National Youth Theatre’s Assemble to create systemic change in recruitment of young disabled and creative talent with landmark £2.3m UK Fund grant

Thanks to National Lottery players, National Youth Theatre has received £2.3 million over three years from The National Lottery Community Fund, the largest community funder in the UK. The funding will be used to support the professional and personal development of D/deaf, disabled, learning disabled and neurodivergent young people, expanding their skills through training and creative placements with theatres and arts centres across the UK.

This comes from The UK Fund, one of The National Lottery Community Fund’s significant commitments as part of its 2023-2030 strategy, ‘It starts with community’, funding projects that help children and young people thrive – one of the funder’s four key missions.  

This landmark grant will support National Youth Theatre to work with leading venue partners Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff; Exeter Northcott Theatre; Lowry; Mayflower, Southampton and Sheffield Theatres to deliver its flagship inclusion programme Assemble in a landmark grant to support inclusive engagement, progression and recruitment in the sector.

Co-designed with its beneficiaries, Assemble aims to create systemic change in how the creative sector recruits, supports and retains D/deaf, disabled, learning disabled, and neurodivergent talent through building awareness of creative opportunities at colleges, a network of inclusive cultural venues and leading to new sustainable career paths across the creative industries for young disabled people.

This is the first time the UK Fund is supporting a children and youth voice project that engages disabled and neurodivergent young people in arts and culture. The £2,365,914 grant over 3 years also represents the largest grant in the history of the National Youth Theatre and provides a welcome impact boost ahead of its 70th anniversary in 2026.

95% of participants in the pilot scheme were unaware of creative career paths before taking part, with 90% keen to pursue a creative career after engaging with the programme. Half of disabled people in the UK do not have a paid job, more than double the rate of the rest of the working-age population (ONS 2024). This disabled-led, youth-led and locally led programme will provide inclusive practice training for cultural employers and unlock cultural visits, work experience and new creative employment progression opportunities in mainstream cultural spaces.

Assemble’s approach will establish long-term cross-sector partnerships between 18 educational providers, 18 cultural venues and creative employers, and community organisations, foregrounding disabled young voices in challenging entrenched inequality and discrimination. Assemble aims to build on the creative sector’s potential as an employment sector for D/deaf, disabled, learning disabled and neurodivergent young people and tackle barriers around opaque career routes and the lack of connectivity between cultural venues, disabled young people and non-mainstream colleges.

Building on existing work in Greater Manchester, South Wales and London, Assemble will expand into Exeter, Sheffield, and Southampton to work with seven times more young people and five times more volunteers thanks to the fund. The expanded programme will be delivered with six flagship cultural venue partners around the UK: Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff; Exeter Northcott Theatre; Lowry; Mayflower, Southampton; National Youth Theatre and Sheffield Theatres. NYT will collaborate with inclusion and disabled-led companies across the UK to support and evaluate the programme to ensure it complements existing work across the sector.

The project will lay the groundwork for many more disabled and neurodivergent young people to access sustainable creative careers in future as indirect beneficiaries by introducing new, inclusive and scalable creative career pipelines with and for learning disabled and neurodivergent young people that can be replicated nationally.

Over the past seven years, NYT has developed impactful work with and for D/deaf, disabled and neurodivergent young people, in partnership with disabled people’s organisations, education providers, and cultural organisations. NYT is currently co-producing with Theatre Centre and Sheffield Theatres a national tour of My Brother’s A Genius by Debris Stevenson, a neurodiversity-centred production seed-commissioned as part of NYT’s new writing festival StoryFest in 2024. The charity’s work has been recognised in national reports by The National Lottery Community Fund and Arts Council England.

NYT is a Disability Confident Employer and inaugural Change Partner in Ramps on the Moon, the national disability equity consortium resident at Sheffield Theatres, embedding disability equality in cultural venues. The charity was the first youth creative organisation to be awarded the Silver Level Trauma Informed Quality Mark, by One Small Thing, recognising that the individual needs of the young people we engage are prioritised. Earlier this year, NYT was part of the Inclusive Progression Routes programme with Access All Areas and A New Direction to create sustainable and inclusive recruitment practices. It is a holder of the Department for Education’s Matrix Standard for high-quality information, advice, and guidance for Learners. Find out more at www.nyt.org.uk/assemble

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About National Youth Theatre

National Youth Theatre empowers young people to tell stories and find their voices on leading stages, screens and behind the scenes. For 70 years we have equipped young people with toolkits to realise their creative potentials, from Helen Mirren and Daniel Craig to Regé-Jean Page, Ed Sheeran and Florence Pugh. Partnering with Netflix, Sky, EON Productions, Microsoft and other leaders we pioneer an industry-oriented approach where young people learn from top professionals in front of live and online audiences, including our 10m online audience. We work nationally and inclusively with 15,000 young people annually aged 11-25, and up to 30 if disabled/neurodivergent, providing progression routes to careers across the creative industries. NYT training is accessible, inclusive and relevant to all young people. We break down barriers to opportunity, engage diverse young people, build confidence and skills and create the next generation of award-winners and creative leaders.

About The National Lottery Community Fund

We are the largest non-statutory community funder in the UK – community is at the heart of our purpose, vision and name. We support activities that create resilient communities that are more inclusive and environmentally sustainable and that will strengthen society and improve lives across the UK. We’re proud to award money raised by National Lottery players to communities across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and to work closely with Government to distribute vital grants and funding from key Government programmes and initiatives. As well as responding to what communities tell us is important to them, our funding is focused on four key missions, supporting communities to:

1. Come together
2. Be environmentally sustainable
3. Help children and young people thrive
4. Enable people to live healthier lives

Thanks to the support of National Lottery players, we distribute around £500 million a year through 10,000+ grants and plan to invest over £4bn of funding into communities by 2030. We’re privileged to be able to work with the smallest of local groups right up to UK-wide charities, enabling people and communities to bring their ambitions to life. National Lottery players raise over £30 million each week for good causes throughout the UK. Since The National Lottery began in 1994, £49 billion has been raised and more than 670,000 individual grants have been made across the UK - the equivalent of around 240 National Lottery grants in every UK postcode district.