Here is a fact that surprises almost everyone who hears it. The UK’s creative industries are worth more to the economy than aerospace, automotive, life sciences, and oil and gas combined.

Not nearly as much. More.

In 2024 the creative industries contributed £145.8 billion to the UK economy, on the government’s latest figures, and grew by 4.6% in a year when the wider economy managed 1%. They employ 2.4 million people: roughly one working person in fourteen. Since 2010 they have grown at more than twice the pace of the economy as a whole, their share of Britain’s service exports has risen from under 9% to almost 15%, and the sector is now around a fifth larger than it was before the pandemic.

Where does that put them in the pecking order? Financial services, the industry we build skylines for, contributes about £209 billion. The creative industries contribute £146 billion. Defence, the sector of aircraft carriers and headlines, contributes £15 billion: around a tenth of the creative sector. Those are the government’s own figures, published this year.

Now the uncomfortable part. Every industry depends on a pipeline of people, and the pipeline for this one is creative education. For fifteen years, we have been cutting it. Entries to arts GCSEs in England’s state schools have fallen by more than 40% since 2010, on the Cultural Learning Alliance’s 2026 figures. The Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, directed by Hasan Bakhshi, reports that the education and skills system is no longer keeping up with the sector’s growth, and that most hard-to-fill creative vacancies are now caused by skills shortages. We built one of the largest industries in Britain, then quietly closed the road that leads to it.

Policy has begun to turn. The EBacc was scrapped in November 2025. The Curriculum and Assessment Review has asked schools to rebuild creative provision. The government’s Industrial Strategy names the creative industries one of eight growth-driving sectors, backed by £500 million in new research and innovation funding. The direction is right. The question is delivery. Rebuilding creative education requires expert partners, proven methods and sustained funding, and none of those appear by decree.

Money is not the whole argument, and we should not pretend it is. Geoffrey Crossick’s landmark Cultural Value Project for the Arts and Humanities Research Council concluded that the arts matter first at the level of the individual: in how a person thinks, imagines, empathises and judges. That is not a softer claim than the economic one. It is the reason the economic one is true.

Because here is what happens next. As artificial intelligence takes over routine work, the capacities machines cannot supply rise in value: creativity, curiosity, communication, compassion, courage. The World Economic Forum ranks creative thinking among the top skills the workforce now needs. The most important response to artificial intelligence is to build human intelligence, and the creative arts are the most powerful means we have of doing it.

This is why Creative Ignition exists. We put the creative arts at the heart of learning: professional artists working alongside teachers and leaders, deepening knowledge and building the five skills above, with every programme evaluated against a framework developed with the University of Winchester. The rooms change: a primary classroom, a training room, a community hall. The method doesn’t.

A £146 billion industry, and the human capacities that power every other one, are rebuilt the same way. One room at a time. That is our work.

If you want to see it, watch our film. If you want to back it, talk to us.