Who gets to be an artist?

If so, congrats – you’re three times more likely to become an artist than anyone else.

The University of the Arts London’s Social Purpose Lab and Artquest have published “Who gets to be an artist?”, and the answer, it turns out, is depressingly predictable – the same people who get to be corporate lawyers, peers, and basically anything else requiring socioeconomic privilege as an entry ticket.

For me, that makes the report more interesting than it might first appear. Because whilst it’s ostensibly about visual artists, what it actually describes is a case study in how social mobility plays out across entire sectors – including the “growth industries” that the government bangs on about.

Of the 658 professional visual artists surveyed through Artquest’s Applied partnership between April 2024 and March 2025, 18 per cent attended a fee-paying school – three times the rate of the general population.

When you look at parental occupation at age 14 (using the National Statistics Socioeconomic Classification), 39 per cent of surveyed artists reported having a parent in a traditional or modern professional role – representing the most advantaged social class. Meanwhile, only 7 per cent answered routine occupations, 6 per cent semi-routine, and 12 per cent technical or craft occupations.

The report notes:

The respondents’ answers suggest that artists may be more likely to come from higher socioeconomic backgrounds – the middle and upper classes – than those in the general workforce.

Of course, this has almost certainly been true for basically every other creative profession in the UK for decades – which has implications for the stuff we see, read and watch.

Over 9 in 10 respondents (92.5 per cent) had attended a higher education institution. That’s compared to around 26 per cent of the general workforce across England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Of those surveyed artists, 49 per cent held a postgraduate degree as their highest qualification, and a further 39 per cent held an undergraduate degree.

The report acknowledges there’s “no requirement for artists to have a degree” but then goes on to explain exactly why you basically need one anyway – foundation skills, safe space to experiment, critical feedback, professional networks, exposure to new ideas. And that’s before you factor in the costs of study.

Where do those artists live? Forty-six per cent in London, with a further 14 per cent in the South East. That means 6 in 10 respondents live either in London or close to it – in one of the most expensive parts of the country to exist.

The financial reality

Only 41 per cent of respondents regularly earn money from their practice. Less than half of professional visual artists surveyed actually make money regularly from being artists.

When asked about barriers to their careers in the last year, 69 per cent cited lack of income earned from their art career. The report quotes separate data showing that the median income for artists in 2024 was just £12,500 – 47 per cent lower than the income of full-time minimum wage workers in the same year.

So how do they survive? Thirty-two per cent regularly earn money outside of the fine arts and wider creative industries. Twenty-nine per cent earn money from jobs related to fine arts. Twenty-seven per cent earn money from casual or occasional work. You’re basically required to have a portfolio career whether you want one or not.

On savings specifically, 28 per cent of respondents didn’t even have enough savings to last them one month. Only 8 per cent had enough to last them for up to 12 months. Financial advice typically recommends anywhere between three months and two years of savings as a safety net. And for freelancers without sick pay, holiday entitlement, or automatic pension contributions, that buffer is even more critical.

Meanwhile, over the past year, 23 per cent saw their income from art practice decrease a lot, 19 per cent decrease a little, and 41 per cent saw no change. In the context of rising inflation, “no change” amounts to a real-terms decrease. Only 20 per cent of respondents had increased their own day rate.

Beyond financial precarity, the data shows persistent discrimination. When asked about barriers that have impacted their career in the last year:

• 32 per cent cited discrimination on the basis of age
• 22 per cent on the basis of social background
• 17 per cent on the basis of race
• 13 per cent on the basis of gender identity
• 11 per cent on the basis of disability

And the report notes that freelancers:

…do not always have access to the same workplace policies, processes, and support as employees, which can leave them less protected from things like discrimination, harassment, and poor treatment.

What to do about it

The recommendations span three areas – creative education and the talent pipeline, good work agenda, and value of creativity.

In education, they’re calling for:

• An education system that values STEM, the arts and humanities in equal measure
• Creative subjects as a core part of the curriculum, not peripheral
• Use of the Enrichment Framework to address the enrichment gap
• Ensuring the Growth and Skills Levy addresses issues with creative apprenticeships
• Safeguarding creative qualifications at Level 3
• Securing the future of creative higher education, including recognition of high costs

The report acknowledges that “creative education in state schools in England has faced a well-documented and sustained period of decline” since 2010, with entries to creative subjects at GCSE and A Level dropping significantly. Meanwhile, “private schools continue to invest in and prioritise creativity and the arts.”

The report notes that the 18 per cent private school attendance rate among artists is “almost as much as” gaining a peerage or becoming a corporate lawyer. The Sutton Trust’s research shows that 74 per cent of senior judges, 61 per cent of top solicitors, and 56 per cent of top medics attended private schools. Artists, at 18 per cent, are actually doing relatively well compared to the top of other professions.

The structural barriers identified here – private school advantage, degree requirement, parental occupation mattering, London concentration, unpaid work as a gateway, need for family money to weather precarity – aren’t just problems with the visual arts sector. They’re problems with social mobility across the whole of the UK.

The Skills White Paper

In the Skills White Paper, which is all about opportunity and social mobility, we were assured that:

The Skills White Paper sets out how we will transform our skills system to drive growth, boost productivity and deliver the opportunities that people and businesses need to succeed… Breaking down barriers to opportunity is at the heart of this government’s mission.

But here in this report, we know that:

• You basically need a degree (92.5 per cent have one, vs 26 per cent of general workforce)
• Private school helps a lot (three times the national rate)
• You need to be able to afford London or the South East (60 per cent are there)
• You need to weather periods of no income (only 41 per cent regularly earn from their practice)
• You need savings to survive (28 per cent have less than a month’s worth)
• You probably need to do unpaid work to break in (nine out of ten creatives have worked for free)

You can’t build a creative superpower when becoming an artist requires either independent wealth or the willingness to use foodbanks.

The White Paper talks extensively about technical qualifications, apprenticeships, and “high-quality pathways” into work. The report has something to say about that too:

Apprenticeships and T Levels have been labelled as ‘poorly suited’ to the nature of creative subjects and industries, where freelance and short-term contracts are the norm. Rigid programme structures and inflexible standards often fail to align with how the sector operates.

The alternative pathways to degrees that are supposed to improve social mobility don’t really work for creative industries. Which means you’re back to needing a degree – and as the report notes, still shows:

…large gaps between the experience of those from lower and higher socioeconomic backgrounds [with] creative degrees dominated by people from middle class backgrounds, with those from less privileged backgrounds especially underrepresented at prestigious institutions.

The Skills White Paper also emphasises the importance of local skills ecosystems and “good jobs” in every region. Meanwhile, 46 per cent of visual artists are in London, where the average rent for a one-bed flat is over £2,000 per month, and the median artist income is £12,500 per year. How’s that local opportunity working out?

Something else that the Skills White Paper doesn’t talk about is unpaid work. The normalised expectation that you’ll work for “exposure” rather than wages, and the fact that nine out of ten creatives have worked for free at some point is a problem. If you can’t afford to do unpaid internships in London for six months, you’re locked out of entire career paths.

The government’s rhetoric is all about “skills shortages” and “training pipelines” and “high-quality pathways.” What it doesn’t acknowledge is that we don’t have a skills shortage in creative industries – we have an affordability barrier. Often, the skills and talent is there, but what’s missing is the ability for anyone without family money to actually use those skills professionally.

Under and over

The report includes a finding about over-representation of certain groups – including people with disabilities, women, non-binary people, and people from ethnic minority backgrounds – in the survey responses, when other research shows these groups are actually under-represented in the creative industries as a whole. The hypothesis is that:

…groups who have more experience of marginalisation may be more inclined to take the opportunity to share their experience.

In other words, the people most impacted by the structural barriers are the ones most motivated to fill in the survey about those barriers – which suggests the actual picture may be even worse than this data shows.

The data is decent (this is the only ongoing, artist-focused data project of its kind in the UK). But without serious policy intervention – not just warm words about valuing creativity, but actual funding for creative education in state schools, actual protections for freelancers, actual enforcement of minimum wages and bans on unpaid labour – it’s hard to see how this changes.

Because right now, the answer to “who gets to be an artist?” remains “people who can afford to be.”