Mansfield group Unanima has been awarded a grant of £200,000 from Youth Music’s £2.25m Shift The Scene fund to provide creative opportunities for learning disabled and autistic young people amd help create spaces where disabled voices lead.

The Shift the Scene fund was launched following new research which revealed that disabled young people face disproportionate barriers when accessing the arts, creative education and employment.

Unanima is one of 13 organisations nationwide selected to receive funding.

Last year Youth Music published a report which exposes the systemic barriers disabled young people face when accessing the arts.

In found that disabled young people frequently encounter limited access to arts education, fear of judgement, and low expectations.

Despite their rights being enshrined in law, in practice they’re often not met.

The report also found that the UK is an international leader in creative access and inclusion, yet good practice is driven by specialist organisations rather than being ‘the norm’.

It added there was ‘a need for greater understanding of access and inclusion practices, more consistency in approach, and greater use of the social model of disability to remove barriers to engagement’.

Unanima is utilising Shift the Scene funding to dismantle the upstream lack of opportunity for learning disabled and autistic young people, replacing systemic barriers with a high-specification training pipeline.

By intervening early, the group aims to equip learning disabled and autistic young people with the ambition and the tangible possibility of more, seamlessly transitioning them into existing Unanima provision to cultivate their creative identities, addressing the post-education ‘cliff edge’ that many learning disabled and autistic young people face.

Tracy Radford, Unanima artistic, director and chief executive, said ‘At Unanima, we are confronting the hard truth that learning disabled and autistic artists remain profoundly underrepresented on our stages, not because of a lack of talent, but because the system has never been built with them in mind.

“That exclusion begins within education itself, where a lack of meaningful arts provision limits creative development, and is felt most sharply at the ‘cliff edge’ beyond it, where too many creative futures are never given the chance to exist.

“This programme is a decisive step toward changing that narrative.

“Representation is not a token gesture, it is about power, authorship and belonging.

“We are not just creating opportunity, we are claiming space, shifting culture and ensuring learning disabled and autistic artists are seen, heard, and leading from the front, redefining who theatre is for.”