‘I feel like a scientist talking about the environment – we keep banging on about this every year, but no-one seems to listen,’ said Emma Kendrick, artistic director of Laugh Out Loud Theatre Company, discussing the defunding of the arts.
The most recent report by the Office for National Statistics commissioned by Arts Council England found that ‘The arts and culture industry… now contributes £10.8bn a year to the UK economy…[and] the sector contributes…363,700 jobs.’
Beyond that, there is even greater impact. ‘All the world's a stage and the men and women merely players’ – a phrase written by Shakespeare, and used to introduce my PhD in the field of business psychology. I studied emotional labour – performative emotion within a job role, such as a teacher having to remain upbeat despite a behaviourally challenging lesson (and a key factor contributing to burnout).
Research is not the only area where the arts have impacted my work. I am a huge advocate of experiential learning – originally conceived by Augusto Boal as part of community social learning that his Theatre of the Oppressed techniques (such as ‘forum theatre’) proposed. Role play – where trainees can try out behaviours in a safe space and reflect on them – enables people to feel capable in a real-work context as opposed to theoretical learning, which Kress-Shull found left them ‘well-trained but unprepared’. And, of course, further to role play for rehabilitation, clinicians will often espouse the value of journalling, creative writing or drawing, or expressing oneself through music when words cannot be found.
While my professional life has been exclusively focused in the area of psychology, I owe my success to the input of the arts.
Then let us look at the impact of involvement in the arts for all – arts programmes have numerous benefits for social inclusion, notably the inclusivity of marginalised groups fostering a sense of belonging, mutual understanding and tackling loneliness – enhancing wellbeing. ‘Theatre/Music/being part of …. has literally been a lifeline’ is not uncommon to hear.
And yet, The University of Warwick's ‘State of the Arts’ report (2024) finds that the number of arts teachers in English state-funded secondary schools fell by 27 per cent between 2011 and 2024 – a sad testimony to the last 14 years of cuts. Perhaps the new government will respond to the arts in the same way as former governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger demands a response to climate change: ‘we see the threat, we know the time for action is now.’