This month Professor Pat Thomson, CLA’s Senior Evidence Associate, reports on a study from the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge which examines creative subject choices and barriers to these at different ages and stages. The study has interesting correlations with CLA’s analysis of what we term the ‘Arts entitlement gap’ in our annual Report Cards.
Ilie, S., Burnard, P., and Marakaglou, K (2026) Creative subject choices: Student pathways through education into employment. Final report. University of Cambridge Faculty of Education.
The research tracks creative subject choices1 for more than 1.7 million English students from age 16 through further and higher education and into employment. The researchers show that around half of young people express a preference for creative subjects at age 14, but only one in twenty-five ends up working in a creative occupation by their early thirties.
The researchers demonstrate that economic disadvantage is the most consistent barrier, but it operates in a counterintuitive way. FSM-eligible students are slightly more likely than their peers to make a creative subject choice at 16, but that pattern flips sharply at the post-16 transition and stays negative through higher education and employment. Post-16 is where economic pressure bites hardest.
Girls are consistently more likely than boys to make creative subject choices through school and further education, but that gap reverses in higher education and again in employment. Women from economically disadvantaged backgrounds face a compounding disadvantage at every stage: worse than either girls in general or FSM-eligible students in general. This intersection does not seem to feature as strongly as it might in most equity conversations about the Arts.
Further education carries a disproportionate share of creative participation, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, but FE students are less likely to go on to creative higher education, which the data shows is the strongest predictor of creative employment. As long as the FE-to-HE progression route for creative students remains poorly supported, FE’s role as a gateway will remain partial.
The report confirms what many Arts organisations already suspect: a creative degree matters for creative employment, but access to creative higher education is structurally unequal. Portfolio requirements, unspoken cultural prerequisites, and the concentration of specialist institutions in expensive cities all function as filters that reflect social background more than creative ability.
For Arts educators, the most actionable finding is around institutional cultures in schools. School practices which steer students away from creative subjects – through timetabling, careers guidance that treats creative choices as risky, and accountability pressures that devalue Arts subjects – make a real difference to life chances. For Arts organisations, the implication is that widening participation work focused only on higher education or professional entry is too late. Choices made at 14 and 16 for qualifications taken at 16 and 18 (GCSE and A levels) are highly significant to future Arts careers.
- The study takes a subject as creative if it provides specialised knowledge that can be considered a ‘pipeline’ for the creative and cultural industries and a training ground for the future creative workforce. The definition covers broad categories including Architecture, Art, Creative Writing, Dance, Design, Drama, Games, Journalism, Media Production, Music, and Music Technology. The researchers extend this definition consistently across all educational stages, from GCSE through further education to higher education, covering both academic and vocational qualifications. Having a consistent definition is a methodological strength as it makes comparisons much more trustworthy. A student is defined as making a creative subject choice only if their proportion of creative subjects out of all subjects taken puts them above the 75th percentile for their cohort at that stage. In higher education the threshold is different: a single-subject degree in a creative field counts, and a combined degree counts if at least two-thirds of the subject mix is creative. ↩︎
