On Sunday, a 15-year-old from Manchester made TV history. Owen Cooper became the youngest male actor ever to win an Emmy, for his performance in Adolescence. In his acceptance speech he thanked The Drama Mob, the local drama school where he started out just a few years ago.
It is the kind of story Britain loves: local talent nurtured in a community class, suddenly centre stage in Hollywood. But it is also a story that should give policymakers pause. For while Owen’s win is rightly celebrated as a triumph, the opportunities that made it possible are shrinking at home. According to Campaign for the Arts, the number of pupils taking GCSE Drama has fallen by more than 40 per cent in the past 15 years. In some schools the subject has vanished entirely.
Before the pandemic, the UK’s creative economy was growing at more than twice the rate of the wider economy. That trajectory sits uneasily alongside a 40 per cent drop in GCSE Drama entries, and similar or worse declines across other arts subjects. The disconnect points to a fundamental problem of provision. Just as the sector expands, the skills base that underpins it is being narrowed.
The risk is clear: if fewer young people get the chance to even try drama or arts subjects, fewer will go on to train, audition or build careers in the sector. That means fewer Owen Coopers and fewer of the global wins Britain has long taken for granted in film, TV, music and theatre.
This isn’t just cultural sentimentality, though. The UK’s creative industries contribute £126 billion a year to our economy, support millions of jobs across the country, and have been explicitly identified by the government as a key driver of industrial growth. From Adolescence to Adele, our culture also travels further and faster than almost anything else we make, carrying enormous soft power with it.
But none of this is guaranteed. To build on our successes we need to protect and strengthen the entire creative talent pipeline, from those GCSE Drama classes in comprehensive schools through to apprenticeships, universities and beyond.
The access problem is getting worse. The 2023 report for the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Creative Diversity titled Making The Creative Majority found that creative higher education remains heavily skewed towards students from middle-class backgrounds. Networks and internships, often unpaid, still function as gatekeepers. Without strong arts provision in schools, this will only intensify, locking out working-class talent before they've even started.
And in the age of AI and automation, creativity, communication and critical thinking will only become more important across every sector. Arts education at school level builds precisely those transferable skills that employers from tech to finance increasingly prize. Skills that make us uniquely human. To cut provision now is to narrow the skills base just when the economy needs it widened.
Other countries are not standing still. South Korea’s deliberate investment in K-culture has produced a global entertainment powerhouse. Canada offers targeted tax credits and subsidies specifically to nurture skills. Meanwhile, a recent paper by Mariana Mazzucato titled ‘The Public Value of Arts and Culture’ argues that arts and culture generate high economic multipliers and spillovers, fostering innovation, social cohesion and civic identity. She stresses that rather than being seen as a cost, they should be recognised as foundational investments for a more creative, inclusive, economically vibrant society. If Britain neglects its talent base, starting in schools, then it risks ceding ground to nations that see creative education as integral to their industrial strategy.
That should concern investors as well as ministers. A sharp decline in GCSE arts entries may also signal a warning sign for the future skills supply chain of one of the UK’s most dynamic export sectors. The British creative industries succeed because they are porous, unpredictable, and open to new voices. Some of our greatest cultural exports, from grime to Trainspotting, came from the margins. If we hollow out the access routes, then we risk flattening the very ecosystem that gives Britain its creative edge.
Owen Cooper's Emmy deserves celebration, but it should also be a wake-up call. If we want more like him - and if we want the creative industries to keep driving growth and shaping Britain’s global standing - arts education must be treated as critical economic infrastructure.
Alex Pleasants is external relations consultant and editor of And Finally…
