Creative arts graduates succeed because of their background, not in spite of it

In my role as Vice Chancellor there is a moment I experience quite frequently whenever I speak at international events.

It comes when I declare I am a Professor of drama. The reaction is: profound silence.

True, as a drama and English graduate, the path I’ve taken to become vice chancellor of De Montfort University is unusual.

But the silence is a reminder that it is still the case that a grounding in creative industries is seen as an unlikely base for the CEO of a quarter of a billion-pound company.

Creative contributions

Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise to me, though, because there is a systematic underestimation of the contribution that creative industries graduates make to the economy. This coupled with an absence of any method of determining value beyond financial gain, demonstrated through the reliance on LEO data to prove worth, for example, omits the recognition of the contribution of hundreds of thousands of creative graduates.

The problem of tracking and acknowledging the contribution of creative arts graduates is perpetuated by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport itself. DCMS has been measuring the number of people in the creative industries since 1998. Their last audit in 2023 concluded that there were 2.3m workers. But of course, that estimate depends on how you define the creative industries.

DCMS started with a definition that included 13 sub-sectors of the creative and cultural industries; this was then simplified to nine, and data has been collected on these ever since. Added to this, we have since 2014 had Nesta’s Dynamic Mapping tool, which located sectors where high proportions of creatives were employed.

What’s missing in these figures, though, are those who are undertaking jobs that use their creative industries background but who are not in the sector. I will be one such missing case. It rather assumes that I am doing my role in spite of my undergraduate, masters and PhD in drama, rather than because of it. I’m clear it is because of it. Vice chancellors set strategic direction and vision, and work with their top team and staff and students to ensure that vision is brought to life:  it’s no different from the skills I developed as a theatre director.

The missing artists

Dynamic Mapping found that most sectors had around 3 per cent of creatives employed within them. These are the other missing creatives. They include designers who work for the manufacturing industry, arts management graduates running in-house corporate events, or graphic designers who might be working for companies who sit outside the creative industry sector.

The issue of how we count creatives has come to light in work commissioned by the city of Leicester, along with Arts Council England, and De Montfort and Leicester universities. As part of preparations to create a new cultural strategy for the city, we commissioned consultants The Fifth Sector to undertake an audit of the creative industry workers in Leicester and Leicestershire. Their final report has now been published and includes some eye-catching findings.

Fifth Sector used a methodology to query the Office for National Statistics’ Business Register and Employment Survey (BRES). That survey shows 4,000 creatives in the city and 12,000 in the county but is taken from PAYE and VAT returns and thus omits smaller and independent traders. Using LinkedIn data Fifth Sector identified that the number of creatives in the city rose to 15,000, with another 15,000 in the county. In other words, double the amount assumed by the BRES data.

Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Adobe recently named Leicester the fifth most creative city in the UK, after Brighton, London, Edinburgh and Manchester. Leicester’s high score was achieved by being the second highest city for festivals, as well as its high density of creative jobs per population.

The largest discrepancy in Leicester between the BRES data and Fifth Sector’s methodology is in the area of design. Here, there are 3,800 more workers than assumed. This approach calls into question the assumption from BRES data that the area of design is in retraction.

Clustering creativity

Policy under the previous government has been to support the growth of creative clusters to increase productivity. This has yielded good growth results with the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Creative Cluster programme producing nine clusters with a total public and private co-investment of £277m, producing 466 spin-outs, start-ups and scale-ups. Early signs are the new government will continue this direction. However, it is crucial that, in choosing where to expand the programme’s support, the underpinning data is examined carefully.

For example, the 2016 NESTA and Creative England study, The Geography of Creativity in the UK by Juan Mateos-Garcia and Hasan Bakhshi used ONS data to identify 47 potential clusters. And the 2022 report, Understanding the Growth Potential of Creative Clusters by Frontier Economics uses Travel to Work Area (TTWA) data to identify 55 areas of creative clusters.

But the issue for us here in the East Midlands is that the region performs oddly in the TTWA data. Leicester, Nottingham and Derby get missed out of the report entirely. While the cities of Nottingham, Leicester and Derby together account for 67 per cent of all East Midlands turnover and 62 per cent of creative employment, as a recent report by the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre noted, they are not on the list of clusters.

This does not suggest that the creative industries of the East Midlands are less prolific than other regions but that – for a multitude of reasons, especially relating to occupational specialisation codes used by government – they have not been as formally recognised as they might have been. It isn’t clear to me that TTWA is necessarily a helpful metric.

Data issues are more appropriately acknowledged in the 2020 Creative Industries Radar published by the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre and NESTA. Here the report argues that micro-clustering should also be considered. The research uses ‘scraped web data’, something which produces an outcome more akin to Fifth Sector’s report. Here Leicester emerges as the top performing city in the country for micro clustering.

As the new government continues to create pathways to stimulate the economy, it is important that the right decisions are made. Data driven decision-making is a sensible approach, and it would be good to see DCMS begin to collect and publish again those metrics which they did regularly until the pandemic, such as on the broader ‘creative economy’, but we must ensure that the data we use doesn’t exclude hidden patterns and opportunities. Creativity often emerges from out near the edges, where the sparks fly: we must be sure we are looking there, too.

And we must be as broadminded as we can when evaluating the functional value of creative skills. People with creative arts qualifications go on to enhance all areas of society, and become, very often, instigators of innovation in the industries they choose.