Arts, Culture and Heritage: recent trends in UK workforce and engagement in England

What has happened to the arts, culture and heritage sectors since the COVID-19 pandemic? In our last report, Audiences and Workforces in Arts, Culture and Heritage (McAndrew et al 2024), we investigated the workforce in arts, culture and heritage occupations, changes in arts, culture and heritage engagement, and the makeup of audiences. This report updates that evidence with the most up-to-date data allowing us to analyse these post-pandemic trends further.

In addition to these updates, this report presents a deep dive into the geography of audiences for arts, culture and heritage in England. The analysis also highlights the relationship between different forms of attendance and participation and the arts, culture and heritage workforce in each local authority. This focus on England is due to data availability, with surveys addressing arts, culture and heritage engagement being collected separately in the four nations of the UK.

Accompanying this report is a series of dashboards which extend the analysis we present. These focus on the Participation Survey. They show how engagement with different forms of arts, culture and heritage varies by many characteristics, and how this changed between the survey years 2022/2023 and 2023/2024. They also show how rates of engagement in different forms of arts, culture and heritage vary across English local authorities. These dashboards extend those that have been published by other organisations by including additional characteristics, such as, for example, data by English local authority for multiple individual forms of arts, culture and heritage