-old, that I was going to retake sixth form to study drama regardless of what anyone said.

I grew up in a middle-class household with working-class values. My dad in particular was part of that generation who experienced upward social mobility at a time when a house deposit cost what now feels like the price of a particularly expensive wellness retreat in Bali.

A lot of families around me had similar stories. I grew up on the London-Surrey border and spent time around people from extremely affluent places like Epsom while also being surrounded by people deeply anxious about money, respectability and maintaining stability. It created this strange contradiction where the arts were encouraged as enrichment, but never really as a future.

Don’t get me wrong, I am so lucky. I did school plays. I attended youth drama groups and I went to the theatre. But still I was constantly told this was not a real career.

“You’re smart, don’t waste it.”

I think adults forget how devastating comments like that can feel to a teenager. Because what young people actually hear is: you are not good enough to make this work. I even had a teacher tell me not to bother taking Drama A-Level because “that’s not the life you want.” Which is funny considering it absolutely was then and, guess what Miss, it still is now.

This is why I found the Arts and Mind conference discussion so interesting. It left me thinking about my own experience with arts in education, from being a student to now being an advocate. Had my teachers supported me in my passion, helped me to imagine a future where art or creativity could be a career, instead of me discovering these pathways at university, what would my practice look like now?

I am happy with where I am at and what I am doing. I love my work and all my projects. But I’d be lying if I said I never imagined a reconstructed future where that support had been given.

Which brings us back to the question: who is allowed to imagine themself as an artist?

If a privately educated upper-class person wants to commit themself to studying art and dreams of being an artist, it is considered cultured and impressive. But if you want to pick up a paintbrush in a state school classroom and declare this is your future, suddenly everybody acts like you have announced that you want to live in a fairytale.

So, the gap widens. And widens. And widens. Until eventually the gap becomes a hole that people cannot climb out of.

Middle and upper-class young people continue accessing theatre, galleries, music lessons and creative confidence, while working-class young people are increasingly pushed toward practicality and survival. If only certain people can afford to make art, eventually art stops reflecting most people’s lives. And that just seems like it's beside the point. Art is a documentation of our times, right?

What happens when there are no opportunities for young people to imagine lives outside the ones they were handed? 

Despite the barriers, the funding cuts and the constant pressure to justify creative work through employability statistics, young people still continue creating things out of absolutely nothing. 

Reading "Dance Your Way Home" by one of my favourite authors, social commentators and youth workers, Emma Warren, made me think about this because it speaks so beautifully about collective creative spaces as forms of social infrastructure. Youth clubs, community centres, grassroots music spaces, amateur theatre groups. They are places where people learn how to belong to one another. And they are important, especially now. What’s scary is that these spaces are also disappearing, due to the financial strain on the sector, in the same way arts subjects are disappearing from state schools.

This conversation cannot really be separated from the wider political climate we are living through. Education is increasingly framed as something that should primarily serve the economy rather than develop human beings. Citizenship and socially engaged learning practically disappear by KS4 and suddenly everything becomes about employability and measurable output. The language around education has become transactional. The result is not only a narrowing of the curriculum, but a narrowing of what young people are encouraged to imagine for themselves.

At the Arts and Mind conference, a member of the education policy board said something that has stayed with me:

“We are breeding a generation of teachers who do not value the arts, and therefore we are building a future where the arts are not valued.”

The more I think about that comment, the more I return to the question of imagination. Not simply who gets access to creativity, but who gets encouraged to see creativity as something that belongs to them.

I think it is important to end by saying that I do understand the importance of making money in today’s society. We live in a world where you literally cannot survive without it. In London, you can barely travel from one side of the city to the other without checking your bank balance first. I understand why parents and teachers want stability for young people. I understand why schools push employability. I understand why so many people are frightened of precarious careers because, honestly, I’m in the midst of one and it can feel scary and stressful.

I do not think the answer is that everybody should be forced to study creative subjects, a whole chunk of this essay is about people having different learning styles and interests, but I do think everyone should have the chance to imagine themselves in the creative space if they want to. 

Access to the arts should be easier, and creative work should hold more value at every level, because at the moment, too many voices are locked out of creativity before they have even had the chance to speak.