Arts subjects now account for the smallest proportion of A Level entries since 2010, new research from Campaign for the Arts reveals.
Jack Gamble, the charity’s director has called for ‘urgent action’, warning that the decrease in A Level uptake represents ‘wasted potential’. He added that this particularly impacts students from lower income backgrounds.
Campaign for the Arts found that performing arts suffered the largest decrease in 2023, with Drama A Level entries falling by 8% in a single year.
The stats
This decrease is in line with a steady decline in A Level Drama uptake: entries in England have dropped by 45% between 2010 and 2023, from 15,144 students to 8,340.
One year is an anomaly to this trend: the number of UK Drama A Level students increased by 3% from 9645 in 2021 to 9,953 in 2022. This temporary uptick has anecdotally been put down to the impact of returning to in-person education post-Covid.
A wider impact
A new report written by the British Academy and the National Foundation for Education Research found ‘considerable decline’ in take-up of arts and humanities subjects over the past two decades compared to socials sciences and STEM.
The independent study attributes these changes to the Conservative government’s severing of A Level courses from AS Level exams almost 10 years ago. This change meant that only a single set of A Level exams is taken after two years of study, when previously there were AS Level exams midway through.
The report also notes that the number of schools and colleges offering A Level courses in arts subjects such as drama and music has also seen a ‘dramatic’ fall. The summary concludes with a call to ‘bring arts back into the curriculum’.
‘Breadth and balance should be at the heart of any future post-16 curriculum and should not be negatively impacted by future reform’, British Academy’s director of policy told The Guardian.
Sector response
The following was initially published in Drama & Theatre magazine’s 2024 Summer 2 issue.
The Guardian reported that Paul Whiteman, the general secretary at the NAHT school leaders’ union, claimed that the decline in arts entires across the board was linked to government performance measures.
‘The government has used high-stakes performance measures as a blunt tool to drive curriculum and qualification choices in schools,’ Whiteman said. ‘While entries inevitably vary each year, this may explain the concerning decline in take-up of arts GCSEs, which has a knock-on effect when it comes to choices for sixth-form and college students.’
The National Education Union’s general secretary, Daniel Kebede, commented on the statistics, calling the decline ‘catastrophic’. He added: “Just this week, the government made another attack on the arts in education with its damaging, inaccurate rhetoric around degrees in these subjects.’
‘With young people hearing this, and schools and colleges both underfunded and constrained in the subjects they can offer thanks to wrong-headed, inaccurate performance metrics like the Ebacc, it’s no wonder entries in arts subjects have almost halved since 2010,’ he said.