British artists have said the UK’s unique cultural output is under threat unless more is done to improve access to their industries, after analysis showed that almost a third of major arts leaders were privately educated. The Guardian spoke to visual artists, directors, classical musicians and playwrights about their views on class and the arts, and how they got managed to get established.

Steven Knight – Peaky Blinders, director/writer

“We have to get around the instinctive reaction to working-class accents a lot of people have, which is that this is somebody who’s either funny or dangerous. We as writers and producers and directors can help by not slipping into that – so that if we want a quick shorthand for ‘this person is dangerous’, we give them a broad working-class accent. Or ‘this person is going to say funny, stupid things’, we give them a working-class accent again. We can get around that. All we have to do is look out of the bloody window and see what’s really going on and then draw that, make a picture of that.”

Shane Meadows – This is England, director/writer

“I did my degree in the first year where they started student loans. So I was on a photography degree, and at the end of that first year I was in so much debt. I couldn’t actually afford to carry on. I ended up making short films via a local community project that had had some lottery funding. They’d been around for a few years and they had all of these reduced rates for equipment. It was quite ahead of its time – we’re talking 1994.

“I eventually won a short film competition and got five grand. I felt like I was a millionaire at the time but I remember that short film had been rejected as a joke by the local funding body because it didn’t fit. I wasn’t good at form filling or the bureaucracy, but I realised you don’t have to navigate all of that yourself.”

Larry Achiampong – visual artist

“The Guardian’s findings are a reminder of the many gross inequalities that exist in the arts and it’s about to get much worse. Access to higher education for the working classes in the arts is increasingly becoming an impossibility. When you look at the rates that people must pay to get on degree-level courses (and above), it’s no wonder that many drop off during said courses or even afterwards should they graduate. The game is rigged.”

Sally Wainwright – Happy Valley, showrunner/writer

“What strikes me more and more is what people get with a private education is confidence, you know, and that’s invaluable. That’s what really saddens me when I go back to the school that I went to. I’ve met kids there who are interested in TV but just really lack the confidence to do very much about it. Whereas I think if you go to a private school, it’s much more assumed that you can achieve what you want to.

“If you’ve got ambition, I think that takes you a long way. But sometimes you’ve got to have the confidence to have ambition and the confidence to see beyond the parameters of where you are.”

Mark Simpson – clarinettist

“I don’t think it’s possible for someone from my background to get to the level that I’m working within classical music today.

“Growing up in Liverpool in the late 90s, early 2000s, the classical music infrastructure was phenomenal. In my primary school I had a very enthusiastic headteacher who made us all play recorder, and then she would play classical music in the assemblies. We had a music teacher come in, who was paid for by the local council, and kids got the opportunity to play the clarinet.

“Under the umbrella of what was called the Liverpool music support service at the time, there were after-school music groups that were in different parts of the city, in different schools midweek. On the Saturday, we would all meet in what was called the Saturday morning music school.

“Access to the entry-level stuff has got to be free or affordable, because otherwise someone like me just wouldn’t know it existed, or get involved in it.”

Beth Steel – playwright

“For an enormous amount of time, funding bodies have ignored this, and if you are giving out money and not factoring in class then the institutions you fund will ignore it as well, because they’re not being asked to measure it. People meet targets when those targets are set.

“For a very long time people have avoided it because there’s an attitude that says ‘oh, it’s so difficult to define,’ but that has led to inaction. I didn’t get my first work put on by connections and a lot of the arts does work through those networks.”

Joanne Coates – photographer/artist

“If there is a project about class, it’ll be quite often done by a middle-class artist. And I think that that’s something that still really bothers me. Why could those people in the work not be the artist? There’s still a thing where working-class people have to be the subject.

“I don’t want to enter into the neoliberal part of the arts where you have to sell yourself and where the artist is commodity. That suits middle-class people more, and it’s because the arts are structured that way by middle-class people.”

Jesse Darling – Turner prize-winning artist

“The problem with arts participation and diversity is that there is no welfare state any more. Britpop and YBAs didn’t pay for school, they lived on the dole and had housing benefits – that was their government patronage. Now there’s wage labour and the housing crisis, and the welfare state has become increasingly difficult to access.

“Because of where I was, I was able to access the last gasps of that system: I was able to access working tax credits, university loans hadn’t ballooned to the amounts we see now, I was living in areas of London that were pre-gentrification and the rent was cheaper everywhere.”

Michael Socha – actor, The Gallows Pole

“I got my start at the Television Workshop, where loads of talented people have come through, from Vicky McClure to Samantha Morton. It was full of like-minded people from the same sort of background who, like me, wanted to act. I ended up there because it was accessible and on my doorstep.

“Even though I’ve had success with This Is England and The Gallows Pole, there’s a lot of impostor syndrome. When I get a job, like a big job, I often get quite intimidated by how elitist it is.”