Item 3 is to discuss the success to date of “Time to Shine: Scotland’s Youth Arts Strategy For Ages 0-25”. This first national 10-year youth arts strategy was published in November 2013, and we are fully aware that some of its aims may be realised only over the longer term. Nonetheless, today’s session provides an opportunity to discuss a number of areas. We are particularly interested in how the strategy has been implemented to date, in how it has helped to change the provision of and engagement in youth arts, and in the progress that is required to ensure its full implementation.
I welcome to the committee Judith Barclay of the National Youth Orchestras of Scotland; Blair Boyle of youth arts voice Scotland; Alison Hardie of Young Scot; Kenny McGlashan of Youth Theatre Arts Scotland; and Mark Sheridan, a reader in music and creativity at the University of the Highlands and Islands.
We will get under way by going straight to questions from members. Before I ask other members to come in, I will run along the line and ask a very general background question. What do you believe the impact of Scotland’s first youth arts strategy has been? Has it made a quantifiable difference to the way in which youth arts are looked at and dealt with on a day-to-day basis?
One key indicator of the time to shine strategy and the investment is a recognition of the value of the arts and young people in Scotland. It is an investment in confidence in the organisations across the country that work with young people. That raising of confidence and recognition of the work is very welcome given the past few years of financial uncertainty and other priorities and so on. For our country to say that we appreciate and want to invest further in young people and culture is a big message.
I agree with everything that Mark Sheridan has said. It has been a fantastic opportunity for many arts companies and bodies to come together and collaborate. It is a really positive effect of the strategy that we can club together and try to make a difference.
I would reiterate what has been said. Youth Theatre Arts Scotland works as a sector development organisation and we represent a number of members in different regions and practice as an umbrella organisation. The feedback that we have had from our members and from participants at our events has been that the strategy is about recognition and dialogue. First, there has been recognition of what they have already been doing and of the impact that they can have in the future. Secondly, the dialogue that the strategy will promote within the art form sectors in the regions and with the connected education and cultural sectors with which they regularly engage is really exciting. That dialogue is vibrant and creates an opportunity for the future.
I agree with everything that has been said. It has been great to enrich young people’s lives with the different ideas of culture and the arts. So far, it is just the early stages, but it will be good to see how far it is going to go and how good it will be.
As Fiona Hyslop wrote in the foreword to “Time to Shine”, if Scotland wants to become an international leader in youth arts, we must put young people at the heart of what we do. We are already starting to see that through the recruitment of youth arts voice Scotland and the work that it is doing. Through that engagement with young people we will start to see improved, targeted provision for young people across Scotland.
That is an interesting point and it leads on to my next question, which is a practical one. What has been achieved as a result of the strategy that would not have been achieved had the strategy not been in place? I know that it is early days, but what changes have started because of the strategy? Alison Hardie mentioned one change, but are there more?
One of the things about the strategy that I found inspiring and reassuring to our sector and members was the fact that the focus seems to be on the links, connections and networking, rather than just on funding buildings or specific practice in a specific area.
Youth Theatre Arts Scotland was established 10 to 12 years ago following some research by the Scottish Arts Council that recognised that a body was needed within the youth theatre sector that would be distinct from the buildings, regions and individual companies and which would professionalise the sector, support the development of professionals within it and target gaps, barriers and opportunities for progression and participation as well as provision. Those three themes have carried through into the strategy and that is exciting. It is not about funding one company. It is about how the links are made that will then raise the game across the nation. That character of the strategy is encouraging.
We feel that the legacy of the development that we have shown in the youth theatre sector, which has become very proactive in its self-development is evidence that that model can work. It just needs to be given time. It took our organisation a couple of years to get the funding in place, and it took a number of years to establish the different milestones. The strategy just needs time if it is to create the long-term effects that Fiona Hyslop outlined when it was launched.
The establishment of the youth hubs has been an advantage for us in the Highlands. Of course, there has been a substantial investment around the country, but in the Highlands there are 13 different cultural and arts organisations as well as community learning and the university, and the hub has brought together organisations that, despite inhabiting the same environment, had had little or no involvement with each other. That in itself is a major step forward.
Greater integration or having more of an interface enables us to get to harder-to-reach young people and those who live in isolated communities, and the hub gives us an opportunity to think differently about how we do that and to think innovatively and imaginatively across the arts and about how we work with young people. It is still early days, but this has been an important step forward for us.
I am sure that members will have questions about the hubs, but in the meantime, I call Colin Beattie.
With such initiatives, there is always the risk of creating another bureaucratic layer. Have we avoided that? Is it even an issue?
Young Scot’s role in this is to support young people’s involvement and empower them to participate in the strategy. We need to work with those young people to ensure that we do not have that other level of bureaucracy and that they can easily access and influence the strategy. As part of our role, we are recruiting the youth arts voice Scotland group and ensuring that those young people are empowered to work with the hubs, the national organisations and so on. As I have said, that should ensure that we do not have the layer of bureaucracy that you have referred to.
But have we avoided creating that bureaucratic layer?
I would say so, because I do not think that there is any evidence of it. Given that the hubs were already very distinct from the money in the strategy, that money is getting channelled to the networks on the ground in order to meet the objectives. In any case, the number of staff in the hubs is very small; there are only two or three people in each and, because their job is to provide links and connections, they are effectively streamlining partnership working in the region with some attention to and investment in that.
Creative Scotland’s youth arts programme management team is also small, and the events themselves are large networking ones that allow national, local and regional organisations to come together. I cannot see any evidence of a large amount of administration or of resources for administration using up the funding that has been set aside.
Taking that a step further, I note that one of the strategy’s key aims is to create access for all and reach young people we would not have the opportunity to reach otherwise. Is there a danger that, by widening the focus, Scottish artists might not achieve international excellence? In other words, are we diluting the talent instead of bringing more up?
I would say no—in fact, it is the opposite. If you encourage this sort of engagement, you will get more talent and more engagement with the arts. Instead of being diluted, it will actually be more concentrated.
10:15
As we are a national company, we are quite different from some of the things that are going on. The strategy is not diluting anything. We have found at NYOS that it gives us the opportunity to work with people with whom we would not necessarily have worked before. Everybody always looks at us as the pinnacle for young musicians—we are what they aim towards. We are not changing anything. We are opening up at the grass-roots level and holding workshops and offering everything that we can to young people, but there is still the scope for people who want to reach the top of their game and have a career as a worldwide musician. There is still the option to do that, so we are definitely not diluting it in that sense.
I understand the concern about the potential for centralisation and bureaucracy whenever an investment is made. However, our understanding of Creative Scotland and the way that things are facilitated—Kenny McGlashan is right—is that there is a sense of ownership locally. That is what we see on the ground.
I would say that the opposite of dilution is taking place. Time to shine builds on what we do through curriculum for excellence and getting it right for every child. It is about the individual young person in Scotland, what they want to achieve and how we help them, no matter who they are. There are a lot of young people who are not engaged with arts and culture who could be. The key to that, which I mentioned in my submission, is interagency working not just in culture but in community learning, education and the health and wellbeing agenda across local communities.
Rather than diluting, I would like to see more people coming through to enrich what we have already. I will give you a short anecdote. The chief executive of Scottish Opera, for instance, would say that, as a nation, we have a small cohort of people who have the potential to be world-class opera singers. That is just a genetic fact, so you need large numbers of people to take part if anyone is going to come through. What we have is a nation of young people who can excel in all sorts of different areas. If we give people the opportunity to choose what they want to do and how to do it, we will see more skilled people and experts across the range of arts and culture that we have in the country.
As a sector development agency, Youth Theatre Arts Scotland characterises itself as distinct from the Scottish Youth Theatre or the national performing arts companies, through the richness of diversity that we represent in practice. Obviously the national youth theatre company, the Scottish Youth Theatre, is rich in terms of its participants and projects as well.
At our national festival of youth theatre, nine youth theatres from nine regions in Scotland and beyond will come together to show different ways of working. I want to challenge the idea of dilution. For me, that would only come from there being one way in which to progress. Scotland is characterised by its diversity of practice, both within the regions and within the art forms. We find it very rich when those groups come together at our national festival.
At one of the first national festivals of youth theatre that I attended, before I ran the organisation, I saw a range of groups. One came from a theatre that was a large, building-based organisation and next to that was a young carers’ group, which was a youth theatre of three young people who wanted to come together and write their own stories. The next piece was an international project and then the next piece was the deaf youth theatre. Those are four companies who work in completely different ways. They do not have four similar ways to progress; they have four different ways to progress. The dilution idea does not work, because the pathways are so distinctly different.
I was struck by a comment on page 2 of Mark Sheridan’s submission. It says that a practitioner said:
“two years is a reasonable amount of time to set foundations, begin projects and raise awareness ... but I think that two years is a very over-ambitious target to develop fully sustainable arts provision.”
Will the panel comment on that?
In a lot of the submission you will see anxiety about sustainability. We have a 10-year vision and two-year funding, and arts organisations are always anxious about their exit strategy. We are flagging up that we are already seeing the potential for that issue. As members of the hub, we have to make the approach work. We have to work together to try to engage and answer the question ourselves, as well as asking as we come towards the middle or the end of the second year where we are going and how we get there.
That is what is being raised in that comment, but I would be interested to hear what others have to say.
The hubs are getting set up so we have found that it has taken us longer to implement the workshops and other work that we wanted to do. Our worry is that we might get towards the end of the two years and only just be establishing the relationships. Because we are a national company and not a self-sufficient hub, we are supposed to support others, but we worry that, at the end of the two years, we might lose contact with the hubs.
We are focusing everything into two years, but it is difficult to get it all set up in that time and to sustain it after those two years have passed.
I have been reading the same paper as Colin Beattie and the comments from the same community learning practitioner, who also says that we
“see limited evidence of organisations working”
together and that
“Nearly a year into the project this hasn’t really been discussed”.
She—or he—also says:
“We need to address how inclusion and equality … are addressed … At present there is limited evidence to show that this is at the forefront of the minds of arts organisations”.
As an MSP for the Highlands and Islands I appreciate the difficulties in remote and rural areas, but my understanding is that the strategy is all about bringing the talent forward, whether it is an opera singer—or whatever they want to be—from Bettyhill or Unst. It seems that your own community learning practitioners are not overly confident in the strategy.
Yes, and that is one of the reasons why that statement from that practitioner is important.
There have been a number of meetings of the hub. To be honest, we did not really get started until November. A year on from the launch of the strategy is not a year on for the hubs because they were established in the summer. However, the point that the practitioner makes in that comment is that there are two different ways of looking at the matter. That is also my perspective from working in community arts as well as education.
The arts and cultural organisations do what they do really well and work with young people who tend to come to them anyway. That practitioner is saying that we must be aware of the hard-to-get young people—the ones who have difficulty in engaging—and she is further initiating conversations in the hub about the need to address that. I am with her and the other organisations in the hub. We have discussed the issue and one of our priorities is to consider it.
I thought that it had to be a woman because she was speaking out so forcefully. We can be assured that inclusion and equality will be addressed in the future.
Yes, absolutely.
Alison Hardie mentioned that Scotland is an international leader in youth arts. The briefing paper that we have from the Scottish Parliament information centre shows the numbers of students taking arts courses between 2008 and 2013. At school, there is not a huge change but, at college, the number of students taking performing arts courses fell 28 per cent in that time. In dance the number fell 83 per cent, in theatre and dramatic arts it fell 60 per cent, and in music performance it fell 54 per cent.
Those figures are not exactly going in the right direction for us to be an international leader in youth arts. What is happening?
I will comment on that and open it up. During the past decade—
Those figures are just for 2008 to 2013.
Yes, but during the past decade, previous to 2008, there was a large increase in the number of arts courses in further education.
If we take my area—music—there were large numbers of courses in music production, recording, performance, business and commerce. However, the reality of the creative industries is that there are fewer opportunities for young people to gain professional access. We have recognised that over the years.
The issue is recognising the courses in which we should invest at further education level. At my college, we collaborate with lots of colleges across the UHI and others in the central belt. In the courses that are now working, we have strong, powerful, well-motivated and highly skilled staff. We have strong numbers.
I am not saying that they are not powerful, but those are the figures that I have and they do not make great reading. Are those figures wrong?
The numbers of people who would have graduated from those courses who then went on to work in the creative industries are probably missing. That is the kind of measure that we probably do not have.
Many fewer are graduating now than in 2008.
More may be gaining employment now than previously. That may be the issue.
There is a huge reduction, which is a serious concern.
My third question is about creative and professional access. I will come to Judith Barclay shortly.
I was quite shocked to discover the crafts figures. Of 11,000 students who were enrolled on creative arts and design programmes in Scottish higher education institutions, there were 60 crafts students in Edinburgh and 70 in Glasgow. We are not very serious about creativity in crafts and professional access to them, but they are an enormous employability opportunity and money earner, whether or not a person is sitting at home. Crafts and design are huge, and we come up with 130 students. Does anyone want to talk about that? Am I right to be shocked? Maybe not; maybe that is the best that we can do.
My final question is on music tuition fees and is to Judith Barclay. Just before Christmas, I submitted a freedom of information request, and I was quite shocked to find that people in some areas have to pay £30 a month for music tuition; people in some areas can do their Scottish Qualifications Authority music exam free whereas in other areas people have to pay for that; in some areas people get concessions if they are on income support whereas in other local authority areas people get nothing; and some people are means tested—they get a little bit of help if they take all their earnings along to the school and those earnings are under £26,000.
The postcode lottery on music tuition must bar a lot of talented people. If we are serious about equality and giving everybody an equal opportunity, what are your thoughts on charging for music tuition? In your experience, has that prevented people from poorer backgrounds from taking music? What about people who earn less than £26,000 who have the humiliation and embarrassment of taking payslips to the school? Can I get comments on that and on crafts, please?
Obviously, there is a lot in there.
But the music tuition—
We will need to try to separate things out.
That was my final question; I just want an answer to it.
Yes, I know.
I can give an answer on music tuition to start off with.
You can start with that.
I completely agree with what has been said about music tuition. There is an absolute minefield. I agree that it can be embarrassing for young people to have to admit to any kind of financial problems.
The issue is massive. We are still suffering cuts all over the place, such as in Saturday morning music centres. People now have to be charged because there is a lack of resources. We need to look at how we can iron things out so that there is equality for everybody.
We are suffering a lot of cuts. If young people suffer from them, private tuition will have to be paid for, as there will be nothing for them to use. Private tuition will be expensive, of course. That is an issue, but I do not know how we can address it, as things are completely off balance everywhere we look and there are many problems with the cuts.
The question is whether music tuition is a priority.
I would say that it is, but that is because I am a musician. The arts can have a massive and positive impact on young people’s lives. I would like to think that the strategy will have that effect, but it will take time.
Going back to Mary Scanlon’s point about the drastic drop in numbers, it takes a long time to perfect any kind of art, to be able to study it and to be at the standard where one can attend a conservatoire. It is worth considering that the initial impact of the strategy will not show up straightaway in the figures; it will be evident in seven or eight years’ time, when young people have managed to perfect their skills and are at a higher level. The figures do not necessarily give a fair picture of what is going on with the time to shine strategy.
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They are not going to perfect their skills if they cannot afford it.
No, but there are ways of working. As a national company, we have a bursary scheme. We will never turn away anybody. There are lots of avenues there for people; there are things like regional residencies. The work that is going on with time to shine is giving people like us a chance. Young people who cannot afford to do music courses are getting something for free that will help them to get better at their art and perfect it. We are managing to do that without them having to spend any money.
I first entered music education in 1979. In the 1980s, standard grades were introduced. In those days, it was Scottish Examination Board exams, and about 2,800 students studied O grades and highers in music. I can send the committee papers on that. Now we have 30,000 people studying SQA courses in schools. That increase speaks for itself.
I do not have the information that the committee has about craft, but I can send the committee figures relating to our institution. Craft development—jewellery and wool, for instance—and small businesses in the creative industries are very important sectors for Orkney and Shetland. I can send the committee information about that from our department, just to enlighten some of the debate.
That would be very helpful, because the figures that we have—to which Mary Scanlon referred—relate only to craft at higher education institutions, which is obviously not the full picture.
I just wanted to make two quick points, one of which relates to my experience of working in various formal education settings. There is a massive difference in the investment needed for different art forms—that is obvious when you think about it. If I do a youth theatre class for 30 young people, I need one tutor and one room, but if I offer music tuition, such as piano lessons, I need one tutor and one room per person, so if I want to train 30 young people in music, it costs 30 times as much. If we break it down into the specific economies of each art form and each region—and even each age—the investment begins to feel quite thin on the ground when we are talking about long-term development.
Secondly, although we have not had the higher education statistics that you are referring to, with time to shine it feels a bit more like we are achieving the recognition and having the dialogue that we talked about at the start of the meeting. The youth arts industries are now at the table, having those discussions. Rather than just feeding people from a voluntary basis or from a strategic interest, the time to shine strategy is putting us on a stronger footing to connect with social work departments and with higher education and formal education. We are making those links and those pathways happen. If we return to the statistics in the years to come, we will see the impact that has been made.
I am not sure about the statistics either. However, I am applying to art school at the moment, and one of the biggest things that I have learned is that there are fewer places than applicants. For 60 or 70 places, there may be 200 or 300 applicants. I do not know whether that is in the statistics.
No, it is not.
I have been told that Glasgow School of Art has 300 places a year but 4,000 applicants. I think that the situation will be similar for Edinburgh College of Art and other higher education institutions. It is very competitive. It might be the case that raising the intake of higher education facilities would dilute the talent, but on the other hand it might also encourage the talent progression.
I wanted to ask about the figures that Mary Scanlon mentioned. The numbers that we have were obviously all produced prior to the time to shine strategy coming in, and colleges have refocused on more full-time equivalent courses, so when we look at the full-time equivalents we see that the numbers are not as dramatic as Mary Scanlon has pointed them out to be.
My other concern is that we do not seem to have a lot of evidence about how the higher education institutions are progressing in terms of the number of people who are taking up higher education courses. Do you have any information on that and any view on whether there is more availability in higher education institutions than in colleges?
I may be the only one on the panel who knows anything about that. In our sector, universities are governed by the numbers from the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council. My understanding is that the only institution that has been able to expand numbers at undergraduate level in the past couple of years is the University of the Highlands and Islands, because of our new status as a fully funded university.
Across music and the arts, the numbers have been similar over the past few years for Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. At UHI, we have managed to expand in applied music and in some of our other courses, and that will continue for another year. We seem to be steady state in terms of visual arts, digital, drama and theatre. We are talking about hundreds of students across the sector in Scotland, and I think that the situation is pretty healthy and that we have a strong arts and culture cohort in the universities.
I am confident that we have the right numbers and that it is competitive, but then again there is a great investment in STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering and mathematics—and although we like to lobby for our world we must also recognise the demands of other areas of industry and business in our economy.
I know that Mary Scanlon read out the per-head figures, but Gordon MacDonald was quite right to point out the shift in emphasis between part-time courses, short courses and full-time courses, and I would like to know your opinion on that. Between 2008-09 and 2012-13, full-time equivalents in performing arts, far from going down, have gone up—in theatre and dramatic arts, in music history and theory, and in theatre production—so there has been a shift. Although the headcount may have decreased, the actual number of hours has increased. What is your view on that shift in policy from funding a lot of short courses or part-time courses to more full-time courses?
I can speak from a distant perspective, with an awareness of the pathways that young people can take following their youth theatre experience if they are considering going on to further or higher education and then into the industry. I am not saying this with any kind of detailed authority but, in years gone by, the character of the discussion used to be that there were a lot of one-year higher national certificate courses that were not of a high standard.
I would be working with young people on a summer project and they would be coming to me full time for five weeks to work on a youth theatre production, and they would go away having had a life-changing experience. Then they would go into a further education course, and when I met them a little bit down the line they would be talking about the fact that they were in college for two days a week and were not getting the same quality of experience because they were not doing it full time and having that intense experience.
Some of the part-time courses have been streamlined throughout the sector, and I imagine that that will happen further with the changes to further education and the consolidation of the further education sector. That can only be welcomed.
My sense is that the further education colleges out there that are involved with theatre have been streamlined, and the situation is now plateauing to the right kind of level with a clear pathway to other higher education courses and degrees. There are also more apprenticeships, graduate schemes and other models, and in future we will need to capture figures from more than a single pathway.
I think that Mark Sheridan wanted to come in.
Convener, the SPICe briefing that I have read was put together by this Parliament’s staff, and the source was the Scottish funding council. It contains no footnotes to make it clear that we are not comparing apples with apples, and various people have been interpreting the statistics in various ways. Can we get accurate information about the number of college students taking art courses before we reach any conclusion? If we as a committee are looking at part-time courses in 2008 and full-time courses in 2013, I want to know whether I have been given inaccurate information.
No, it is not inaccurate at all. I apologise to the witnesses—please give us a second here.
We are looking at two tables, the first of which—table 3—is about headcount; as you can see, it refers to “Count”. Table 4 shows the full-time equivalent. The headcount has dropped—I said so in my question to Kenny McGlashan—and you were quite right about the figures that you read out with regard to the headcount. They are accurate.
So my figures were accurate.
In terms of headcount.
There is another table on page 9 of the briefing, but table 3 is accurate.
Just a second, Mary. What I said was that you were quite right to say that the headcount has dropped, but I should point out that the figure for full-time equivalents has gone up. That is why I asked about the policy shift.
Well, it has not gone up. It has gone down for dance, music history and theory, music performance and music instrument technology.
Not by the percentages that you have suggested.
The figure has gone up for theatre and music history—
And I specifically read out the figures that have gone up. The figures that you said were headcount drops have not dropped by the percentages that you suggested in terms of full-time equivalents, which was the question that I was asking. I now want Mr Sheridan to answer the same question.
There are obviously supply and demand issues in certain areas of art and culture with regard to how things change. Over the past five or more years, there has been a structural change in all universities. Every new course comes through the senate and court; there are modular courses; and we have entrance and exit strategies for year 1, year 2 and year 3.
There is no such thing as a conventional student now, and we need to cater for not only lots of young people coming from school but people of different ages and backgrounds. As a result, we now have a suite of modules or what are called building blocks, and people can take advantage of that approach by doing individual modules or a number of modules, doing the first year of university part-time over two years or exiting their course and coming back in later. Therefore, we live with the FTE; we are used to people entering and leaving courses at different levels, and the system helps with articulation from HNC to the higher national diploma.
That has been a big shift in the past seven or eight years, and I think that it accounts for some of the policy changes that you see in the figures.
First, convener, I apologise for my late arrival, which was due to flight delays.
As I said in the debate on time to shine, I very much welcome the strategy, and it is encouraging to hear the positive messages. However, I was struck by the remarks in Mark Sheridan’s submission about sustainability and the risk with two-yearly reviews that, as in other areas, we will be tempted to dig up the roots to see whether the plant’s growth is fine, to little effect and with the potential to damage the structure that has been put in place. Are you confident that the review structure contains benchmarks along the way and that we will not be in effect doing handbrake turns every two years to try to deal with any issues that might arise?
If anything, we have to flag up to the hubs and other organisations the need for integration and close working as a long-term solution. After all, since the Christie commission, other organisations across the country have been doing that and thinking differently about how resources are used.
For example, I am the vice-chair of Fèis Rois, which is one of the hub organisations that really led the management of our Highland youth arts hub. We will seek to retain the manager that we appointed through the hub as we move into the second and final year. We will try to maintain that from our own resources and investments.
We have to develop on the ground the integration of organisations, like-mindedness and the idea of working together to ensure that any further investment that will naturally come to organisations supports integration, articulation and collaboration, if that makes sense.
10:45
That is helpful. Kenny McGlashan mentioned that the strategy is also about developing and enriching networks and connections and about developing creative ways of bringing together what is already happening or opening up opportunities to those who do not have them at the moment.
I do not want to get overly hung up about the hub structure, but people will forgive me if I say that the islands are perhaps conspicuous by their absence from it. The Borders and Dumfries and Galloway are also notable for not being included. During the debate, I asked Fiona Hyslop how we can build the networks and develop the young person input in areas where there is no hub. I am not sure that I got an answer. Do those at the coalface have a view about how to reach beyond the regions where the hubs are based?
Personally, I think that in some ways it was a little unhelpful that the hubs and the strategy appeared at the same time. The hubs are a mechanism to progress a lot of the objectives, but they are not the strategy. At Youth Theatre Arts Scotland, we understand that implicitly, because we are a sector development organisation. As Creative Scotland has been at pains to emphasise, the youth arts strategy is not just the hubs strategy. It is not just about the hubs’ activity; it is about the national youth performing arts companies. Likewise, it is about youth work organisations and social development organisations. That is quite an important point to make initially.
I am sure that Creative Scotland would have wanted a hub in every region and that everybody would support that, but there is a tipping point—if things are spread too thin, will we get the infrastructure development that we want? The investment in the selected regions is at the right level for the moment. I know that there is a smaller investment in two other areas as a result of ideas that were submitted, but those areas will not have full hubs. The Creative Scotland submission reminded me of that.
I certainly hope that, if on-going investment is secured, other regions will get a similar investment and that, in the interim, particular attention will be paid to supporting work in the regions that did not get the hub investment. I understand that that is being done through the national youth performing arts companies.
I think that Mark Sheridan alluded to my next point. The area that I represent—Orkney—has a vibrant arts, cultural and music scene in which young people play an integral part. The issue is understanding better how that links with regional and national organisations.
Although those who are excluded can be excluded for many reasons, including social and economic reasons, there are also issues of rurality. It would be helpful to understand whether, as part of the strategy, it is recognised that many people with a wide variety of talents find themselves distant from where it is appropriate, sensible or reasonable to coalesce and deliver courses or whatever. Does the strategy pick up on support for travel and accommodation for people who are not necessarily at the poorest end of the spectrum but for whom it is prohibitively expensive to go away for multiple weeks or for a year-long course?
We have done a collection of workshops, and one of the programmes that we offer is called route NYOS. It focuses on not only going out to hubs but going out and offering support to places that are not hubs and which have not been picked up. As a national company, we try our hardest to target places that have no provision at the moment.
The digital platform has not really been picked up on today. There has been a fantastic recognition of how powerful digital and social media can be. We are working on having a powerful digital presence, as are a lot of the hubs. Young people use that medium and anybody can access it. In that way, they can still tap into what is going on, even if it is just digitally.
Part of youth arts voice Scotland’s role is to evaluate what is happening locally on time to shine not only in the hub areas but in areas where there is no representation through the hubs. Youth arts voice Scotland is conscious that we need to build those links in the areas that do not have regional hubs and ensure that young people work locally to raise awareness of work that is going on in those areas.
The group is considering initiating a young ambassador scheme, which would involve recruiting young people to act as ambassadors for the arts in every region. Part of their work will be to consider the areas where there is no representation through the hubs.
At our last residential meeting, we did a bit of an equalities impact assessment of the group. That included geography, and rurality came up as an issue in the representation on the group. Therefore, we seek to expand the group’s membership to ensure that we have representation from throughout the country.
I will pick up on the points about the digital platform and our last residential meeting. As far as I am aware, the digital platform goes live this week. It will be a way to reach out to the areas that do not have hubs and will inform people in those areas of things that are on in their areas. As a result of co-operation between the arts organisations throughout Scotland, it will have a calendar where people can see all the youth arts events that are on in their area.
Alison Hardie mentioned our last residential meeting. We met Evaluation Support Scotland to think of ways in which we can evaluate the strategy as it goes on without making it seem too distant from young people. We considered ways of getting triggers and outcomes and that went quite well.
As a sector development organisation, we have found that having continuing support and a strategy has enabled us to establish regular events and projects. That is relevant to the question about involvement from different regions, whatever stage they are at and whatever level of investment they have.
The national festival of youth theatre, which I mentioned before, has been running for 10 years. Some youth theatres return year upon year and, each year, they grow their ambitions about what they will do when they come to us. Similarly, that provides a place to go for youth theatres from regions into which seed investment has gone to help development. First, they aspire to what they see, then they come and then they develop their own provision. The festival is also a way for them to find out about our network organisation and how they can learn from other practitioners.
That relates to where some of the nervousness about the long-term investment comes from in our sector. We want to set up the infrastructure so that it is not just about who is doing things now but so that people who discover the opportunity three or four years down the line can find their own way in and start to make the connection to develop their practice.
The point about the strategy’s sustainability is interesting. We talked earlier about its establishment over two years. Will the structures that are in place by the end of those two years be sufficiently robust to generate sustainability over the next few years? It is a 10-year strategy, and two years are not sufficient to implement a 10-year strategy.
Because we have funded the links in the first instance, we have set up the infrastructure, so any further investment will ripple out into the delivery. It is folly to think that we will get the start, middle and end of the ambitions of the time to shine strategy in just two years. Instead, at the end of the two years we will start to see the impact that it could make and a streamlining of the ideas that can happen in each region, as well as a celebration of the diversity. The hubs, for example, are all set up in slightly different ways. At the end of the two years, they will all have created their own identities, networks and infrastructure, and we will see a different way of communicating and networking across art forms. I have found that very exciting throughout.
We have a network organisation in our art form of youth theatre, but such an opportunity does not exist for young people in film, crafts and multiple other areas. We have gone a stage beyond that with the hubs and the youth arts strategy, because we now have a network of networks. At the end of the two years, the infrastructure will be ready to make the impact that we seek, rather than having achieved it.
We have spoken about the increasing number of people who are participating in the arts. I have a question on where the balance lies in the strategy between increasing the number of people who are participating, and developing audiences and arts appreciation. Is that balance right? Without the audience, we do not really have the art.
One thing that the arts do in general is challenge our views. It is good to challenge young people’s views of the arts. The strategy aims to do that by increasing participation, but another way in which we can achieve that is through peer engagement. Someone might not want to do the art but, if their friend does it, the idea is that they become the audience. The idea is also that all their families will be interested. Because the strategy is about engaging with young people, it is also engaged with their network and the people they are engaged with.
To answer Mr Griffin’s question and a previous one, if organisations such as ours engage with young people and embody the philosophy of engagement and participation in the time to shine strategy, that approach will continue and will become embedded in our education system and how we see the world.
Blair Boyle is right to say that if more people are engaged with the arts there will be more of an audience. They will ask hard questions, they will want to develop their own view of the world, they will want to visit galleries and they will see the world differently. If someone is engaged locally in such activities, they will want to go to the theatre and concerts and to visit galleries. They will be encouraged to do that because they have been exposed to it.
Our national and local companies, and organisations that are not directly involved in hubs, such as the Shetland Arts Development Agency, have the same philosophy and way of working and will encourage people to engage as audience participants. The further we can get into rural and other communities that do not normally engage in arts and culture, the greater the audience participation in the long run.
That is the ambition behind the youth ambassadors and champions projects within the time to shine strategy. The aim is to increase awareness not just through participation but through people attending arts performances and so on. As Blair Boyle said, having young people carry out that peer-led work in their communities will support that aim.
11:00
I return to my point that the strategy is not just for youth arts deliverers but for education providers and professional arts organisations. Our submission mentioned that we are part of a group called culture counts, which is a research and advocacy group of cultural organisations across art forms that is championing the role of culture across society and in Scotland. Because of that work, I find it interesting that the time to shine strategy has sent something important up the flagpole that says to people, “These are your future audiences.”
Given tight budgets, arts organisations often look at the here and now and are perhaps not that worried about five or 10 years down the line. However, the time to shine strategy has raised the importance of youth arts. It also recognises that the flow from being an audience member to being an audience participant is what naturally exists out there.
Young people often enjoy engaging through participating. This is a bit of a broad statement, but they do not see those aspects as distinct, as we might do when we become old and decrepit. They do, they watch and they chat. They just do it all—it is all one spectrum of participation and engagement. There are not the same distinctions as we perceive when we are more embarrassed about treading the boards and we just want to go and watch. I have witnessed a different perception in young people.
The strategy has 23 objectives across the three areas of participation, progression and provision. How far down the road are we in meeting the objectives? Have one or two been ticked off or are we halfway there? As it is a long-term strategy, will you give us some idea about how many of the objectives in each category have been met or are under construction, if I can put it that way?
A few of the objectives are clearly long term, such as Scotland being an international leader and connecting the arts with the education frameworks. It is great that those objectives are in the strategy, because that keeps us all focused on the ambitions and opportunities that are there. However, we are looking only at early signs of progress.
In that case, I will ask you about some specifics. The first objective under participation is:
“Establish a national young people’s advisory group to advise on the implementation and development of forward plans of Time To Shine.”
That is a tick.
That has been done. Some of the objectives have been achieved, but I agree with you that meeting others is a more distant prospect. For example, I wonder about the objective to
“Develop work and increase access to opportunities for the youngest age group and ensure the arts are effectively represented in national early years strategy development across all sectors.”
I am not 100 per cent sure about this, but I think that I read the other day that Creative Scotland has an initiative called starcatchers that engages with early years children. It is possibly aimed at those aged zero to four—I am not 100 per cent sure about that, but it is definitely aimed at engaging toddlers in art. That initiative is going ahead.
Time to shine is not a strategy in isolation—lots of fantastic work in the arts and creativity in early years education is under way. However, it flags up the fact that we need to think across the sector, join up and gather all the good practice and ensure good practice. If we all buy into progression—the idea that we move on, that young people develop skills, knowledge and understanding, that we do not just keep doing the same thing over and over again and that, for example, we embed what young people want to do—we can meet the objectives.
The convener is right that we can say that we are meeting a number of the objectives. For example, on being proactive in using digital technology, we are advancing and moving into that activity. That is difficult in our area, because we have thinband rather than broadband, and even that is patchy at times.
We are all aware of the objectives. As a one-time teacher, I think that there is nothing wrong with having too many objectives, because we then have things to do—that becomes our homework for next week. To be realistic, as we review the situation in the next couple of years, the strategy will be important in assessing what has been achieved.
It is early days for the hubs, but we are aware of the issues. At least we have them all in black and white and up front, so that we can tackle them together.
A role of youth arts voice Scotland is to look at how the objectives will be measured and evaluated. The group is working with Evaluation Support Scotland to work out how that will happen and to develop a logic model so that we can easily demonstrate how some of the objectives are being met.
That is interesting, because my follow-up question is whether the timescales have been established to determine effectively whether we will achieve all the objectives, and whether it is clear who will deliver the objectives. Are you saying that that is happening?
The group is putting together measurable outcomes that its members will work with in their communities, and links will be made with the hubs to ensure that they are delivering what they are supposed to deliver. I do not know whether there is a timescale for that work.
I seek clarity on whether the timescales have been established or whether that is a work in progress.
It is a work in progress.
It is a journey.
Everything is a journey, but sometimes there are stops along the way.
Creative Scotland has laid out the evaluation process on engaging with all the participants. That includes effective evaluation, the tools for evaluation and how to progress the work.
The seventh principle—continually striving for quality improvement—is a lifelong ambition for everyone. As we take on board more young people, the process also starts all over again. Most of us are fairly confident that the organisations that we work with can address the objectives and go a long way towards meeting them in the timescale or at least towards knowing where we will be going once the two years have elapsed.
As no member has any further questions, I thank you very much for your attendance—you have been very helpful. Mark Sheridan said that he would send one or two bits of information to the committee, which we would be grateful to receive.
It is worth mentioning that the committee will hear from Creative Scotland at a future date. We will cover some of the issues that you raised in your submissions and your oral evidence. I am sure that we will also discuss other issues that arise between now and that meeting.
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