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Over the past few years, I’ve spoken with dozens of arts educators who tell me something along the lines of “I love what I do – but sometimes it feels like I’m doing it alone”.
If you’ve ever taught theatre in an international school, you know the feeling: the studio tucked in a basement or a repurposed lunch hall, disconnected from the buzz of the school, happening somewhere else. The same can be true of finding a professional community: some of us have had thriving departments, while in other cases, many are the sole voice of their subject discipline in their entire school.
That sense of isolation is being felt even more sharply as global enrolment in arts courses continues to decline. In the UK, for example, GCSE and A-level entries in creative subjects have hit their lowest levels since 2010 (Campaign for the Arts, 2025). Entries have dropped by 48% at GCSE and 31% at A-level, with the steepest declines in dance, drama, music and film. Fewer students often means fewer colleagues, allies, budgets, and most painfully, less institutional support.
At ISTA, we’ve been thinking deeply about how to change that, how to create resources that don’t just sit on a shelf, but connect educators around the world through shared ideas and practical tools. I wrote this piece to share why this matters, and how we’re approaching it.
So while organisations like ISTA take on the long-term challenge of advocating for the arts in education globally, there are two urgent, immediate questions: (1) How do we support the teachers and students who are still in the room today? And, (2) How do we ensure that the arts courses, which are still running (often against the odds), remain well-prepared, well-resourced, and valued?
Why resources?
International qualification boards such as the International Baccalaureate (IB) provide strong curriculum and assessment guides, but these are often dense and technical by design. Teachers frequently need supplementary materials that translate complex requirements into day-to-day practice, and too often these are missing or limited in scope, adaptability and immediacy. If you’re the only theatre specialist in your school, every unit plan, rehearsal timeline or assessment strategy is often built alone. Rewarding? Yes. Lonely? Also yes.
That shortage of practical, accessible resources is not accidental, but the result of a wider publishing gap.
The publishing gap we are closing
Part of the challenge is structural. Large educational publishers, including those connected to organisations like the IB, have traditionally avoided producing teacher workbooks, student handbooks or tailored resources for arts subjects. The reason is simple economics: with fewer than 10,000 candidates enrolled worldwide in many pre-university arts courses each year, these are seen as “small subjects,” not large enough to guarantee a profitable return. The result is a chronic shortage of high-quality, reliable materials — a gap that has persisted for decades.
This is exactly where non-profits like ISTA play a meaningful role. We invest in resources not for commercial gain, but because teachers and young people deserve excellent support, regardless of the subject size. This way, arts education is not left behind simply because of its scale. Yet we also recognise that others are moving into this space, and that a new wave of AI-generated content is already beginning to fill the gap, bringing with it both opportunities and significant risks.
The new content landscape: gold, glitter and AI
AI has supercharged content production, unleashing a surge of content online. While some of it is useful, much of it is produced without a deep understanding of curriculum demands. Slick presentation often masks weak substance: activities that look polished can misalign with assessment criteria or collapse in practice. In this landscape, volume is not the same as value, and what glitters is not always gold.
This is where we hope organisations like ISTA can also play a meaningful role: helping to safeguard standards of accuracy, creativity and pedagogical rigour at a time when they risk being diluted. We leverage AI to make processes more efficient and support content generation, but our aspiration is to pair technology with the wisdom of experienced artists, educators, examiners, and curriculum developers. Our goal is not to replace human expertise, but to use new tools to expand possibilities, not flatten them.
Building connection through resources
We see ISTA’s resources not as ends in themselves, but as bridges that help teachers feel part of something bigger, connecting isolated classrooms to a global conversation about arts education and offering adaptable tools that can work across diverse contexts.
From our free monthly resources for members, to classroom materials such as posters that bring key concepts to life, IB aligned handbooks and on demand video courses with practising experts, our focus is on clarity, creativity and collaboration. We are also trying to make access more sustainable, offering both print on demand and digital download options so teachers can choose what works best for their setting. These are small steps, but we believe they can make a difference, and we are committed to doing more.
Why it matters
Our hope is that by curating tools grounded in course expertise and enriched with intercultural perspectives, ISTA can help teachers transform classrooms into hubs of creativity and connection. Because whether arts educators are teaching solo in a small school or within a large department, they and their students deserve to feel part of something bigger.
A shared sense of purpose is what sustains us as educators, and what allows young people to thrive as globally minded artists, collaborators and thinkers.
Building connection starts with sharing what we have. If you or your colleagues are teaching theatre or film, explore our growing collection of resources from practical handbooks, posters to interactive games and on-demand learning designed to make teaching feel more connective.
