Podcast – Building Youth Participation in Scotland’s Arts

16-02-16
Written by Ashley Smith-Hammond

This month the Culture Republic podcast is looking at how Scotland’s arts organisations are connecting with young people.

The Scottish Government have prioritised youth arts in the past by supporting the Youth Music Initiative and more recently by supporting Creative Scotland’s Time To Shine, National Youth Arts Strategy. Culture Minister Fiona Hyslop announced in December that quote:

“Arts and creativity can help young people grow confidently as citizens and towards realising their ambitions, wherever they lie. This can have huge benefits for the whole of society, and must be a priority, even in difficult financial times.

“That’s why this Government is continuing to invest in the Youth Arts , and why I’ll continue to champion the arts in 2016.”

Ageing is something we all do, so it cuts right across other kinds of categories like race or ethnicity, income levels or geography. Working with young people means reaching out to people who are growing up and becoming more independent, but there are still other people – teachers, parents, social workers – who have a strong influence on how they make decisions.

In practice, youth is a loose category that those working in this space often define differently. The UN describes youth as ‘a period of transition from the dependence of childhood to adulthood’s independence’. Creative Scotland’s work with young people, for example, focuses on those aged under-26; the United Nations classifies them as 15 – 24 years old, and the National Youth Agency defines ‘young people’ as 13 – 19 years old.

It is useful for arts and cultural organisations to consider exactly what they mean by ‘young people’ as this is likely to influence how they will engage with them. For example, if you’re programming events for people of school age you might want to consider term dates. For the purpose of clarity Culture Republic define young people as 16-24 year olds – but if you’re looking for information on connecting with under 16s, check out our podcast on connecting with family audiences.

This episode features interviews with:

James Coutts, Communications and Marketing Manager at Youth Theatre Arts Scotland (YTAS) – a Scottish development organisation helping to build the community of youth theatre practice and empowering Scotland’s youth theatre sector through the projects and services.
Robin Baillie the Senior Outreach Officer at the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) who reflected on the UNTITLED project, which was inspired by GENERATION: 25 years of contemporary art in Scotland. UNTITLED started in June 2014 and worked with young people in Leith, Alloa and Irvine to create their own contemporary art, which is on display at the National Portrait Gallery now – May 2016.

Engagement by numbers

Youth participation varies a lot across artforms. Scottish Household Survey data shows that about 75% of young people tend to participate in cultural activities. The most popular events for 16 – 24 year olds are cinema and live music. The age group also has above average attendance rates for libraries, potentially because they are more likely to be studying, and dance events. Younger audiences, however, have below average attendance rates for all other arts activities, including book festivals and classical music events.

At Culture Republic we use Mosaic Scotland, which segments households in Scotland by postcode into different groups based on demographics, lifestyles and behaviour. Independent younger people fit into three Mosaic Types – flying solo, disconnected youth and student scene. (These exclude young people living in other households, for instance, with their parents or carers.) We can then combine this information with Culture Republic’s unique dataset of box office returns from across Scotland to gain insight into arts attendance patterns:

Young people are slightly more likely to attend events during the week when compared to other age groups. They are less likely to attend events in the daytime.
On average 24% of the Scottish population attend more than once a year. This percentage is higher for younger audiences with 34% of them doing so. This is particularly significant because repeat bookers are where many venues generate a large proportion of their revenue.

It’s important to note that these trends are for ticketed events only. But it still provides a useful indication of how younger audiences engage with the arts in Scotland.

Barriers

Young people are a strategically important group – the next generation of audiences, artists and performers. So how can Scottish arts organisations support and work with them most effectively? One route is to try and remove the barriers that stand in their way.

When we look at barriers to attendance, young people are most are most likely to be put off because of price. Scottish Household Survey data shows that 37% of 16 – 24 year olds cited cost as the main reason for not attending cultural events.

They are also more likely than other age groups to miss out on cultural events because they are unaware of them. On average, just 2% of people said they didn’t attend an event because they ‘didn’t know much about it.’ This figure, however, was much higher amongst 16 – 24 year olds at 11%.

According to the Scottish Household Survey, lack of interest is the most common reason for non-participation in cultural activities for young people. Sixty-one percent of 16 – 24 year olds said they didn’t participate in cultural activities because they weren’t really interested in them.

Benefits

There are also benefits of arts engagement for young people, such as increased confidence and better self esteem. Young arts participants are also more likely to go on to further or higher education.

This suggests there is a need to take a more proactive approach in engaging younger audiences and explaining the relevance of arts events to them. In the podcast, James describes a recent success with the YTAS Chrysalis Festival, which he describes in terms of “buzz” and “vibrancy” of the space.

Working with young people often means communicating with them through intermediaries. Even though many young people are quite independent, when you’re working with them there are other people involved in their lives that you will also need to communicate with. You might need a communication strategy that includes teachers, parents as well as young people themselves.

And its not just who you communicate with, it’s how as an adult, you communicate to and about young people. There was a fine line that both YTAS and NGS were sensitive about crossing, which was around being too ‘cool’ or too highly produced.

As we have seen in all of these podcasts, partnership working is really important and successful projects are in many cases stories of really effective partnerships. YTAS work with a broad range of partners including youth theatres and practitioners from around the world, theatre teachers across Scotland and the country’s Youth Arts Hubs. NGS’s UNTITLED project worked with specific schools, Social Work and Youth Services departments to connect with the young people in their care.

The next generation

It’s important for arts and cultural organisations to engage with younger audiences because, in addition to being important audience members in their own right, right now, they are also the adult audiences of the future. Plus, the sector will need them not just as future audience members but also as artists.

Many believe the idea that if you get young people involved in art making then you are also building the next generation of audiences as well as the next generation of artists.

In YTAS’s work we can see the beginnings of the transition into professional arts work in their Chrysalis Festival and young leaders programme. The young people who work with YTAS are at the cusp between early adulthood and childhood. Their practice is sometimes training to add professional polish but for others it’s still about the value of expression and learning to get their ideas across in a new medium.

Conversely, the NGS UNTITLED project worked with young people who did not identify as artists and whose practice was not building toward a professional career. But the work itself gives voice to young people’s lives and experience that adults are missing. Robin from NTS describes how this adds urgency and vibrancy to the work and hopes this helps it be more relevant to young audiences.

Credits

Thanks to James Coutts at Youth Theatre Arts Scotland and Robin Baillie at the National Galleries of Scotland for sharing their stories. Reach them on Twitter @NatGalleriesSco and @YTArtsScot.

Audio production by studio engineer Barry Reid of SPAD.

In and out music by Drew Hammond of Mesura Music.

Additional music (in order of use):

Eracilon – Over water (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)
Eracilon – From here and there (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)
Nick Gordy – Unattainable stars (CC BY-NC 3.0)
Clairox – indifférence (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

Culture Republic is on Twitter @culture_public and presenter Ashley Smith Hammond is on Twitter @AnAshleyAbroad. Use the hashtag #CRpodcast to let us know you’re listening.

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