Hundreds of babies born in Leicester are to be tracked by researchers for the first 25 years of their lives to examine the impact of regular exposure to arts activities.

Arts Council England (ACE) and De Montfort University (DMU) in Leicester announced details of the Talent25 project on Friday.

The importance to children of activities such as being read to and reading, listening to and learning music, going to the cinema, theatre, libraries and museums, has been mostly taken as a given. The Talent25 project aims to provide the first rigorous academic evidence of this.

Its backers also hope it will provide lessons on what does and does not work when it comes to engaging children culturally and developing talent.

Dominic Shellard, DMU’s vice-chancellor, said he thought the project would be a game changer.

“I firmly believe that the creative urge is in all of us from birth, but this has to be cultivated and we, as adults, parents, carers, educators and policymakers, each have a duty to play our role to ensure that young people have equality of opportunity to be involved in artistic and cultural activities such as art, music and dance.”

He said the project would reveal much about opportunity and access to the arts. “Crucially, it will in time give us the information, data and insight needed to allow all of our children and young people to enjoy the benefits of a full cultural life.”

The scheme will recruit 100 babies and their families in 2019 and track them for the next 25 years. Another 100 will be recruited in 2020, and so on for at least two more years.

Darren Henley, the chief executive of ACE, said every child had the capacity to be creative and opportunities to realise potential should be equally available.

“Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not,” he said. “We hope that Talent25 will help us to better understand what might make a difference to young people’s talent development and cultural engagement.”

The intention is to discover what works best in Leicester in order to develop a programme that can be introduced to cities across the UK.

Arts policymakers are increasingly attempting to better explain the benefits of arts and culture beyond it being fun, or good for the soul, or a moneyspinner.

The culture secretary, Jeremy Wright, announced recently that he would convene a summit of academics and experts this year to discuss the measurement of cultural value “so that we will be better placed to make fully rounded arguments about culture’s true value to society”.

The Talent25 project has echoes of Michael Apted’s Up series of documentaries that have followed the lives of 14 British children since 1964; and Robert Winston’s Child of Our Time series for the BBC and Open University, which has followed 25 children born in 2000.