Hello and thanks for tuning in to this podcast from Teacher magazine, the resource for K-12 educators published by ACER, the Australian Council for Educational Research. I'm Jo Earp.
Welcome to Episode 109 of The Research Files, and I've actually got 2 guests with me today – Professor Sandra Gatenhoff, Academic Lead Learning and Teaching in the School of Creative Arts at Queensland University of Technology, that's QUT of course, and Dr John Nicholas Saunders, Senior Lecturer in Education at Australian Catholic University, that's ACU. Now, their study was featured in the recent Australian Journal of Education (AJE) Special Issue on Arts in Education. In that paper (Gattenhof & Saunders, 2026), they warn the arts and creative sectors here in Australia are facing unprecedented challenges. We're going to be taking a look at what's happening in schools then in relation to that, starting with the declining enrolment numbers in year 12 arts subjects in Australian states and territories, and the implications of that. We'll also be talking about the challenge of out-of-field teaching in arts education and some of those practical supports and solutions for schools. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Jo Earp: Professor Sandra Gatenhoff and Dr John Nicholas Saunders, it's lovely to have you here today, welcome to The Research Files. Now, we're going to be talking about the declining enrolment numbers in year 12 art subjects in Australia. But before we dive into that, I'd love to hear a bit more about your current roles and interest in this area of education research.
John Nicholas Saunders: Thanks for having us, Jo. Sandra and I have worked together for a very long time. I came from a schools background, and so I came into academia a couple of years ago, and I was noticing in my own school context that numbers were declining in the arts across the school; and Sandra was talking about it from a university perspective and also noticing that similar trend within creative arts courses. And we are both involved in the National Advocates for Arts Education (NAAE), which is a national group representing the 5 arts associations. And in that role, we sort of look at what's happening at a national level, advocate for the arts with federal politicians, and we sort of started getting into this really because we kept getting asked to write letters to universities based on cuts to creative arts courses, and that sort of sparked us into looking at what was happening more broadly across the sector.
Sandra Gattenhof: And John mentioned my own backyard, which is QUT, which you mentioned in the intro, Jo, and thank you for that. And John is right, we were seeing coming out of COVID, but even before COVID around about 2018, a pattern of activity in universities where courses were either being amalgamated, re-accredited, or vastly changed, or completely cut. So, we were watching – when I say ‘we’ John and I but also the National Advocates for Arts Education – were watching that declining pattern. And we got up to something like about 53 documented courses by the end of last year. So, it really was a pattern that we were seeing consistently. And then we started asking ourselves the questions, because we're curious educators: Why is this happening? And that spawned this whole kind of deep dive into what we call the ‘polycrisis for creative arts education in Australia’.
JE: And we're going to be talking about the school aspects of that today. As I mentioned in the intro then, your study looks at secondary school enrolments across Australia in arts subjects. And you mentioned those 5 there – that's dance, drama, media arts, music and visual arts. You share some ACARA (2025) data then, and for our international listeners, that's the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority. Just take us through some of those sort of broader figures.
JNS: ACARA has sort of aggregated data that they collect from all of the states about enrolment in learning areas and so, it's very broad national data, but it's quite interesting to have a look at and they break it down by gender as well. So, that sort of was one of the early pieces of data that we sort of found. And we were looking at 2012 to 2022, so a 10-year period, and at year 12 enrolments in art subjects, and that it had dropped quite significantly over that 10-year period.
For male students, it dropped by about 6.5% – so that's about 6,000 fewer male students studying an arts subject in year 12; and for female identifying students, it declined by a much more substantial number, about 10% – and that's about 11,000 humans who are no longer studying the arts. So that really sort of jumped out at us. And when we dug a bit deeper, we were also then interested in what was happening in primary schools and middle schools.
What really surprised us is that there's actually very little data available looking at what are the arts provisions in primary schools in Australia. We actually have very little idea of if curriculum is actually being followed, if students are engaging in the arts. And in middle schools, so year sort of 7 to 10, when students are selecting subjects and electives, et cetera, what is being delivered and what are the enrolments. So that data is almost invisible. But the OECD did give us a little bit of a sort of look into this in its 2024 report looking at the creative thinking assessment from the PISA test. So that looked at 15-year-olds (mainly year 10s in Australia) and found that about 25% of students reported engaging in art classes or activities at least once a week and about 20% participated in music classes or activities once a week. It's again a very broad picture that includes co-curricular and classroom activities, but that's quite significantly lower than the OECD average.
So that sort of also was a piece in the puzzle, putting it together of sort of understanding that actually what was happening was that we were seeing a decline across the board and that even internationally comparing, you know, our year 10 students, that we were seeing lower numbers of engagement.
JE: And you mentioned there is definitely some difficulty there in terms of mapping what's happening. And we hear that in a lot of education research about, you know, the data is not really there actually in a lot of cases. But you also look at each state and territory, and you've managed to break those stats down into individual subject areas. Take us through those findings. For the most part, though, looking at that list, it's really sobering reading, isn't it?
SG: It is, it is absolutely, unfortunately. It was a picture that John and I thought was bad but didn't really understand the gravity of it until we began to crunch the numbers. So, if we look at the national picture, unfortunately, the state that John and I live and work in and have spent most of our lives in – Queensland – is the leader in the decline of enrolments in senior secondary schooling.
So, what John and I were able to do was look at the national data that reports on senior schooling and then also go state by state. The only missing data set was the Northern Territory because they don't publish their education data publicly, even though their curriculum is connected to South Australia, even the data doesn't appear in the South Australian data set.
So Queensland, unfortunately, when we look at the arts subjects as a whole, not as an individual (I'll come to those in a minute) there's an overall decline at 45%, Western Australia is slightly below at 44, and then you get a mix of statistics in South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania, that is roughly between 12 or 5% across those states. The anomaly here is the ACT, which saw an increase of 43% and that was simply because there was an introduction of a new subject that came in that had an enormous, it's a creative arts subject, it was an enormous jump in that state for a couple of years. So, it's an anomaly, it's not saying that there is a pattern of increase in the Australian Capital Territory.
Then, if we look at statistics nationally, art form by art form, the 2 poorest performing or the most impacted art forms are dance and drama. Nationally, they have had extraordinary drops. And then, it's followed by media, then by music. And visual art has probably been statistically the most consistent with enrolment numbers between 2015 and 2023. So, the last data set we were able to look at was 2023-24 and last year were not available. But yes, Jo, it is a pattern of decline nationally across every art form in senior schooling.
JE: Just to give the listeners an idea, in Queensland, I'm looking at dance – so as you say, this is percentage change in enrolments, number of student enrolments, from 2015 to 2023. So, Queensland dance down 56%, I can see dance in Tasmania down 52%, dance in WA down 56%, WA drama down 48%. I mean, I could go on and on and on … drama in Queensland, 58%.
As usual, I would encourage listeners to read the AJE paper. There's a lot of detail in there, much more than we're discussing today, and there's a fantastic table that I just read some of those stats from showing all those state and territory enrolments for the different arts subjects. It's fascinating to look at if, like we say, a little bit sobering. I'll put a link to that paper in the transcript of this podcast, as usual, over at teachermagazine.com.
So, look, we've got this widespread decline then and you've dug into that data and shown that. I want to talk about a couple of the implications then. Firstly, the benefits of having arts in schools, not just for students in terms of the skills that are being developed there, but also for teachers.
SG: So, I might start off on this and John, please add in as I provide some insight here. I think we have to look at the current scenario that we're working in as educators and that is around the impact of Gen AI and what that might mean for our young people through education and then into the workforce. So, it is ubiquitous. It is everywhere. Young people are using it, academics are using it, universities are now grappling with policy and procedure around supporting young people with their engagement with Gen AI. So, it's just another tool. We had similar scenarios happen when computers came out – it was going to be the death of everything. It won't be, but we do need to grapple with it.
The importance of arts education in schooling right from early years through to senior years, then into tertiary and then that lifelong learning piece is really important because there are skills that cannot be replicated with AI, and they are skills that a lot of national and international reports are saying are the most important skills in the workforce. And roughly, they're what we call ‘the 4 Cs’: so, creativity, communication, collaboration, and critical thinking. The 2 big ones there are creativity, and critical thinking. The critical thinking piece is really important in the AI environment to work out, you know, what is actual useful information and what is an hallucination. So that kind of critical thinking is really important. But that creativity aspect, it crosses every single subject area, every area of the workforce. A lot of people think of creativity just about being art form and about training for being an artist, but if you look at the statistics from the ABS data, the number of people that identify as a professional artist or working part-time as the artist, they're not huge numbers, they're significant, but they're not huge.
We would say that creative arts education is not just about training artists. It's probably not the most significant reason for doing it. It is about a way of looking at the world that is different. It is about understanding that the world is experienced through your senses. So, the art forms are all feelings based and sensory based and there is the word for that, which is the aesthetic, it's the aesthetic framework. And that word comes from the Greek aesthetikos (apologies to Greek speakers if I said that incorrectly). But aesthetikos means through the senses, learning through the senses. And it is the only way of knowing in the world that engages both the brain, the cognitive aspect of our lives, and the emotive aspects simultaneously. Those 2 things come together to create creative knowledge. There is no other way of learning creative knowledge apart from bringing those 2 things together. And one of our drama colleagues, an extraordinary drama educator, Cecily O'Neill, calls that way of learning sensuous knowing, which is that real senses-based, visceral, embodied way of learning. So, the arts are hugely important when we're talking about engagement in creative activities or creative learning in schools because it is a very unique way of knowing and understanding the world.
The last thing I'd add is that all of the art forms are predicated on telling a story – whether that is the story through a visual medium, through an oral medium, through a spoken medium, through a physical medium. And there is a lot of research that has come out in the last 5 years that says story, the ability to understand and tell story, is the conduit to empathy. So, if you can literally walk in the shoes of another way of thinking or another person's story, you develop an empathetic response. And it would be my position to say the world that we're currently in probably needs more empathy now than ever before.
JE: Yeah. One of the other implications I was thinking about was maybe longer term down the track. Could this affect the future pipeline of arts teachers then? And then I guess that then leads us into another discussion about outfield teaching.
JNS: Yeah, what we're seeing is with those declines in enrolments in year 12, that the pool of young people and school leavers who are looking then at university courses in the creative arts, including teaching degrees within the creative arts, is also declining. So, Sandra mentioned earlier, we've seen a whole range of those creative arts university courses decrease or be completely removed. But I suppose it's interesting in the arts that most of us, including myself, did a first degree in our arts discipline; so mine was in drama and then my second degree was in education. And that's fairly common for secondary teachers to have those 2 degrees, or a Masters of Teaching and an undergraduate in their arts area.
And what we've seen was the impact of the Job-Ready Graduates scheme as well during the sort of period that we're looking at, that increased the cost of creative arts degrees quite substantially for university students. And what we've seen is that sort of pressure is also pushing people away from choosing creative arts degrees. And therefore, it's also impacting the number of people moving into the teaching field in the creative arts; so it's sort of a double whammy.
And when we're looking at out-of-field teaching, AITSL is probably the best place to look at data about in- and out-of-field teaching. We know that the arts and the performing arts are between 18 and 26% of teachers are out-of-field – so, they've been trained in one area and are teaching into the arts. And we found that quite alarming and surprising. And that's a big shift from a decade or so ago when it was more challenging and more competitive to find a job as an arts educator, but with the decline in enrolments now, that's also painting part of the picture.
So, it has been a really big shift for us. But I think that also goes into the quality of delivery of arts education as well. Arts are challenging to teach and having that very deep discipline knowledge and pedagogical knowledge is absolutely essential in delivering high quality arts experiences.
JE: So, given that schools are grappling with this challenge of out-of-field teachers in the arts then, and teachers themselves obviously are trying to navigate that challenge; for anybody that's, you know, turned up at school and you're teaching out-of-field, it's just, it's a, yeah, it's like being thrown in at the deep end, isn't it? Can you share some sort of practical advice then in terms of the supports maybe that are out there and some possible solutions to that?
JNS: I think the professional teaching associations in the arts are great places to go if a teacher is working out of field and it helps a teacher become, I guess, more in field. They're volunteer run, they deliver amazing professional learning by extraordinary teachers and leaders within the field at a state and a national level. So, I'd really encourage listeners to look into those associations, and they can go to the National Advocates for Arts Education, the NAAE website, to find links to the national and state associations.
But I think even more practically, we sort of, we really need to encourage teachers and school leaders to really be great advocates for the arts. We need to think about the kind of schools and the kind of society that we want. And even though we're in this sort of challenging chapter for arts education, we know that we don't want to be an artless society. The research from Creative Australia (2023) shows that, you know, almost every Australian engages in the arts in a fairly regular way, and so we know that we value it. And so, while we're in this sort of challenging period, we really need that great leadership from principals sending really good messages about why the arts are important, why they're valuable for young people.
SG: And to support young people into those creative arts pathways. I think it's really important that teachers really become familiar through their guidance officers, who get a lot of really valuable information about the pathways into universities or other training.
So, you know, the ATAR is such a, and I'm going to use the word deliberately, a burden on young people to achieve an ATAR, and an ATAR is not the beginning of an academic journey for all young people. There are multiple pathways that universities have open to them for young people to come in, experience a creative arts course and end up with a degree. Most universities will have a diploma pathway. So if you don't get the required ATAR for a creative arts course, you can come in and do that diploma pathway, which gives you then a year of what we call ‘advanced standing’ into a full degree course.
There are other ways of coming in, recognising qualifications like your AMEB or Trinity College qualifications. A number of universities have kind of university experience tasters. So here at QUT we have a program called START, where a senior secondary student can take 2 subjects in the course of their choice. They're free, so you don't pay HECS on them. And then [those 2 subjects] are credited into the course that they're coming in.
So, there's lots and lots of different pathways for young people to come in. Teachers really need to get that information from their guidance officers and provide that to young people, not only in the creative arts, but in every subject area and senior schooling.
JE: So, John, you mentioned there about the professional associations being a great source of resources and support and guidance. I'm wondering, you know, is it worth sort of schools grouping together? Schools supporting each other that are perhaps in the same area or, linking up, sharing successes, sharing what's helped? Is that a source of support as well that perhaps sometimes we don't think about?
JNS: Yeah, absolutely. I think the almost communities of practice that, you know, that exist and, you know, I think teachers moving to new areas, moving to new systems, moving to different states often are looking for those, you know, small communities of practice where they can be vulnerable and share that they don't know everything and look for that support. And I think that arts teachers are great teachers and are so willing to share and support each other and work really collaboratively. So, I think that's a really good point, Jo, that, you know, as a profession we do work shoulder to shoulder with each other and that sharing resources, sharing knowledge, supporting each other, in our clusters is really valuable.
That's all for this episode. Thanks to my guests, Professor Sandra Gatenhoff and Dr John Nicholas Saunders, and thanks to you for listening wherever you are. If you enjoyed this one, please take a moment to follow our show on your podcast app, if you haven't done that already, and leave us a review. Both of those things help more people like you to find our podcast, and they're a really big help to the team. We'll be back with a new episode very soon.
Teacher magazine is published by the Australian Council for Educational Research.
References
Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. (2025). Year 12 subject enrolments. https://www.acara.edu.au/reporting/national-report-on-schooling-in-australia/year-12-subject-enrolments
Creative Australia. (2023). Creating value: Results of the national arts participation survey. https://creative.gov.au/research/creating-value-results-national-arts-participation-survey
Gattenhof, S., & Saunders, J. N. (2026). The Polycrisis for Arts and Creative Education in Australia. Australian Journal of Education, 70(1), 87-106. https://doi.org/10.1177/00049441261421275
OECD. (2024). PISA 2022 results (Volume III): Creative Minds, Creative Schools, PISA. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/765ee8c2-en
