This month, Professor Pat Thomson, CLA’s Senior Evidence Associate, reports on an Australian longitudinal study focusing on fostering diversity in the creative arts by addressing student capacity to aspire to work in the creative sector. The study also speaks to the same kinds of access issues that exist in England.
Gore, J., Gibson, S; Fray, L., Smith, M., & Holmes, K (2019) Fostering Diversity in the Creative Arts by Addressing Students’ Capacity to Aspire Journal of Creative Behaviour. 53(4) 519-530
Although this is not a new study, this Australian research does offer a perspective and language that is helpful – it focuses on the expressive arts nurturing the capacity to aspire. It also speaks to the same kinds of access issues that exist in England.
Gore and colleagues draw on a four-year longitudinal study of 6,492 students aged 8-18 in New South Wales government schools to investigate who aspires to careers in the arts and what shapes those aspirations. The study is the first to examine arts career aspirations among school-age children rather than university students already enrolled in arts programs.
The headline finding is something of a paradox: careers in the arts were the most popular occupational choice across the entire sample, yet the profile of students expressing that interest was remarkably narrow. Using logistic regression, the authors found that being female, from an English-speaking background, from a higher socioeconomic background, attending a more advantaged school, achieving more highly academically, and possessing greater cultural capital all significantly predicted interest in arts careers. Students from non-English-speaking backgrounds, lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and less advantaged schools were notably less likely to express arts career aspirations, even when arts careers were popular overall.
The theoretical framing draws on Appadurai’s concept of the “capacity to aspire” as a cultural capacity unevenly distributed across society, and on Bourdieu’s account of cultural capital. The argument is that aspiration is not simply a matter of individual desire or talent but is shaped by the social and cultural resources available to young people. Those from advantaged backgrounds have greater access to experiences, role models, and navigational knowledge that allows them to construct viable pathways toward arts careers; those from less advantaged backgrounds share the same desires but lack the scaffolding to sustain or act on them. A clear age effect compounds this effect: interest in arts careers declines through the secondary years as students begin to circumscribe their aspirations in light of financial insecurity concerns and reduced arts provision in the later years of schooling.
The paper argues that school-based interventions – artist-in-residence programs, teacher professional learning, sustained engagement with arts practice – are essential levers for disrupting these patterns and building the capacity of under-represented groups to aspire.
The findings speak directly to the English context, where many of the same structural pressures are at play and are arguably more acute.
The narrowing of arts provision in schools.
England has seen a sustained decline in arts subject uptake at GCSE and A Level since the introduction of the EBacc in 2010, which excludes arts subjects from its core accountability measure. The Gore et al. finding that interest in arts careers declines in the later secondary years and that school-level factors mediate this maps closely onto the CLA Report Card. In England as well as in Australia. When schools reduce arts provision, and it is typically students from less advantaged backgrounds in less resourced schools who lose access first. The paper gives empirical weight to the argument that this matters not just for arts participation now but for the composition of the professional arts workforce in the future.
The cultural capital problem
The strong predictive power of cultural capital in the Australian data is likely to be replicated in England, where analyses of cultural participation have consistently shown that engagement with the arts outside school – enrichment activities -is heavily stratified by class and ethnicity. If aspiration is cultivated through accumulated experience, then children who only encounter the arts through school are already at a disadvantage relative to those whose home environments provide the kind of cultural immersion the study measures. This puts a particular weight on what schools do, especially for children in care, from lower-income households, or from communities underserved by cultural infrastructure, groups that feature prominently CLA evidence.
The particular significance of primary and early secondary years
The finding that the Year 5 cohort (roughly ages 9-12) shows the highest arts career interest, and that decline sets in through the secondary years, points to early and sustained engagement as the critical window. In England, this sits at the junction of primary arts provision, which the CLA Report Card shows is often patchy and heavily dependent on individual teacher confidence and school ethos, and the transition into secondary schooling where subject specialisation begins. Programmes that build teachers’ capacity to deliver rich arts experiences in primary school, and that create continuity into Key Stage 3 before exam pressures bite, seem particularly important.
It would be very helpful if we had a similar longitudinal study in England so we could ascertain if the evidence were much the same, as I have assumed.
