Department for Culture Media & Sport: Diversity within Arts

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) aims to ensure Britain is one of the world’s most creative and exciting places to live, visit and do business with. As part of this, DCMS is committed to encouraging participation and ensuring the pathways into the cultural sectors are better defined, signposted and supported, especially for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The recently published Culture White Paper recognised this and Higher Education (HE) is an important route into arts professions through visual arts, dance, drama and music programmes offered by a range of institutions, including specialist Conservatoires and Drama Schools. Recent work carried out by CFE Research indicates that the participation gap within HE is reducing. However, evidence from a recent rapid literature review by DCMS indicates that the participation gap may be particularly pronounced for certain HE arts programmes. This had led DCMS to commission CFE research to undertake a detailed high-level analysis of HE data, derived from UCAS and HESA, to gain a deeper understanding of what barriers disadvantaged groups face within the arts disciplines and at what point barriers occur.

Key project contact

Dr Sarah Tazzyman

Sarah joined CFE in January 2016, bringing a wealth of research experience having worked at the Universities of Leicester, Hertfordshire and Sunderland as a researcher and psychology lecturer.

Sarah has extensive experience in using both qualitative and quantitative statistical techniques and is passionate about designing creative and engaging methods to capture data from different client groups. She has a particular interest in child and adolescent social and developmental psychology and has contributed to educational and social policy.

Her research and methodological background enables her to provide a range of expertise at CFE on educational projects such as National College’s evaluation of the Leadership Curriculum, process evaluations for the Big Lottery, Sport England’s Active College evaluation and impact evaluations for the ECB inclusion and diversity agenda.