This post is written by Dr Corinna Geppert.

As somebody who is involved into “number crunching”, doing statistics, I often wonder: What story will these numbers tell me? What sort of patterns, correlations or differences between groups of people will emerge? And then I start, do the first steps of analysis and realize that there are really exciting results.

I am delighted that the WAVE 1 survey report is now launched. It includes data on over 2300 students in TALE schools all over the country and it is meant to give a first overview on the survey findings, without too much interpretation at this stage.

Some of the highlights are:

1. Encouragement from school and family has an important impact on students’ engagement in the arts.
2. Students draw a clear distinction between the arts and other academic subjects. They report that their academic workload often prevents them from becoming more deeply involved in the arts.
3. Many students report that the arts promote well-being by helping them to express themselves and alleviate stress.
4. The majority of students surveyed regularly participate in film and music activities.
5. About a quarter of the surveyed students report that they are planning to study an arts subject in the future, but only a fifth are considering an arts-related career.
6. Arts activities are important for students with a physical disability – many were active participants in the arts, felt supported, would like to do more and were planning to participate in the arts in the future.

These findings are encouraging because they show that the arts have a meaning to students, but that they sometimes need support to get engaged.

To support these findings and to put them on stable grounds, we collected more data from schools in autumn 2017. I’m looking forward to analysing the data and see how robust our findings are. A report including the WAVE 1 and WAVE 2 findings will be available in summer 2018 and will show us once again that numbers can turn into meaning.

Download the Wave 1 Survey report here.

Schoolcopy_WAVE 1 Report