Building Pathways for the Next Generation

These ten leaders share a common story: they reached their positions through chance encounters, individual tenacity, and perseverance against systemic barriers – particularly those from working-class, disabled, and global majority backgrounds. Their testimonies reveal a crucial truth; that lived experience within a community is a core expertise.

By addressing and acting on the issues explored here, we can shift from a sector built on individual resilience to one that creates accessible pathways for all leaders.

Alongside the accompanying timeline and policy analysis (found here), this piece brings together past and present wisdom with real life experience.

Sankofa, and the ‘Unwritten Curriculum’

The Sankofa principle – that the wisdom needed to build a better future lies in understanding the past – lives in this collective testimony. The leaders’ experiences form a body of knowledge born from necessity – and a need to share it.

Their impact has been forged not by the system, but often in spite of it. An ‘unwritten curriculum’ – pedagogy of resilience, creativity, mutual aid and adaptability – has emerged as a result. This knowledge is not taught in schools and universities, but learned through chance encounters, combative thinking, and constant adaptation to shifting policies and political landscapes.

These leaders describe not careers, but vocations – responses to wrongs that they instinctively or experientially identified early on, even if they couldn’t articulate them at the time. They worked out how to use art and creativity to affect their communities, and imagine ‘how things could be, for us, in the future’. This motivation continues to drive them today – they want change and continue to advocate for it.

Characterising the Cultural Education Leader

Within AND’s roundtables, there was a discussion about whether, and in which circumstances,

to apply the term leader, or educator. The interviewees here varied in their responses to the question – one noted that these were labels applied to them by others, not identities they claimed for themself. However it is described, theirs are roles that are inherently hybrid, often contested, and defined more by action and ethos than by job title. For the purposes of this essay, I’ll be using ‘leader’ to mean cultural education leader.

Leadership in this field is often a ‘portfolio career’, not by choice, but by necessity. It is not outlined or addressed within formal education, but a practice built from a combination of skills and attributes, which form part of each leader’s work:

  • The artist: making work, understanding craft, and pursuing creative
  • The educator: designing and implementing learning experiences, unlocking potential in others, transmitting
  • The administrator: understanding of budgets, funding applications, and planning.
  • The activist: an imperative to advocate for a community, an idea, or a more equitable system, turning personal experience into public

A leader is an idealist as well as a pragmatist. They need to know ‘how to build the case for good ideas’ as well as to think about balancing the books.

Leaders are often defined by their ability to operate in the gap between grand vision and less-grand reality.

Leaders have a role as ‘connectors’. They provide the link between youth clubs and theatres, community activism and policy rooms, as well as marginalised artists and institutional stages. One leader described a challenge they encountered working in a large cultural organisation that was aiming to develop a more holistic youth-centred approach. Many of the staff, across multiple departments, lacked experience working with young people. This led to dissonance and distrust with the cohort the organisation was attempting to attract.

The leader, because of their youth work background, was able to advise, advocate for, and, over time, successfully affect a cultural change in the way the organisation worked – one that it continues to benefit from.

Whilst the interviewees generally eschewed defining themselves as leaders or educators, it is clear that they share an approach to why they do what they do. Theirs is a commitment to access, a belief in the power of creativity to transform lives, and a practice of paying forward the opportunities that they themselves received.

Based on these responses and discussions, we can land on a tentative description that encompasses a range of approaches, careers and outcomes: a cultural education leader is a practitioner who works to shape a more equitable sector by facilitating learning and creating pathways for others.

The Catalysing Encounter, and the Door-Opener

These leaders did not necessarily emerge via a ‘cultural sector’ pathway, however. Their diversity of backgrounds means that they each bring a different set of tools and a unique perspective to the sector. Here are some of their stories that illustrate this:

Nuna’s youth club provided them with great, informative experiences growing up. When someone asked them, ‘what can you give back?’, Nuna realised they had ‘just been taking’, not ‘giving’. As a result of this revelation, they started teaching young people dance.

Liza’s lightbulb moment occurred while observing ‘belly-dancing and kebabs’ at a miners’ benefit when she was six. She now understands this was both a political and cultural awakening– which have become indivisible factors within her advocacy work.

Tony began as an actor, but their trauma-informed practice was developed through lived experience.

Rachel and Jamie both came to leadership through their own artistic practice – itself a form of activism that demands a space that still does not exist for disabled artists.

“My trajectory to becoming a leader was hugely influenced by having a portfolio career – I was a mixture of artist, educator, activist, coach, and facilitator.
That mix is fundamental to who I am now – I developed skills, viewpoints, and insights I simply wouldn’t have if I had just directed theatre, and which provide a richness of experience that is essential for leadership.”
- Rachel Bagshaw

The power of an encounter

A particular theme that emerges across the testimonies we gathered is the profound, occasionally life-altering power of a single encounter. Their journeys into cultural education leadership were not mapped out; they were often catalysed by individuals who saw potential, and who offered a key to a door that was otherwise invisible or firmly locked. These experiences – informal, personal, and altruistic – were often not with a formal mentor, but a pivotal individual whose intervention was instructive, and/or transformative:

Shereen described an early post-show encounter with a cultural figure she greatly admired. After Shereen explained she’d spent their last twenty pounds on a ticket, the artist gave her twenty pounds and said, ‘When you make it, pay it forward’. Many years later, having got a job working with that same person at the Young Vic, Shereen returned the money, and asked them to ‘pay it forward’ again. The episode embedded in Shereen a philosophy of leadership that is about understanding the impact you can have on others at all times, and how generosity of intention and practice can help to build positive legacy.

The catalytic encounter is often not just a ‘nice thing to happen’ – it is an essential intervention and act by someone with capital – social, institutional, knowledge-based or financial – choosing to spend it on someone without it. These ‘door-openers’ do not just offer opportunities– they demystify the path and provide a counter-narrative to the message that says, ‘this is not for you’. Recognising this, our leaders’ careers are largely dedicated to ‘paying it forward’ by reinvesting in others.

Tips for Leaders:

What Does This Mean for You?

Think about the chance encounters that helped you advance in your career:

  • Who has opened a door for you in your career?
  • Now, who can you open a door for?

Look around your organisation and network:

  • Whose potential might you be overlooking?
  • Can you make one intentional, proactive intervention this month? (If applicable) Audit your organisation’s early-career opportunities (internships, assistant roles, etc):
  • Are they paid fairly, and accessible to those without pre-existing financial support?
“For me, a cultural leader and a cultural educator are not the same. A cultural educator is actively engaged in teaching, sharing information, and building knowledge, whereas a cultural leader might not have direct engagement with individuals, instead focusing on shaping the local cultural sector’s outcomes or the intercultural narrative in their area. However, many of the best cultural educators also function as leaders, inspiring interest and change, and many of the best cultural leaders are also educators, embedded in the process of supporting, developing, and creating change for individuals and, by extension, the wider community, with a deep understanding of what people actually need.”
- Jamie Hale
“A leader in this context is a connector. They have to be able to
join the dots between very different worlds – from formal settings like schools and universities to the informal spaces in local neighbourhoods.
It’s about finding the connections between these often disparate spaces.
This also means being chameleon-like – to alter how you talk about cultural education depending on who you’re speaking to; the way you make the case to a teacher is completely different from how you would pitch it to a funder.”
- Paul Crook
“Leadership isn’t something I was ever formally taught – it’s iterative and instinctive; I’ve learned to trust my gut and constantly put myself in uncomfortable spaces, where the real learning happens – and my journey wasn’t a conscious career plan. I was a creative kid who didn’t fit in, but I had a talent and an interest in drama.
That was recognised by a teacher who took me under his wing – he saw something in me. That was the start. It’s those chance encounters, being spotted and nurtured, that set you on a path, and my whole career has been built on that foundation.”
- Steve Moffitt