What it means to be human: Why the arts and humanities are more important than ever

It’s grim times in arts and humanities UK higher education (HE). This week’s budget offered scant reassurance. Despite a nod to the economic contribution of Britain’s globally successful film industry, there was little to support arts and humanities humanities disciplines outside the defined ‘creative industries’, deepening long-standing concerns about the sustainability of research and education.

This is a matter of pipeline, policy and purpose. And these three challenges are inextricably related.

Pipeline

Recruitment to both our undergraduate and postgraduate courses is in decline – and the applicant pipeline under strain – as the number of secondary school students taking arts and humanities subjects at GCSE and A-level continues to decline. And with reduced recruitment comes the existential threat that results from lack of financial sustainability.

If an academic department doesn’t meet its gross surplus percentage target because recruitment is stagnating or dropping, then increasingly that department is at risk of staff redundancies and course closure. So, universities strive to grow in areas with greater recruitment potential to remain financially viable. In past weeks, we have seen this in more than one Midlands university.

With the recent government Curriculum and Assessment Review, there is a chink of light on the horizon; we must double down on our ongoing engagement with schools and colleges to help pupils and their parents develop a better understanding of the power and potential of arts and humanities education.

As machine learning advances apace, the need for human creativity within that development is more urgent than ever. The persistence of an arts and humanities pipeline, then, is critical in the time of AI.

Policy and purpose

Simultaneously, the UK policy landscape has continued to prioritise science education and research, through differential levels of support for disciplinary areas. Most recently, the 2025 Post-16 Education and Skills white paper indicated a future uplift in home undergraduate fees for certain courses and maintenance grants for students studying those subjects, to be funded through a levy on international student fee income. It is crucial that arts and humanities subjects are among those supported in this way.

The 2025 Creative Industries Sector Plan sets a ten-year vision for the skills development needed for economic growth which will support some aspects of HE provision. But beyond this, it is hard to separate policy decisions from wider culture wars with the narrative around arts and humanities as being of low value, as not delivering the core skills needed for innovation and economic growth.

If we follow this to its logical conclusion, arts and humanities education will shrivel away until it remains only as a number of exclusive ‘hot spot’ enclaves for the most elite students, where social class continues to be a barrier to access and success.

We have, then, a landscape in which arts and humanities education is frequently seen as fundamentally lacking in value in terms of contribution to institutional financial sustainability, economic growth and delivery of core skills, and thus not worth supporting and maintaining. Those of us who work in this sector know this is misguided and inaccurate.

It is essential we make these arguments publicly, including the places they are least likely to be supported. We need to work together to lobby and influence the pipeline, policy and narrative on the purpose and power of arts and humanities. And with the Curriculum and Assessment Review, which begins to re-think the role of the arts in the national curriculum, we have a moment of opportunity.

A call to action

The British Academy has championed SHAPE – Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts for People and Economy – as a companion to STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths – which has been so successfully socialised and taken up.

As a sector, it’s essential we get behind and advocate for the SHAPE agenda. To do so, we need to move beyond the conventional story of transferable skills and start being specific about the essential contribution our subjects make to communities and the economy.

We know employers are horizon-scanning and anticipating they will require the skills and attributes we develop in our graduates – curiosity, analytical and creative thinking, empathy and self-awareness – and that these attributes are not being delivered by science, technology and business-focused education. We need to agree on, and consistently deliver, the story of the powerful attributes our subjects deliver, through our interdisciplinary approaches, our partnerships with schools, colleges and industry, and through our pedagogic research and practice.

We need to be talking about the importance of critical cultural and historical perspectives informing the future; about the increasing significance of intercultural communication and translation; about human creativity and the question of ethics in the time of machine learning and artificial intelligence; about the crucial skills of advocacy, diplomacy, respectful challenge and collaborative creative working that an education in arts and humanities develops.

Why does it matter?

While this needs to be core to our educational offer and narrative, the ongoing issue of support for fundamental arts and humanities research is just as crucial. It too depends on telling a convincing and consistent story about its importance.

Why does it matter if the study of Yiddish literature, or material culture of 16^th century Scotland, of folk music of Appalachia, or the histories of enslaved peoples does not continue? What would the world look like if philosophy, history, art, choreography, music, design, literature, poetry, film, theatre, languages, cultures and religious thought were simply absent? How would we document and understand humanity?

How would we understand other cultures, perspectives and experiences? How would we connect, communicate and empathise with each other? How would we help STEM subjects grapple with future complexities around technologies, space exploration and living and medical advancements. How would we transform hope and action in addressing climate challenge?

Arts and humanities scholarship is not an ornament, it is the record of what human minds have made, imagined and endured. To let those worlds fall quiet is to diminish what it means to be human.

This is the story we need to tell, consistently and convincingly, to parents, teachers, policy makers, philanthropists, vice chancellors, University Councils. We also need to tell this to our children and young people. While arts and humanities may never attract the same level of student fee and industry income as business, economics and engineering, at stake in their persistence at the heart of the university is the survival of the human itself.

¹The Midlands Arts and Humanities Futures Network (MAHFN) is a group of Deans, Pro-Vice-Chancellors, and Vice-Provosts of Arts and Humanities in universities across the UK Midlands, including De Montfort University, University of Leicester, Northampton University, University of Nottingham, Nottingham Trent University, and University of Warwick. It provides a space for dialogue and collaborative thinking towards an aligned regional sector, in line with anticipated directions of travel and similar to other initiatives such as the N8 Research Partnership.