Only half of children in England have been to a museum or the theatre in the past year, while three-quarters have not been to an art gallery, research shows.
Dawn Airey, the new chair of Arts Council England, said the figures were “shocking” but also “an amazing opportunity to ensure they do have that experience to enrich their lives”.
In her first interview since taking up the job six weeks ago, Airey said experience of arts and culture “should almost be a human right”.
“When I was at school you went on cultural trips. It was just accepted that you would go to your local gallery. You can have great art but if there is no access it might as well not be there. That is the challenge,” she said.
Airey, a TV industry veteran and former Channel 5 boss, spoke to the Guardian while on a whistlestop tour of arts projects in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria.
She succeeds Nicholas Serota as chair of an organisation that has had a bumpy few years, beginning with huge cuts imposed by the Conservatives.
An independent review of ACE by Margaret Hodge this year levelled a number of criticisms, including that it had overly complicated application processes, which “stifled creativity and innovation”.
Arts organisations were also last year put through the wringer when ACE’s grant processing platform, Grantium, crashed, causing widespread funding limbo.
Airey recalled that on her first visit as chair to ACE’s London office, “it felt quiet, a little bit subdued. I didn’t expect that.”
She said she wanted ACE to get its “swagger” back. “I want the Arts Council to be open, I want it to be confident, I want it to be leading conversations, I want it to have a sense of fun, a sense of energy.
“We’ve been quite process-driven and it doesn’t need to be. We’ve got to relax. I want us to be loud.”
Airey was speaking as ACE published its first Creative Young Lives survey, one of the biggest of its type undertaken. It looks at how children and young people engage – or don’t – with arts and culture.
The figures showed that in the past year 51.79% of young people had been to a museum, 48.56% to the theatre or a show, 26.31% to an art gallery or exhibition, and 22.25% to a music event.
In the survey, 74% of children said being creative was important to them, and 60% said they would definitely like to do more creative and cultural activities.
Cost is one of the biggest barriers, with 32% of respondents saying it prevented them from making more visits to cultural places. More than half (55%) said making creative activities more affordable would help them increase their participation.
ACE said the detailed survey provided “robust data”, with previous studies “not conducted a scale to allow such granular analysis”.
On her visit this week, Airey saw first-hand the value of giving young people easy access to culture, at the arts-mad Dowdales school in Dalton-in-Furness.
Its headteacher, Emma Aubrey, has fostered close links with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, which performs in Barrow and has a youth hub.
Aubrey said it had been a battle to ensure arts education was “front and centre” at her school while watching it being marginalised nationally.
“It has been tough to say: no, we will continue to do that, and we teach drama and dance as well as music to every child in key stage 3 every week.”
On the day the Guardian visited, 12- and 13-year-olds were rehearsing Romeo and Juliet – and also considering their town centre. It was “rough”, said one child. “There’s nothing good going on,” said another. It was “run down”. People “feel there’s not much they can do about it, it’s already happened”.
They were talking about Barrow, but it could be almost any English town centre: the nation’s problems summed up in seconds by children rehearsing Shakespeare.
Aubrey is clearly proud of the school’s arts focus, and not necessarily because it is going to create lots of artists. “It’s about opening up a world that can be very insular and isolated and very industry-driven. It’s about making them believe they can be anybody,” she said.
ACE distributes more than £650m a year of public and lottery money to arts organisations and individuals, and will next week publish new, “simpler” guidance for the next national portfolio funding round.
In Barrow, Airey met a number of organisations that had benefited from Arts Council money.
At one roundtable she told participants: “The Arts Council has been through a bit of a tough time … I want us to get our swagger back.”
Airey said ACE would be actively involved in the government’s ambition to “rewire the nation”, adding: “We have been doing that a long, long time.”
The idea of ACE getting its swagger back was enthusiastically received by panellists, who spoke of the challenges of getting everyone on board when arguing for embedding art and culture in places such as Barrow, a town dominated by its shipyard building nuclear submarines.
Jo Reilly, the deputy director of Art Gene, said: “We need you to be an advocate for us at all levels.”
