Bachelor of Arts - Arts and Festivals Management (Honours)

BA (Hons) Arts and Festivals Management is one of the longest-running degrees of its kind in Britain, training the producers and administrators who make cultural events happen: arts management, festival and event production, cultural policy and funding, audience development, marketing for the arts, and venue operations, with January and September entries both recorded in the source export.

Leicester functions as the course’s workshop — students deliver real events into the city’s festival calendar, from community arts programmes to music and comedy platforms, and the enormous Leicester Diwali celebrations sit on the doorstep as a live case in large-scale cultural production. Assessment is production-led: budgets, funding bids, licensing and safety plans, and delivered events with real audiences, culminating in a final-year festival project.

The admission pattern deserves highlighting: five entry windows including January cycles, unusual for an arts-management degree, plus the standard £16,800 fee — and the course’s assessment structure means a January entrant joins production teams mid-cycle, which the course leaders treat as a feature, since real festival careers always begin mid-production. Students should budget modest personal event-attendance costs as informal but essential professional development.

The employment conversation needs both warmth and honesty: this is a vocational degree for a sector people enter out of love, where portfolios of delivered events drive hiring, freelance and fixed-term contracts are common early on, and pay trails the private sector — but the skills transfer cleanly into commercial events and back into South Asia’s expanding festival economy. The honours award qualifies for the Graduate Route at the 18-month post-2027 term, with no dependants on taught routes.