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Shaping creative futures with young people at the centre

We start the new year with an international perspective. Douglas Lonie, one of the authors of the British Council’s new UK Arts and Young People Report, published at the end of last year, highlights practice that is responding to global agendas on young people’s creative rights and futures.

Several high-profile papers, declarations and pacts were published last year outlining how it is essential to secure young people’s rights to cultural participation and expression. The UN Pact for the Future focuses on meaningful youth participation, stating explicitly that:

We can only meet the needs and aspirations of all young people if we systematically listen to them, work with them and provide them with meaningful opportunities to shape the future.

The Pact recognises that the decisions made today will directly impact younger generations and those yet to be born. This approach sets a framework for institutionalising youth engagement in policy-making at both national and global levels. The Declaration on Future Generations highlights this intergenerational responsibility to ensure that future generations inherit a just, peaceful, and sustainable world.

This builds from ongoing multilateral commitments to enhance and support cultural participation and freedom of expression for all, particularly those at risk of marginalisation and exclusion. The UNESCO-MONDIACULT 2022 Declaration commits to:

Foster an enabling environment conducive to the respect and exercise of all human rights, in particular cultural rights – individual and collective – in all areas of culture, from cultural heritage to cultural and creative sectors, including in the digital environment, in order to build a more just and equitable world, and reduce inequalities.

Last year, UNESCO also published a Framework for Culture and Arts Education that stresses: ‘The critical need to enable all learners to fully benefit from the opportunities of culture and education through inclusive access to quality education.

These excerpts highlight that all children and young people have a right to access arts and culture, a right to cultural expression, and a right to meaningfully contribute to the systems and policies that support them in this process. 

In the UK context we know that these rights are not currently being respected. As the Cultural Learning Alliance has revealed, since 2010 England has seen a 42% decline in Expressive Arts GCSE entries1. Investment in youth provision has more than halved2. These trends not only indicate fewer opportunities to access culture, but a dismantling of the infrastructure that supports young people to develop in arts and culture, with the most marginalised bearing the brunt of a decline in universal provision.

Despite these statistics, our recent research highlights the organisations and programmes in the UK that continue to innovate in youth arts practice. In a funding and policy environment that has relentlessly challenged young people’s rights to engage in culture, express themselves, and meaningfully contribute to their cultural lives, we engaged with more than 70 organisations which are committed to enabling young people to shape their futures through culture.

Across the four nations of the UK, we heard from arts and cultural organisations who are enabling young people to develop their creative selves, and have a stake in their cultural lives, despite the ongoing effects of austerity. Alongside equality of access, organisations and young people told us that they are dealing with significant mental health issues, a sense of helplessness in the face of seemingly never-ending national and global crises, and a need to equip themselves for a rapidly shifting workforce of the future.

The innovative and effective practice that we saw had several common features:

  • Placing creativity at the centre
  • Co-creating with young people
  • Being flexible and responsive to young people’s needs
  • Establishing mutual trust and respect
  • Enabling appropriate development (recognising that progression journeys are unique to every young person)

Crucially, all the effective practice that people shared took an approach where young people’s rights were at the centre. This showed up in several ways:

  • Recognising that the journey is more important than the destination
  • Setting clear boundaries and managing expectations
  • Enabling formal and informal engagement
  • Celebrating and advocating with and for young people

The organisations taking part in the research, along with the arts councils of the four nations and other core funders of youth arts in the UK, highlighted that much more can be done to embed these practices across youth arts provision. Altogether there are four key steps for the sector to take to ensure that all young people can be at the centre of shaping their creative futures:

  1. Come together to discuss young people’s needs – including young people, arts organisations, practitioners, and funders.
  2. Share, learn, grow – there is so much exciting and innovative practice taking place (our case studies show nine great examples from across the UK) we need to find more ways to share and learn from each other
  3. Share power with young people – we need to enable young people to be at the centre of their creative development.
  4. Celebrate the present and the future – one way to deal with the stress of an under-resourced arts sector, and the existential dread that organisations and young people are feeling, is to platform and celebrate all the amazing ways that young people are being creative.

There is huge potential to bring together young people, artists and organisations from across the four nations of the UK to move this agenda forward. There is further scope to make this an international movement. To respond to these global agendas seeking to put young people and creativity at the centre of just and sustainable futures, we must remain global in our outlook and approach.

This research showing diverse, innovative, youth-centred arts practice right across the UK is just the tip of the iceberg. Those supporting young people to be at the centre of their creative development all around the globe should step forward and join in. Collectively we can shape a future with young people’s rights and creativity at its core.


  1. https://www.culturallearningalliance.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/CLA-2024-Annual-Report-Card.pdf ↩︎
  2. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/youth-provision-and-life-outcomes-research/youth-provision-and-life-outcomes-a-study-of-the-local-impact-of-youth-clubs-executive-summary#:~:text=During%20the%20period%202011%20to,%2F12%20and%202018%2F19 ↩︎