Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Part of our commitment to increasing equality, diversity, and inclusion is to monitor the demographic data of our creatives, audiences, and staff. This is so we can understand who is/isn’t getting involved, celebrate how diverse Peterborough’s creative communities are, and take an honest look at where we can do better. We hope that being transparent about our stats makes us accountable for the work we are doing.

Please note that our reporting years run from April – March. The below stats are for April 2024 – March 2025. Our 2025 / 26 data will be released in Summer 2026.

Where we’ve improved

– We’ve improved the diversity of ethnicity of artists we’ve worked with.

– Including “friends of the consortium” to improve diversity has maintained an increase in diversity of our staff and consortium across age, gender, ethnicity.

– We continue to reach a wide range of cultural and ethnic communities, particularly increasing Asian / Asian British diaspora.

– We’ve increased the amount of men participating in our programme.

Where we need to do better

– Age: Young people aged 20-24 continue to be our lowest age demographic.

– DDN: we have had a decrease in the amount of deaf, disabled, and/or neurodivergent people participating in our programme. We have however not had a specific co-created with those audiences in 2024, and we are working on continuing to improve access across all our programme to address this decrease.

– Artist data: our artists data from people returning our demographic survey is lower than the artists we have worked with. To address this, our EDI group suggested that we change when we ask people for this information to the beginning of a project, rather than annually.

Diversity of our audience

From April 2024-25, we reached 49,905 people in-person and online. Our survey responses suggest that:

Gender: 65.6% Woman, 27.9% Man, 2.3% Non-Binary, 0.5% identify as Other and 2.9% preferred not to say. There has been a 10% increase in Male audiences from the previous years’ data.

Ethnicity: 67.5% White British, 16.5% Asian or British Asian, 3.4% identify as Other White Background e.g Eastern European, 3.7% identify as Mixed/Multiple Ethnic Backgrounds, 4.4% identify as Black or Black British, and 3.1% preferred not to say. We have seen an overall rise in Global Majority audiences, particularly from the Asian / British Asian diaspora.

Age: 15% were under 19, 4.8% were 20-24, 15.7% were 25-34, 27% were 35–44, 14% were 45-54, 8% were 55-64, 7% were 65-74, 4% were 75+, and 3% preferred not to say. Most age brackets remain similar to last year’s data, with an overall younger average age.

Disability: 28% identify as Deaf, Disabled, Neurodivergent, and/or Learning Disabled. Of those, 7.8% are physically disabled, 6.4% have a mental health condition, 9.9% are neurodivergent, 4% are deaf, 1.7% are visually impaired, 4.9% are learning disabled, and 3.5% are Other. 63% are Non-Disabled and 8.1% preferred not to say. We have seen a 16% decrease in DDN audiences overall, as we postponed the start date of our Reasonable Adjustment programme due to our office move.

As part of our evaluation, we compare our demographic data with citywide stats to understand if our audiences are reflective of the make-up of Peterborough. From analysing this data, our target audiences for 2025-26 are disabled people (sustaining our engagement figure from this year), men, young people aged 20-24, and global majority (particularly South Asian & British Pakistani diaspora).

Diversity of our artists

From April 2024-25, we worked with 88 artists or organisations. Our survey responses suggest that:

Gender: 38.7% Man, 54.8% Woman, 0% Non-Binary, 3.2% Other, and 3.2% preferred not to say.

Sexuality: 67.7% Heterosexual, 9.6% Bisexual, 9.6% Queer, 12.9% Gay, and 3.2% preferred not to say.

Ethnicity: 54.8% identify as White or White British, 6.4% identify as Black or Black British, 22.5% identify as Asian or Asian British, 3.2% identify as Multiple Ethnic Backgrounds/Mixed Heritage, and 16% identify as White Other.

Age: 28% were 20-34, 37.5% were 35-49, and 31% were 50-64.

Disability: 14% identify as Deaf, Disabled or Neurodivergent, 86% as non-disabled. Of the 14%, 3.3% Neurodivergent, 3.3% Mental Health Condition, 3.3% Physical Disability, 3.3% Blind / Visual Impairment, 3.3% Hidden Disability. Overall the amount of DDN artists we have worked with has decreased by 8%.

Diversity of our staff and consortium

From April 2024-25, our staff and consortium demographics suggest that:

Gender: 35.7% identify as Man, 64.2% identify as Woman.

Sexuality: 78% identify as Heterosexual, 7% identify as Queer, 14% identify as Bi.

Ethnicity: 71% identify as White British, 14% identify as Asian British, 6% and 7% identify as Mixed.

Age: 28.5% are 20-34, 50% are 35-49, 21.4% are 50-64.​

Disability: 22% identify as Deaf, Disabled or Neurodivergent, 57% identify as Non-Disabled, and 21% preferred not to say. Within this, 14% are Neurodivergent, 7% Blind / visual impairment, and 7% physical disability.

An action we have taken to increase the diversity of our staff, consortium, and strategic team, is to invite guests from the many communities we work in to be “friends of the consortium”, attending occasional meetings. If you’d like to know more about this, please get in touch. In 2024 we also implemented “Associate Producers” – a new job role in which we will prioritise diversifying our staff team.

Our EDI action plan sets out much of what’s contained on this website page into yearly targets. You can read the full EDI action plan by clicking here. We’ve also summarised some more steps we are taking to improve our EDI within all things Peterborough Presents.

Improving our recruiting process
e.g. accepting non-written applications

Investing in our EDI working group to continue to improve our equality, diversity, and inclusion across all the programme