This month Culture Republic looks at how Scotland’s artists and arts organisations are engaging with older audiences in Scotland.

We are defining an older person as someone over pensionable age (usually around 65). This segment of Scotland’s population is growing faster than other population segments.

Between Scotland’s 2001 and 2011 census we saw this group go from making up 18.6% of the population to 20.1% (942 thousand older people to 1 million and 64 thousand – an increase of 122,000 in 10 years). This increase is affected by the Scottish population growth and equates to 357 thousand households across Scotland, which is expected to go up in line with the population. An ageing population is something that is happening across Europe, but Scotland in particular will have the largest increase of older people within the UK.

Older people have specific needs in terms of communication, programming and practical support. Poor health is correlated with age, so it can be a barrier to arts attendance or participation. But there is a wide variation across the group in terms of levels of support needs.

To make sense of the pattern, we work with a classification between ‘third age’ arts participants who are fit and well and ‘fourth age’ participants who have more significant additional support needs. The benefits of participation are clear though for both groups – better health, less social isolation and enjoyment of day-to-day life.

The market is important as this group tends to be retired and have more free time. Barriers can include: the financial costs of participation or attendance along with logistical challenges (travelling to the venue), access issues (lots of stairs or lack of parking) or timings (evening events can be challenging if patrons have to travel at night).

This episode features interviews with Louise Crichton from Culture Republic our in-house expert on ageing audiences; Martha Pollard from the Scottish Poetry Library on the Living Voices project and Emma Young from Dance House on the Still Dancing performance group. We explore the Living Voices project as an example of good practice for ‘fourth age’ arts participants and Still Dancing as good practice for ‘third age’ dancers. These are both participatory projects but much of the good practice can still provide learnings for arts venues and programmers.

 

Web bonus – More on booking patterns for Scottish audiences

According to the 2014 Scottish Household Survey, 72% of those aged 60-74 are attending arts events, including cinema, at least once a year whilst only 53% of 75+ year olds are attending once a year. So according to this data, older people are less likely to attend compared to other age groups.

However, in terms of households attending arts events at ticketed venues and festivals, when we look at Culture Republic’s unique data set of box office returns from across Scotland (35 box office feeds for 48 organisations) we see that 71,000 older households (5% of arts attenders in our database) attended an arts event in the last year (FY14/15). They tend to be early bookers and they tend to attend more than once a year.

• 57% of older households booked more than a month in advance for a performance in the last financial year.
• 14% booked on the day of the performance and 25% the week of the performance.
• Older people are more likely, than families for example, to attend more than once a year – with 38% of them doing so.

This is particularly relevant to note, because early bookers and repeat bookers generate disproportionate revenue for box offices.

For more information about arts for ageing audiences we recommend the Baring Foundation’s report Ageing Artfully: Older People and Participatory Arts in the UK. To understand more about the third age/fourth age classification you can explore this helpful video from the Open University.

 

CREDITS

Listen on Soundcloud above or subscribe on iTunes or on Stitcher.

Connect with Scottish Poetry Library or on Twitter @byleaveswelive

Connect with Dance House on Twitter @dancehousegla

Audio production by studio engineer Barry Reid – @barryspad

In and out music by Drew Hammond of Mesura Music

Main image credit: Elderly Inc.: Epworth Villa Harmonica Time 2 by Josh Rushing (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)