How Arts Engagement Supports Mental Health and Wellbeing Across All Ages
Experts and charity founders argue that creative education is not a luxury but a vital tool for improving mental health, school attendance, and wellbeing at every stage of life.
The Case for Arts Engagement in Health and Education
The growing body of evidence linking arts participation to improved health outcomes should surprise nobody who has spent meaningful time working alongside children, young people, or marginalized communities. Two prominent voices in the UK creative sector are now calling on policymakers to take bold, coordinated action — connecting the dots between education, culture, and public health before the opportunity is lost.
Creative Experiences Help Children Feel Seen and Valued
Paula Briggs, founder of AccessArt — a UK charity established nearly three decades ago to champion visual arts education — reports that teachers across the country consistently share the same message: creative learning helps children feel connected, empowered, and genuinely engaged with school life.
Despite this, arts subjects have been systematically undervalued in many schools for years. The relentless pressure to narrow the curriculum and prioritize outcomes that can be easily measured has pushed meaningful creative engagement to the margins.
This comes at a significant cost. England continues to grapple with persistently high rates of school absence, and behind every statistic is a child who may simply not feel they belong. While arts education alone cannot resolve the complex causes of school disengagement, it can play a meaningful role in transforming schools into spaces where young people feel recognized, respected, and motivated.
Arts Education Is Not Optional — It Is Essential
Briggs argues that treating creative learning as an expendable add-on while simultaneously expressing concern about children's mental health and school disengagement represents a fundamental contradiction in policy thinking.
Creating time within the school day for imagination, making, and cultural connection is not an indulgence. It is a foundational investment in healthier children and stronger communities. Policymakers, she urges, must be far braver in aligning education, culture, and health agendas into a single, coherent strategy.
Unequal Access to the Arts Is Driving Health Inequality
Recent research from University College London has reinforced the connection between arts engagement and slower biological aging — a finding that carries serious implications for public health planning. For Nicky Goulder, Founding CEO of Create — a charity she established in 2003 to bring creative opportunities to society's most excluded individuals — the research underlines an urgent and uncomfortable truth: access to the arts is far from equal.
Decades of academic study have consistently demonstrated that engaging with creative disciplines — whether painting, singing, dancing, writing, or any other artform — can significantly enhance both physical and mental wellbeing. Yet people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and otherwise disadvantaged communities remain far less likely to benefit from these opportunities than their more affluent counterparts.
Bringing Creativity to Those Who Need It Most
Create addresses this gap directly by delivering artist-led creative workshops entirely free of charge, held in locations that participants already know and trust. After more than twenty years of evaluation data, the charity's findings are clear: giving people access to creative expression measurably improves their confidence and wellbeing.
Crucially, the positive transformations tend to be most profound among those who face the greatest disadvantage — precisely the individuals who would otherwise have no meaningful access to creative life.
A Call for Systemic Change
Goulder warns that if society fails to address this deep imbalance, unequal access to the arts will simply become another layer of health inequality, further entrenching disadvantage rather than alleviating it.
The evidence is in. Creative engagement improves lives across every age group, and the benefits are greatest for those who have been left furthest behind. What is now needed is the political will to ensure that arts participation is treated not as a privilege for the few, but as a right — and a genuine vehicle for wellbeing and opportunity — for everyone.
