 I welcome to the 13th meeting of the Constitution, Europe External Affairs and Culture Committee in 2023. We have received apologies from the convener, Claire Adamson MSP, so I will be chairing today's meeting. The committee has a new member, Neil Bibby MSP, who has replaced Sara Boyack MSP on the committee. I take this opportunity to thank Sara for her many and varied contributions to the r verifiediad peyr Sometimes work over the last few years. We greatly look forward to working with Neil Bibi, Neil, however, gives his apologies for this morning's meeting, however he is substituted by Foysle, Chardery MSP foysle, can I invite you to make any declaration of interest you might have in relation to this committee. We are also joined by Audry Nicolle MSP, who is substituting for Clare Adamson. Audry, can I also invite you to make any relevant declaration of interests? Nothing to declare, convener. Thank you both very much and welcome to the committee. Our first agenda item is to take evidence on our culture and communities inquiry, which is focused on taking a place-based approach to culture. We have two evidence sessions this morning. The first evidence session now is one where we are joined by, firstly, Professor David Stevenson, a Dean of the School of Arts, Social Sciences and Management, and Professor of Arts Management and Cultural Policy, Queen Margaret University. We are also joined virtually by Professor Andrew Miles, Professor of Sociology University of Manchester. I welcome you both warmly to this committee and thank you for coming to give evidence to us. I begin by asking you both a very general question, just for some opening remarks, on what you both see as the main challenges to cultural participation within communities across Scotland. Your views on what good cultural policy looks like in this regard. If I could start with Professor Stevenson. Thank you, convener, for that. I think for me the main challenges come from the perception that cultural participation is something that is difficult as opposed to something that occurs naturally and something that we do as part of an expression of ourselves as human beings. However, cultural participation is the way in which we define ourselves both as part of communities, but also in difference to other communities. Communities that we may share common interests with, but there are differences. That means that different groups, different communities need equity of access to resource, be that time, be that money, be that space, in order to be able to pursue the cultural participation that they find meaningful. Part of the challenge, I think, for good cultural policy is that good place-based cultural policy should be responsive to those different groups and communities, those people and places, but it's vitally important that it is representative of the differences that people express in that way. We all experience culture, we all want to participate and express our cultures. However, there are differences, and when you're faced with limited resources and there are discussions around what and how we spend money, the spaces that we make available, there are choices to be made. I think that part of the difficulty can be falling into an opportunity that thinks that there's a one-size-fits-all model and that we can invite people into a universal shared culture. So I think I would sort of finish by saying that cultural participation is something that we all share, but cultural participation that is meaningful can look very different for different groups and communities of people. Thank you. Can I turn to Professor Miles, please? Well, I would echo this sentiment, just expressed by David. I think one of the problems we have is understanding how people participate culturally in their communities. The working definition of culture draws heavily on official traditional forms and assumptions about what's valuable in the way that people participate culturally. In the first instance, I think we have to understand better what it means to participate culturally in these place-based, situated circumstances. I think understandings of community are probably not as well-founded and as rich as they could be, but we have to understand the trajectory of communities and understand historical influences and also the resource dynamics that David referred to. So I think who's culture is always the way that I approach the idea of cultural policy and who's making policy on behalf of whom and identifying what matters, and I think you need to start with what people themselves want to participate in. Thank you for those answers. Can I go on to ask about barriers to organising and participating in culture? We've had several responses to our inquiry on this topic and many, many respondents noted things like lack of public transport, lack of options particularly in rural areas, accessibility, those kind of things. I think Professor Mars, you gave evidence to the UK Parliament in 2018 where you talked about location being an important factor in participation levels and you made the point about libraries that have the highest number of users are often those which have good connectivity to public transport etc. So can I just ask for your observations on those issues, on those concerns? We had evidence also from local authorities last week about this and how we addressed those concerns in terms of cultural policy. Perhaps I could start with you Professor Mars. The problem of connectedness is an obvious one when we're dealing with rural communities but also periurban communities like the one we did a lot of work with on the edge of Aberdeen, a place called Peter Couter. The perception in Couter at the time was that even though it was only seven miles from the centre of Aberdeen it was caught in a policy vacuum when it came to resourcing the fundamental infrastructural issues that are required. For people to take part in both established forms of culture getting into the city centre for example and networking their own cultural activities locally. We developed with the community a cultural action plan which the community council actually put into operation. They had five key actions that they made progress on whilst we were there but when we did the scoping work for that cultural plan in which we involved citizen researchers the second most important issue for the local community was the bus timetable. Those very basic issues, economic and social and infrastructural issues and it's not rocket science, what we need to address in the first instance when it comes to resourcing communities for pursuing their cultural participation. I think there's probably three things that I would want to say in regards to this question and the first is around about the way in which we conceive the idea of barriers. I think I would always suggest that a barrier only exists if that's the direction of travel that you want to go in and often when surveys are done around why people haven't taken part in certain activities. Yes, there are always things around about for example cost but the one that tends to get not necessarily overlooked but is always a difficult one is lack of interest, lack of relevance. That is the barrier and that leads you into a question around about should and is it right to challenge people's perception of what they find valuable. I always refer back to a piece of research that I did once where I spoke to people about barriers. I was very struck again by the extent to which some of the people that I spoke to were very aware of the fact that we spoke about barriers and that people were concerned about for example the barriers that people may face going to the local museum or going to the local theatre. The particular individual that I spoke to at the time told me that they'd never taken their children to the commercial cinema, they couldn't afford to go to the cinema, they just couldn't buy tickets for their family. They said at the time that no one's interested in those barriers, no one's interested in the barriers that I face trying to express my cultural life, my cultural values. The danger that you fall into is that if you are someone who faces certain types of barriers you are limited in terms of the types of culture that we're willing to help you reach. So we will help you overcome barriers so long as it is to the type of culture that we feel is valuable for you to take part in. If, for example, you can't afford to go to the latest concerts, say you can't afford to get tickets to Eurovision, even if you manage to get through the telephone queue, there would be no help to overcome the economic barrier that you would face to do that. So there is a value judgment implicit in the way that we talk about barriers. Secondly, I would echo Andy's point about the extent to which barriers extend across our life and often culture is seen as an instrumental tool that can help other policy areas. There was a Scottish Government document, I think it was 2008, it came out called Culture Delivers, and that document was around about persuading people that culture can deliver for every other area of government. It can deliver for education, it can deliver for the economy. I guess my challenge back to all the other areas of government is to say that people taking part in their cultural life is an expression of a healthy society. It is a society where people are healthy, where people have disposable income, where there is public transport that people can access. It is a marker of our success in the other areas in which government takes place. My challenge is always rather than saying culture delivers is to say how can all those other areas deliver for culture. If people's health is not right, they will not be going to the theatre. If somebody can't access dental care, they are not going to sit and enjoy the transformative potential of musicals, for example. In that sense, with barriers, we need to watch that it doesn't become overly transactional and focused on certain types of activities. I bring in colleagues from the committee, and I start with Ben MacFassan. Thank you, convener. Good morning. Fascinating contribution so far. I just wanted to explore a bit more on those considerations around enabling people to access the culture that they are enthusiastic and passionate about, that they have already had exposure to and engagement with. They know that they have a positive experience with that genre or type or expression of culture. Could we do better, could we be more creative in balancing that with also exposure to new areas of culture that they may be passionate about, if they don't know yet? I like Scottish folk music only because a few years ago somebody bought me a ticket as a present for Celtic Connections, for example. I would not have known that in likelihood unless I had that different exposure. That is an important consideration. I am not saying that there is a hierarchy. If only people knew about a certain type of music or dance, they might enjoy it, but they might enjoy it, and how do we create those opportunities? I know that that is something that festival organisations consider, but is there more that we could be aware of and participate in? I am happy to go first on that one. Again, that is a common argument that comes up. There is a particular perception or position that we have at the moment that the omnivorousness, the consumption of a broad variety of cultures, is in and of itself good because it helps us to understand other people and other types. Again, intuitively, rather than basing any evidence, I would agree that understanding different cultures, understanding what you do not like, is also important, because understanding that helps you to understand who you are and who your people are and who you can collaborate with, but where those overlaps are. The difficulty, once again, is that we tend to challenge those with the least and the least amount of influence in society to diversify their cultural interests the most. There is a descending individualism whereby if you have less money and you are more requiring in terms of free tickets of opportunity, then again, you have no control over the other options that you want to take part in. You may well be interested in going to a musical. That might be the thing that you want to do. You may never have been there before, but you might not get any help to do that. I think absolutely that there is a sense of curiosity that we want to embed in people. For me, the biggest challenge or the biggest risk that we face right now is that most of the evidence points towards the importance of early years and early years' education in making people curious about different forms of culture. Sadly, we are in a position whereby our notion of cultural participation once again tends to focus on adult or transactional interactions with certain organisations. The conversation about culture in education is seen as something separate. It is not seen as something that is about cultural participation. It is a question about cultural education. Fundamentally, when people are young, most of the evidence that I have read points towards the extent to which, if you want people to be curious about diverse forms of culture, you need to start when people are young. That points towards ideas such as the cultural rucksack that has been trialled in Fife, the extent to which we ensure that there are no young people who cannot explore the full spectrum, and yes, it is to find out what they value, but it is also to find out what they do not value. Yes, I am a professional of arts management and cultural policy. There are lots of arts that I do not want to go to, but I did have the chance to go there and decide that, when I am making a choice, that is not for me, and that is not a problem so long as I am able to explore the things that I do feel are important for me. I think I would just read slightly about how we generate further different interests. I would start with the fact that a lot of so-called everyday practices which we would not include in the normal range of activities defined as culture are often very creative and rich and textured and probably we do not quite understand just how much expertise there is in communities around activities which more broadly encompass creative practices, so visual creativity right along to other forms of creative practice, the making and so on and so forth. How far do we want people to go in terms of moving across and why into different cultural spheres? I am not sure. I think that we should be supporting what people are already doing. I understand that there is a need to make relevant the kind of culture that is funded by government. In order to do that, I think that the early years issue is crucial, but also the transition from early years and primary school into high school. In England, there is quite a lot of cultural activity that is woven into the curriculum. I am a governor of a special school where there is a variety of cultural activities and references brought into the curriculum, but I think that these are then sort of streamlined out at secondary school level. I wanted to go back to something that David was talking about earlier on about understanding where barriers are. It is still the case fundamentally that cultural participation in the UK, including Scotland, is segmented principally by class, social class and age. I think that we have to understand what is going on with those kinds of demarcations in order to address how we might develop cultural practices, the culture practices that people want to do and what other options they might want to get involved in. Another point I would make is that if you are looking for practical ways of encouraging people to engage with different types of culture, if that is thought to be a valuable thing to do, is you need to put culture, put interventions, if you like, in the places that people normally inhabit, in the places of their everyday engagement. That would be, I now know that people have done this, Arts Organisations have done things like working in shopping centres. One of the things that I have observed is the way in which outdoor arts, multi-form outdoor arts, engages communities and right across communities. When I used to live in Kendall there was a big outdoor arts festival where people who you would not normally see coming to engage with a whole range of arts forms, from comedy through to high wire acts and just a whole range of things. It was very evident that the curiosity that people stood on the outside, the people from the less privileged areas, residential areas of this town, stood on the outside of this festival for the first day and moved gradually towards the centre. In so doing they were interacting with other people and discussing what was going on. I think those kinds of potentials for increasing social interaction about the discussion of what's going on in people's own spaces, which is broadly cultural and then even formally cultural, is a potential way. Then there are particular art forms. Another thing I've been working on recently is comics, comic art, graphics, graphic novels. Amongst young people, this is why I brought the point about demarcations between particular social groups, amongst young people. Comics are a big deal and manga, which is the Japanese, principally Japanese form of comics, has begun to have a global impact in youth culture right across to the West. The thing about comics is that they're sort of a multi-form art object which brings in obviously visual art and text and integrates the two. The accessibility of that form is something that can bring people into engaging with forms of culture and other cultural references. I think there are broad structural issues that need to be addressed. The point about early years education is fundamental, but in the meantime we could look at particular states and locations for cultural practices, where you bring whole communities together and also particular forms like the comic format that I just mentioned. I think that Professor Stevenson wanted to add something. Just a brief point there. On the spaces point, I wanted to really stress this. Again, it's the sense of starting from an assumption that people are cultural. That sense that they are doing something. So often in the research that I've done or the evaluations that I've done of projects, one sticks out, which wasn't in Scotland, it was an evaluation in a city in England. It was a project about getting people from different ethnic diasporas to take part in dancing music. Again, the perception was that it failed. It failed to get people to come to the event, not as many people came along as they wanted to. So I went to speak to the people that they had hoped to take part in. They said, we didn't come because we were playing music and we were dancing in places that we already went to. We were doing it in places of faith whereby they were singing and they were playing instruments. Our sense of what is a cultural space, we of course need specialist spaces. They are vital. We need specialist theatres. We need film studios. We need music studios. But there is always a risk that we don't properly understand what our cultural infrastructure is because it's also school halls. It's parks, it's band stands, it's skate parks. It's where people gather together and listen to music. All of these are cultural spaces. If we want to talk about a cultural ecology, if that's something that we find attractive, you can't pay lip service to it. I get struck by, recently, we saw the frustration that was expressed by the difficulties that was faced by the film house in Edinburgh. Arguably, people made a strong argument as to why that type of space should be protected. The difficulty is that, across our communities, small community halls are closing down. Access to school spaces is closing down. That is as important to the cultural ecology as the film houses. But again, it's that sense that we don't anguish about those and the danger is when we're looking at what works, we're not looking at what was working that we're ignoring places that are shutting. It's that idea that giving people just a little, allowing them a little time, a little resource to do things within the spaces that are there, and that any space can be a cultural space. It doesn't always require significant investment, but it does require us to value the things that people are doing. I want to bring in Foisal Chattery. Thank you. Good morning, panel. I just want to ask you a question. Obviously, I have another question for you, but you've just said, do you think that we are using the spaces we have within schools? You mentioned that film has difficulties, and you mentioned that you always find difficult to get people from minority backgrounds because are they informed enough, or do they know where they can perform or participate? First of all, I would say that part of the challenge, I think twofold. One, there can be small bureaucratic difficulties with getting access to certain types of spaces. Yes, schools are a useful space. Community campuses are useful spaces. Again, some of the micro challenges, if we go back to barriers, and again at the moment I'm involved in an evaluation of the cultural collective projects that are on-going. In some places, it's finding who has the keys to a particular space. We can often make these things more complex than they are, but part of the difficulty is that if things are short-term, project transactional, then these micro barriers become massively important. If there is support, if there is a... I use the term infrastructure very widely by infrastructure, I mean people locally who understand how do you get access to the hall, who can you speak to, how can you get a piece of equipment in, how can you use the resources that are there. My second point is that so often we are requiring there to be a kind of upfront justification for why the transformation that needs to happen, that people have to turn their cultural participation into a problem to be overcome. As opposed to saying what do you want to do in this space? Again, I go back to an evaluation that I once did, where I spoke to... and it was a group of women who wanted access to a space, it was a museum space. What they really wanted was a warm space in which to get together and crochet and knit, that was it. They really struggled because the organisation they were working with really needed them to construct it as a complex social problem that they needed to overcome, that they needed to be transformed, that they needed to be integrated and what they said was no, what we need is just access to a space. There's a group of us, we have an interest. Again, I think we can make this more difficult than it is. It's about saying that people have a right to take part. They don't necessarily need to justify it in terms of it being a problem. I think there's a roundabout way of saying no, I don't think we're making enough of public spaces that can be cultural spaces. I'll go back to my questions I wanted to ask. Do you believe that there has been a drop on cultural participation from individual, from typical background or deprived communities? I think that this is a difficult one because it comes back to the point that we've mentioned before of what is the measure that we are using in order to make a judgment about the level of cultural participation. In Scotland, we have the Scottish Household Survey and the Scottish Household Survey is a blunt instrument. I can flippantly point out the difficulties with the survey. For example, in the Scottish Household Survey, if you go to a gallery and look at a piece of art, that's cultural participation. If you buy a piece of art, take it home and put it on your wall, that's not cultural participation. That's because it's difficult to categorise these things. What we certainly can see from the Scottish Household Survey is that there's little statistically significant shifting between the patterns that we see. I think that I am confident to say that if people have less disposable income and less time because they are having to do more work in order to generate more disposable income, then the time that they have in order to read, to listen to music, can diminish. Fundamentally, people are also listening to the radio at work, listening to music in the car. I think that's a difficult one, I think I've probably answered that poorly, but at the heart of your question, yes, certain people have less time, less money, less resource to explore the things that they find meaningful, but I imagine Andy might be able to nuance this for me. I can offer some new data. At the beginning of this year, I commissioned a YouGov survey which was looking at the broader definition of culture that I used in my previous work, a big HRC project which took an approach to culture which started with people's practices what they valued. We asked in this new survey which I just started working on in the last month. We asked 19 different participation types who practice these regularly and how much their participation in these different areas had changed since the before and after the pandemic. It's quite a big survey, 6,000 people, so statistically representative, it covers Scotland in much smaller numbers of course because it's comprised of all of the UK nations and regions, but broadly speaking, what we are seeing is a strong majority whose cultural participation rates and types did not change between before and after the pandemic, about 60% of people indicated that their practices hadn't changed. Where there was change, where people increased their participation, it was strongly related to economic resources, so those who did more stuff were better off, more privileged, higher educated. So there was more stability for groups that were less privileged, lower resourced. Interesting that there were only three types of participation where participation increased over the pandemic and they were doing the arts, so things like painting, playing a musical instrument, writing, playing video games, no surprise there, and gardening interestingly, and that's the case across the UK, so there was a small variation in the rates in Scotland for example, a little bit more doing the arts in Scotland than in the rest of the UK. The other interesting thing, when we ask people to, rather than using the definition of culture that I mentioned, there's 17 different types of cultural participation ranging from the high arts to socialising going to the pub. We ask people to tell us, in an open field question, what they had done, what they were doing since the pandemic, which was new and which they've sustained over the period since the release from lockdown officially happened. And that's very interesting for the way in which it shows different increases or new participation types across the board, which are very classed and very related to age, as I mentioned before. So in a way there is change, but it goes along the same kinds of routes and patterns that we saw before. So there's much more crafting. People have taken on craft activities more than they did before the pandemic, but you can see in white middle class communities that they're rather different from the crafting activities that take place in working class or ethnic minority communities. Can I turn to Mark Ruskell, please? Yeah, thanks. I was really interested in those points about how the world might be changing a little post Covid. I'm just wondering if there are trends there in terms of availability of time. Is time becoming harder to find? Is it becoming easier to find? We've got a growing interest in the concept of 4-day week as well as being implemented, not the minority of situations, but I just wonder what your thoughts were around that and particularly how that plays out in relation to time not just to participate but time to organise the kind of voluntary effort that's needed for example to run a third sector group, how that varies perhaps within different communities that may be time rich or time poor. So, yeah, just reflections on that would be useful. Andy, do you want to go first or? Yeah, I mean, I think that it's very clearly the case that better resource people have more time and that folds into time for organising as well. So, we're seeing declining rates of voluntary participation in the survey that I just mentioned before and after the pandemic. So, since the pandemic, people are spending less time volunteering now. We would need data on time use to be clear about what was going on. I think that the bigger emphasis that I've seen in the data so far are that it's economic resources so we see the only people who are increasing their participation outside the home for example going to theatres, going to the cinema going out and playing sport or going and attending events are people who are capital rich particularly economic capital richer I should say. But I do think that that is combined with time. People whose employment status is less certain or have to mix and match work are less able to control the time. Those who are better off have more regular working arrangements in spare time as well in terms of holidays and so on. Time is a big issue but I couldn't tell you any precise data at the moment on that. Thanks. There are two points that I would bring up here. Time is vital and I often go back to the notion of opportunity cost is that so often when you're thinking about audience development work or reaching out to people the organisations that I work with I think through no fault we all do this. Imagine somebody sitting doing nothing the reason that somebody is not coming is they're waiting there and they're waiting to be persuaded or motivated to come. I always encourage organisations to say what does the person have to stop doing in order to find the time to come to the place that you're going to. That might be that they may have to stop doing paid work it might be that they have caring responsibilities or it might be that they're already doing something that they find valuable you are going to have to make an argument as to why to take a risk and that opportunity cost that balance of risk as people's time reduces means that back to the point that Ben made the likelihood of me taking a risk and doing something that I think may not be valuable to me starts to increase. You also come back to the question of travel which is that the time is not just the time that you will spend doing the event if that event is not within your home but the time that you will spend travelling to that particular location travelling to that place and that means that the time investment that's required from people varies relatively significantly across the board but I absolutely want to come back to the point about volunteering and in particular the impact that that has on the governance of organisations both voluntary organisations and major organisations. There is a significant challenge in diversity within the boards that are running these organisations. There has been progress as far as I understand from the evidence that I've seen in terms of gender diversity but in terms of age, background in terms of class the diversity of the arts organisation boards isn't changing as much as it could and that is a question of time because it is voluntary and people have to give their time and they have to have the time available it's a question of confidence and that question of the social norms and skills that you have to have to be on those boards but why does it matter? It matters because when you're on a board and you're trying to imagine somebody else's cultural values there's always this sense of trying to persuade them or move them forward as opposed to saying what would I value or what would be there and one of the biggest roots that we would have is to ensure that our boards are diverse so what is being commissioned and who is being employed is diverse and again, this is potentially a bit of an easy metaphor but I do point towards an organisation and the point of this is about diversity of programming resulting in a diversity of people or audiences and I point to the Playhouse in Edinburgh as a significantly diverse audience that goes to the Playhouse it's a commercial venue but I would argue part of that is because of the diversity of programming and that is driven by a commercial imperative but having diverse people on arts boards means that you can have diverse activities happening in that you've got a sense of what can be done so yes for me, time is vital but I think the governance question is one that's so often overlooked in terms of that and who has the time to set up in your organisation as well? Thanks very much and so related to that perhaps to ask you about trends in terms of availability of physical assets you know, that's the film house or the village hall whether it's a playing field whether it's even open space for an expansive art exhibition what do you sense in terms of the availability of those resources? Is there a tangible decline or the particular resources that are in more decline than others? Are there opportunities that are potentially opening up for communities to get access to new forms of resources? I mean again I think I wouldn't want to give a robust answer without saying you know we don't have a good data set about all of the assets and all of the spaces in part because again I think we don't necessarily fully appreciate what they all are what I can say is that particularly with some again evaluation work that I've been doing recently related to the culture collective we are seeing a decline in people's ability to access spaces and resources in order to express themselves culturally and anecdotally that is more significant in rural areas, in smaller areas because one space going, one community hall closing down is actually supporting a multitude of different cultural activities but we are also facing challenges at the other end at the specialist end and it's back to that sense again of the challenge is not to fall into the trap of going this is an either or we can either have world class theatres in certain locations or we can have community spaces it's about saying that so often we know that the journey is from those community spaces on to television and that's the route that people go, we know that young people's experiences often through for example youth theatre or going to a local Cub Scout activity and doing that local pantomime, amateur pantomime is important but a lot of public spaces are also facing challenges in their own finances which means that they are now looking to commercialise the space that they've got they're being told to charge for that in order to cover their overheads to cover their costs and so what we're doing is we're passing those difficulties further and further down the chain making it harder and harder for people to access that space so yes I think there is a challenge and also for certain forms of cultural practice fundamentally you require access to specialist equipment so if you want to do mosaic work, if you want to do work that's around about stained glass you need access to equipment that no individual necessarily can afford on their own and that starts to get into questions around about our ability to sustain a creative economy and again there are facilities but it's complex and it's difficult for one individual to navigate access into those spaces so yes I think I would anecdotally say that our spaces are becoming more difficult to access and less available thank you Andrew so we do have some data actually on assets the understanding everyday participation project that I mentioned we collected our own data on assets because official sources were so inaccurate actually and also didn't encompass the wider definition of culture that we used and what we found actually was first of all that there's more participation of the broad cultural type that I'm talking about in rural and periurban communities than in urban communities and city centre residential areas so people getting involved in a lot more and what's supporting that is what David actually pointed to earlier on but we have evidence of this what is supporting this is the availability of kinds of infrastructure which wouldn't be termed cultural it's not, they're not theatres they are village halls and they are other community assets buildings which are borrowed for practices whether it be choirs or practising pipe music or whatever it might be so these are fundamentally important resources which we do need and recognise for their importance so I'm referring in terms of the quantity of these kinds of cultural assets to places like Lewis where we worked and also South US in Peter Cooter there was a very important dimension to bringing the community into cultural activity in the role of a village hall Cooter is like all communities a complex is a complex community with a village identity even though it's an urban community and people buy into this imagined identity as a village through being able to access resources like the village hall which is a neutral space in the village unlike the working men's club for example or the country club on the edge of the village which was formally set up by one of the old companies and that kind of resource where people of all types can go and have a sense of ownership without it being excluding particular groups is really important and it was symbolically and practically important and I don't know what's happened since the pandemic there but as we left there was a struggle going on about how to raise funds for the hall so the locals as they call themselves who were in the majority on the committee wanted to maintain the profile and the trajectory of the hall as an open space which was open as much as possible to mothers and toddlers knitting as well as the Christmas panto and so on and so forth but another group who were more associated with incomeers were looking to raise funds in ways that didn't sit so comfortably with the more local group so there were these tensions and that was about resourcing and so the income group said we have to keep this going but we'll need to put the hall out to these kinds of activities and there was a sort of cultural tension around that so it's about understanding the almost natural social tensions in an unequal society that go on so these things have to be understood and managed and I think that little parts of funding for these kinds of places is absolutely crucial David I think I just wanted to again stress this point I mentioned earlier about the term infrastructure and the reason I want to nuance it is it's very easy to think about them in terms of physical assets but the point that Andy is making there is that infrastructure is also the networks that exist in these places and the extent to which those networks have again the time and the resources the connections in order to then access the assets and to access the resources that are there the touring network that works to support touring across Scotland is vitally important but again I did work with them and part of the challenge they face is an ageing network of essentially voluntary producers to the work of connecting opening up the halls making sure that someone's got somewhere to stay ferrying people in cars where there's no buses but they face a challenge in that a lot of these people are saying I'm either too old or it's time for someone else to pick this up and move on and if there are no young people with the time because they're too busy trying to find work or their work is very short term then we lose that network and that is part of the infrastructure and again I think that's something that at the moment with the the culture collective that has been so powerful is that part of the culture collective was recognising the needs for strong networks locally because and I think later on you're hearing from some of the nationals national companies are incredible but their ability to go into a community requires there to be networks for them to link into otherwise they will end up just connecting with the same people that are there but that infrastructure, that local network needs to be sustained and that means that it doesn't necessarily have outputs constantly but it is its presence and that sense of people being there having the time being able to contribute is as much a part of our infrastructure along with those small spaces and those small bits of equipment that actually maximise the investment that we put into our nationals because otherwise they don't have a local build on when they go out touring so perhaps just finally would you make a distinction then between democratisation of culture and then a cultural democracy is what you're describing the work that you've done, working culture collective the studies you've done in Coulter really focus more on what a cultural democracy looks like locally rather than just widening participation and access in a more in a more sort of general sense I guess it's always an easy binary to make and I think the danger is that it often pits one against another to say that it's one or other I think my space is that even if you want to democratise culture and sense of democratising those high arts organisations the best way to do that is through having a strong cultural democracy whereby there is a localised grounded network that can be connected into and so yes absolutely I think our concern is often too much around about how can we get people to interact with certain types of organisations and again I think that's a value judgement for society for governments, local governments to make but what I would say is pragmatically if you do want to do that actually one route to that is making sure that there are rich and robust local cultural democracies taking place that have access to assets, times and infrastructure I think Ben McPherson has a brief supplementary on that thank you it strikes me that if we were to be on the health committee and asking the same questions about sport there would be such crossover here and I just wondered if you had any further comment around the constraints of time based on the demands of the cost of living particularly around key necessities like housing for example the pressure that that puts on the volunteer network the opportunity for participation is really about is a concern across the whole wellbeing consideration whether that's access to culture sport time to undertake exercise, cook all of this it's all connected isn't it yeah I mean Andrew John to go first on it is I want to go back to yeah I mean it is connected I'll give you an example so we did some work on on Lewis on community land management as a form of cultural participation because the whole idea of buying the land and then developing it is a cultural process and it also involves cultural activities when you're engaging people in the process and we look particularly about young people's participation in community land management boards and here we have the classic construction of it's mostly retirees, mostly men, running these organisations and of course we're dependent on them because they're the only people at half the time but at the same time what you fold into that is a particular way of running an organisation a particular set of assumptions and values which go into who should participate to include and so we were working with younger people who had gone on to these management boards and we asked them about what the barriers were and the needs and so on and so forth and fundamentally it is about supporting people at different parts of the life course in order to enable them to engage with but also to productively alter the culture of these kinds of organisations in ways which bring more people in but also reflect the importance of local cultural values so it's about diversity but it's about the practical measures you need to take in order to for example support people if they've got childcare responsibilities to go out and participate in the boards in the evening, the board meetings in the evening working with employers to give them time off at particular times when they need to go engage with community land trust business so those kinds of practical issues were very much to the fore there so I'm just going back also to the previous point if I may one of the issues about vibrant so-called cultural democracies locally I recognise what it is that people themselves value in local communities in the present but also historically in terms of their broader sense of engagement and belonging to a place it's a way of getting people into managing their own affairs and I don't mean this in a sort of individualistic neoliberal way I mean it much more in a collective way of actually getting involved in the business of local politics the valuing and underpinning the development of a local community in a civic way so culture and the civic this is a really important connection between cultural activity in the broadest sense and civic participation but getting involved in decisions which affect you, your family and your neighbours so this is what I mean by cultural democracy but there's a broader connection with the democracy with a big D if you like and that's where I see the importance of building up these local infrastructures which then can connect with the national organisations and the very important formal types of cultural participation I'm not saying that not important I'm saying that you need to connect both ends of that process cultural participation I would fully agree and I think that the sport one is a very good example is that in sport there is less of a attention that people find between the sense of the everyday and the elite is how those things connect we don't question the fact that if we want to have elite Scottish football players elite Scottish rugby players elite Scottish curlers that we need young people to have a go to have a bash at it and they won't all go on to be great sports people but there is a sense that there is different things needed one is not more valuable than the other they are fundamentally interconnected and I think I point towards the idea that if we were standing here saying should we have football pitches or sports pitches across all of our communities everybody would be like yeah that's fine let's not build houses on them let's not take those down but when it comes to local music venues we anguish over this we question local music venues closed down music is as popular as sport and yet we seem to struggle to get that sense that if we want the elite end we also need to be able to allow that local end to happen and we need different things and the challenge that the arts and culture has that sport doesn't is that we are trying to service both with the same policy interventions whereas in sport it is recognised that elite level sport requires different interventions than supporting local level movement and sport activity The clock is ticking down a bit so I've still got members to ask questions so if I could ask for slightly shorter answers that would be great Thank you very much and good morning panel I'd like to focus my questions on the role of corporate social responsibility and that maybe ties in a little bit with what you've just outlined Professor Stevenson so I suppose my constituency is up in the north-east Aberdeen south I was interested to hear Professor Miles' contribution about the Peter Cooter project which is in my constituency but historically the north-east has benefited from a buoyant energy sector and we know that that sector and I'm sure others that sector has been very supportive of arts, culture everything from supporting a local knitting club to for example the BP portrait awards so it's right across the span so in terms of place and access to space and I suppose the democratisation of culture I'm interested in your comments about the role of corporate social responsibility and that kind of provision if you like funding or a venue to support culture in communities let me become to you Andrew first I'm not sure that I have much to say about corporate social responsibility rather than the obvious that as far as corporations benefit directly or indirectly from the public purse which they do it's important that there is a contribution a reverse contribution to politicians about the only powerful act which can tie such organisations down but I don't have any specific knowledge of how that might happen I think my only concern absolutely that there's money that's available the difficulty there is that it becomes selective that money may vanish it is not something we should rely on so in that sense the notion of a percent for culture that is around about actually ensuring that that money is an expectation not a gift that if you are in a community that you are of that community but it is for the community to decide how that money is spent and so again it's around about ensuring there's community wealth and making sure that the decisions about how that wealth is spent sit in the hands of the communities if I may just ask a quick follow up question the point about sustainability funding without straying off the focus of the session which is around place and space but nonetheless it's still important that communities and organisations are confident in funding sustainability so again I'd be interested in your comments around models of funding that can provide that reassurance David first The thing that I would say is that we have a very fractured landscape of funding which means that there's complexities and a huge amount of time spent with people trying to get money from be it centralised organisations Creative Scotland, local authorities putting in similar funding and I think that I look at for example Germany in some case and there's a much cleaner understanding about different elements of the funding landscape supporting different things and there's a big challenge about who covers the overheads whether that is the overheads of a major theatre space or the overheads of keeping the heating on in a village hall and there's an awful lot of game playing and hard work to grapple together bits of funding from different components with multiple agencies being engaged in that and I think we could really do a much more bold overview of saying what is national funding looking to support is that there to provide the infrastructure and then is a local authority there to provide the activity so that the individual organisations are not spending the time having to navigate a very complex landscape in order to piece together bits of funding to support the infrastructure but fundamentally I would say in Scotland that we do not value the overhead costs enough and that by that I mean the time of running these organisations, the spaces and that everything is funded through project funding and the biggest challenge we face is a persistent and pernicious obsession with short-term project funding Andrew, I don't know if you want to come in on that I couldn't disagree with that I mean the most my knowledge is greater in terms of funding of the English system and the model that seems to work best is the national portfolio organisation model where you have three years of funding at a particular level which is guaranteed and then those organisations can come back and repeat the application for a further three years I think that consistency is really important and I do support the idea of a division of labour when it comes to funding regarding the on costs the overheads which are the invisible costs I personally, David kind of alluded to I don't know if he was serious about you know percent for the arts I mean the arts are not funded very well when you think about the amount of money that's spent across government it's a tiny amount of money and the arts council budget may look huge on one level but it's tiny in relation to other aspects of government so we need more money in the arts and we need more money supporting local cultural development again in England with the drawl of the state and funding to local authorities it's been extremely difficult for organisations to make good in Cuta all we could do was support the volunteers to make funding applications to various bodies so we managed to help them get several thousand pounds of the co-op for example to support the regeneration of the youth club there but the community council really did value our input there and our support in a way I mean I don't agree that everything should be voluntary and reduced to the the efforts of a few individuals I think we need structural funding into communities to make capital out of the incredible talent that exists but it needs to be supported consistently and structurally thank you that our final questions from Alice Rallon thank you convener and if you'll permit me to get on to familiar hobby horse for my question we don't often we don't always talk about books in the context of culture I've asked officials from cultural organisations in Scotland about promoting literature and kind of stumped them in the past I'm sure it won't stump you but perhaps one of the most liberating things that an individual or a community can discover if we're talking about place-based culture is that their community has produced writers, has produced literature whether that's James Hogg in the Borders Ervin Welshin, Leith George MacKyne-Brown or whatever we're talking about and in the past I think we've kind of assumed that schools will deal with this but of course in the past schools haven't dealt with this so there's an interest in what literature your community has produced, what books your community has produced but as a country are we actually meeting that interest and that demand is this? I guess briefly I would come back to me that yes, books are important but for me it's about storytelling. Fundamentally what people want to know is that they have told their stories, their ancestors have told their stories they will tell their stories and books are vital and important but as Andy mentioned earlier on so are graphic novels, so are the stories that people see around about their generation about their identity so is music, music is poetry all of these components around about the word about how we've expressed the human condition and so do I think that we're focusing in this space the challenge is that publishing becomes very difficult for certain people from certain backgrounds in order to be able to publish and again that's back to the sense we've been talking about and I almost hate to bring this into it but in entrepreneurialism we understand the notion of a ramp there's lots of ideas and the ramp goes up and you scale up. In art and culture it becomes very difficult. People tell stories in school or they may have an artist in residence that inspires them but then moving on to saying how do I get access to a publisher, how do I do that activity can become challenging and yes we need to share the stories of the past but we need to ensure that people are telling stories now and they're writing their own stories and again for me yes it comes back to education but it's about having for example artists, it's about having writers in schools. I point to Wales I think the work that they're doing about having artists in every school is exceptional and they genuinely made a commitment and they are looking to do that and they are almost up at having a resident artist in every single school but it's a bold commitment that is said that this is something that is an entitlement for everyone Reading is ubiquitous activity in the survey data that I've been generating it's also I think one of the interesting things about all forms of cultural participation as we define it is that profoundly social and I think reading and writing talking about these things I mean the advent of the book club and the development of that sort of interaction has been quite important one of the things I wanted to mention is not about finding out about what goes on culture it's a lot of culture happens in the home and it's quite difficult to get involved with that kind of activity because it happens behind closed doors I get the sense that a lot of people were doing more writing during the pandemic this is one of the things we're encompassed in doing the arts as I mentioned before one of the few areas that increased the pandemic by comparison with before in terms of books I think the work we did on libraries shows just how important libraries are to people when they can access them on their own terms again in relation to the everyday schedules that they have so that if they got a library more or less on their doorstep which is then connected to shops and so on and so forth so they can do we found these kind of trajectories shopping going to the library so it's fitting places where books are held into people's everyday lives and then just to go back to this thing what is a book young people do read books but they're particularly interested in the visual form alongside the written word in comics and graphic novels and as I said before that's a developing cultural phenomenon and I think also we need to understand the way people interact with writing online and around sites through blogs making comments even twitter is a form of writing whether we like much of what is done on it or not it still requires the construction of a couple of sentences to advance the point of an argument so there are all these different contexts in which writing takes place in terms of identity of place I'm not sure I could say very much about that with it from my research the one place where it was very evident was in relation to Gallic identity, Gallic culture and education in the Gallic medium on the islands where young people in particular were brought into connection with their historical cultures through literary representations and storytelling so when you have a hook like that which is strong around entity in the first place then I think you can fold in different types of cultural activity including reading and writing Thank you very much and a very important point to finish up on Can I thank you both very much for attending and for such a stimulating evidence session we're now going to very briefly suspend the meeting to allow for a change of witnesses Thank you Good morning to everybody again we're moving on to a round table with the national performing companies and we are joined this morning by Steven Roth, Executive Director of Scottish Ballet Brenna Hobson, Executive Director of the National Theatre of Scotland Alex Riggick, General Director of Scottish Opera Gavin Reid, Chief Executive of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Alasdair Mackay, Chief Executive of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra a warm welcome to you all this morning's meeting is a round table and therefore we quite like a free-flowing discussion if possible we do have three broad themes which we will cover in turn if we can although appreciate that this is a as I've said a free-flowing discussion so we may just see how it goes please indicate to me all the clerks if you have a want to come in on a particular question or theme we do have a very hard stop of 1130 where the committee must close its business due to other parliamentary business happening thereafter so if I could start with our first theme which is national local layers of government and how national local layers of government work together we did have evidence last week from local authorities and I just would like the panel's views on how you as organisations seek to complement the work of other bodies such as local authorities or other national agencies in providing communities with opportunities to attend and participate in cultural activities and as I'm looking at Brenna as I finish my question perhaps you might start if you don't mind I think to start off what I would say is that the cultural economy is very much interlinked so we can't exist without the venues that local authorities provide none of us have, none of us resident in our own venues which enables us to be truly national certainly I think also we are seeing the pressures particularly on local authorities at the moment in terms of the amount of cultural provision that they are able to engage with and so I think that that's a difficulty but certainly if any one aspect of the cultural landscape is affected then we all are and I think that's key here I'm going to go around the panel so Stephen would you like to come in on that question I guess the key thing for us would be that we're very interlinked with all of the dance networks across where they exist in local authorities and as Brenna says the venues are absolutely crucial to what we do and how we interact with them and the work that they do they're very much struggling if you look at Aberdeen in his majesties through the pandemic it almost faced closure at one point these are really key venues that rely on their local authorities and we're there to support them with content obviously because we're the major producing organisations we produce the content that then goes out to those venues we also have a really close relationship I guess with all of the schools within local authorities we work with currently about 26 schools in eight local authorities as well we used to be funded in each local authority where we perform so Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh and so on to do outreach programs with those organisations that exist within the local authorities over the last seven, eight, nine years that funding has eroded to zero but we're still trying to do as much as we can in that space and we're often approached by the local authorities to complement or to bring our programs to their areas but they essentially don't have any funding to be able to do that we do where we can but at the moment as with all of my colleagues our budgets are ever more stretched and we're trying to make them go as far as we can so we're out there everywhere at the moment we're about to go to and we're drawn away as well so where we can we do and usually it's through fundraising specifically for that purpose ourselves I'm sorry to be repetitive but there was a time when local authorities were a crucial part of the funding of the RSNO and now that's decreased enormously Edinburgh City Council went through its funding in my second week in the job in 2019 I think more and more we are expected to provide financial support to local councils and that support often comes from trust and foundation income and we use that to get out and about and we are very determined as a national company of course to be in every local authority in Scotland we're committed to that but the funding for that now really comes from trust and foundations there is increasing pressure on trust and foundation income because with standstill funding and cuts from arts council England to the same trust and foundations asking for more and more so the heavy lifting is shifting away from local councils towards trust and foundations and that's really difficult to sustain but relationships with local councils are absolutely crucial to have successful integration of culture in communities I mean across Scotland we've got relationships with everyone to get into schools to get into community centres it's absolutely crucial to maintain these relations sorry Alex Thank you, good morning I was just going to say rather than echoing my colleagues necessarily gloomy perspectives I just wanted to say one of the interesting characteristics both of Scottish Opera and of the world we inhabit at the moment is that we've had a longstanding I mean well over 30 years worth of opera highlights or smaller scale touring and so we draw on a gene pool of about 110 smaller communities across Scotland and we try to visit about 35 every year it's just forcing us on a piano but that intervention in those communities is incredibly we know it resonates, we know it's powerful because on the whole those halls irrespective of whether there are 100 seats or 300 seats they're full so that's brilliant and what's interesting both pre-Covid it's particularly in referencing your earlier speaker about the sense of the integration of the responsibility of the local authorities to maintain and sustain the halls but also how many of those halls are in fact sustained by volunteer groups and we saw a huge loss of motivation and energy for all the obvious reasons during Covid but coming out of Covid many of those volunteers, voluntary organisations who come back together at a infrastructure level were really blessed with a number of amazing community halls sustained by communities and so it's a great delight and pleasure to go and visit but it's also echoing colleagues comments, the challenge remains that on the whole local authority funding has effectively stepped away from the work we do at all levels but there are little green shoots little glimmers of hope where on a project by project basis we secure some support really matters to us like all of us that we're very present across all of the nation and Gavin thank you echoing comments all around actually in terms of the reduction and a loss of crucial local authority funding in our case it was Glasgow City Council not long ago we do still retain the funding annual funding at the moment from the City of Edinburgh council hence you'll have noticed in the pack information about our longer term community residency in Craigmiller which is for us a model of how it could work in other places where that level of funding available similar to Scottish Opera my organisation has toured now every year apart from a couple of years clearly recently for about 42 years around the islands the borders giving more than 20 concerts in some larger venues that we don't get to such as Stirling Castle on a regular basis but actually places like Yale in the north of Shetland in their village community hall to 50 of the most appreciative and wonderful audience members I can recall in my in my time so this is very important to us we've just launched the similar summer season so there are planning and delivering those concerts in local authorities across the country no end of rich and aspirational conversations but we fund it from our own core funding and resources and as you can imagine with 50 people in Yale box office return is welcome but pretty pretty limited I want to bring in colleague Mark Rascal on this topic I was particularly struck by the work that all the national companies are doing with schools around Scotland and I was talking to a teacher actually who was involved in a Scottish opera production with her own school and just how transformative that was for the entire school it was a big undertaking and just the development of self esteem of the young people as well but I wanted to ask you about the resource implications of doing that particularly from the school side because it is quite a big commitment for a school but also we've seen perhaps changes in the way that music tuition is provided for across councils and I suppose a question would be is there that resource now within schools to interact with in order to make your work within schools effective so from that sort of council resource side of things your reflections on music resources within schools and general resources within schools to make your work really really effective Do you like me to speak to that first? Yes please Thank you it's a really good question I should say that Scottish opera on the whole finds itself across about 100 primary schools around Scotland a couple of things that characterise those visits one of which is interestingly less to do with money and more to do with individual champions within the school so where there is a particular head teacher or a particular music teacher or a particular teacher they often are the broker the facilitator the link between our overtures and the outcomes in the classrooms partly and this is not a criticism of anybody but partly because every school every head teacher has hundreds of pressures every day so a good thing like this takes a bit of energy to get some cut we also we tend to for example a price point so we do charge a small amount but our price point doesn't go anywhere towards covering our costs the price point is simply a recognition of the exchange of services we're offering and the responses from the kids it's also true in my travels over 17 years I can't tell you how many people I've met who said I loved it when you were at school my kids loved it and now my grandkids loved it so there is something about the sustainability of the delivery of music performances musical performances again about 100 kids get involved in each of our performances so that track records are tremendous other side of it is we also Scottish Opera have what we call our young company or connect which has about it started about 12 or 13 years ago we had we typically had about 100 young people involved with it drawn from around Scotland to try and amplify all that was particular to our outform and to encourage people to be singers, musicians, administrators etc we formed a small orchestra as part of it but with the diminution of music training we've now had to disband the orchestra because there were no young people coming through to participate in it so I think there has been a direct impact and I'm sure orchestral colleagues there has been a direct impact on the diminution of music teaching in schools on the flow of young people into our sector I'd like to talk to one thing in particular we've committed to and it's using digital resources to get high quality music tuition into every classroom and there's no substitute for live music for music teachers but there isn't enough music teachers particularly in primary school so giving normal primary school teachers the skills the resources, the training to teach their classes I think is an incredibly effective way that we as national companies can really influence the classroom teaching and we have a tremendous success with a number of projects Gaspar the Fox was an animated film with teacher resources that reached over 100,000 Scottish school children and there's one thing particularly I'd like to highlight we signed a memorandum of understanding with a company called Charanga and Charanga has been going 25 years it's a very evolved digital platform to support music education primarily in English schools it's in 12,500 English schools now reaching over a million children in primary school it's just made an agreement with Welsh Government to support all schools in Wales with music education and that goes from instrumental tuition to classroom teaching it's now in over 30% of Scottish schools going to work with them to grow that but it really does open so many doors and what it does is it builds lesson plans for teachers it gives them the resources to deliver these lesson plans it gives the kids experiences of playing their instruments with quite sophisticated backing tracks what it doesn't have is much orchestral music and what the RSNO will provide in Scotland and in England and beyond will be resources to populate that platform that Charanga has but of all the challenges we have with funding digital gives us immense opportunity to stimulate an interest and our model at the moment is to stimulate that interest through digital but then to get live musicians there and what we have noticed in the last couple of months in particular in March we went into a number of halls around Scotland and in every hall we were oversubscribed with schools wanting to come to experience music live so digital is not the end point digital is the start point but it's an amazing facility and I think if we could put even limited resources into integrating digital education across the national companies it would have a huge impact across Scotland Can I ask my colleague Maurice Golden to ask questions Thanks for that we've kind of discussed the reduction if you like local authority support but according to Spice the Scottish Parliament information centre there's been a 20% reduction in real term funding from the Scottish Government over the last 10 years and I just wondered what sort of impact that is having on the sector what coping mechanisms otherwise you're utilising to try and continue to make an impact and improve culture based policy in that context I don't know who wants to start I think as a group of national companies I would say we're very agile and we're out there and entrepreneurial as well you've heard some examples of the entrepreneurialism within the companies I can speak for Scottish Ballet in that way when the standstill funding has been continuing through 10 years or so we've had to make it an imperative to raise money in other ways and usually it's coming from trusts and foundations or from sponsorship what that creates a little bit is a stop start mechanism so you can raise some money sometimes very significant funds for a specific project that will give you a pilot or a start-up and then that funding may drop away and I'll give you a good example of that someone mentioned corporate social responsibility earlier our programme is safe to be me which runs through primary schools in Scotland 26 primary schools it's live is also a hybrid version of it similar to what Alistair was describing but we prefer if we can spend a week in a school with a whole year level and with an outcome at the end which is a performance that was funded by Aberdeen Standard for the first two years that funding just stopped suddenly at the end of last year full stop so the funding now no longer exists for us to continue to develop that programme and continue it we're looking and I think we'll eventually find funding to substitute for Aberdeen but it means that you can never rely on it and long-term impact is incredibly important both from the perspective of engaging with young people through their whole life cycle so that they are becoming audiences of the future but our dance health programme which is safe to be me sits within is about a whole life cycle so we do young programmes for young people and programmes for older people dementia, Parkinson's and so on all of those are self funded by through trust and foundations or a corporate sponsorship it becomes harder and harder to do that obviously because we're in a competitive space with each other as much as everyone else that's out there looking for money for services whether they be social services or creative services so we're very agile and entrepreneurial and if we're told no we'll try and find another way to do it and expanding as we can but there's nothing like the security that you have with the solar government funding that is at least linked to inflation so that you know that you can keep up with the costs particularly as touring organisations the costs now on the road are phenomenal particularly for fuel or just building sets for instance Alex will tell you so yes it's a constraint but we'll try to as we can to fill the gap in any way we can Brenna I think the other thing that I would highlight I agree we're all out there hustling for extra money we're also incredibly efficient so we will be co-producing with other organisations within Scotland and also frequently in England and the rest of the UK which means that the contribution that each organisation makes we've all taken a very strong look at all of our overheads I would also say that I think we're coming towards the end of the efficiency that we can we can bring to bear and it is with great reluctance starting to have an impact on the amount that we can put out and I think that's a concern for all of us a couple of things, we are all very inventive in finding ways to make less go further but the honest truth is our musicians are now paid 30% less compared to inflation than they were 12 years ago as a percentage of turnover 12 years ago the RSNO got about 70% now it's at 40% so it's not that we are not being entrepreneurial it's I think we are at a limit we just can't keep doing it and I liked it one thing we are looking at commercial income we're looking at film and television recording we had Disney here last week we've got universal pictures next week the reason we can win the contracts and the quality of the facility the reason we have that quality of facility and orchestra is because of the support we get from Scottish Government so it's absolutely crucial to earn more income but I would love to sit here and tell you how creative we all are at getting over these funding challenges but I absolutely think we are towards an end point now where there's going to be a real impact captain only to to sort of PS that really there's nobody in our sector short of ambition and short of a really passionate desire to reach more people and to do ever more creative work and work with more and more interesting artists and as we all do to some extent for another co-curate with communities and partners around the country the Scottish Chamber Orchestra the musicians are all freelance they're paid by the session they're not on retainer, they're not on contract so every budget is built from the bottom up and we all to some extent for another are now at a point where entrepreneurialism ambition, creativity are at a max certainly in our case we're innovating slightly at the margins we would love to have a much more well developed digital output to complement the life but there is no resource to develop that idea and there is no real income generating model that matches the significant new expense so I think the point and we will all have examples of that to offer the point being ambition and matching ambition and resource is always the balancing act it's just getting much harder thanks Morrest, do you have any other? Just your submission notes collaboration between yourselves but do you feel that collaboration could be strengthened under a place based approach to culture within communities in order to collectively respond to unmet demand across those communities collaboration in order to start Gavin? There are some long standing examples of collaboration here the RSNO the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the SCO have collaborated on now with Perth concert hall on a community based series of public concerts in the concert hall and a whole increasing range of schools based work and that's a partnership that goes back over 25 years the RSNO and the SCO have presented a joint series of concerts and outreach activities in Aberdeen for many years so I think we will all be able to again point to those collaborative specific projects I think there is a collaboration of thinking going on at the moment amongst this group in particular which has intensified in recent years and that goes from top to bottom of the organisation I think we have found depths of support and resource and creative thinking amongst our group and I don't just mean at this level throughout the organisations which I think are producing a much richer opportunities for outreach not only in terms of business efficiency use of resources but how we're actually maybe I can say some good news from the pandemic we used to meet once a quarter now through the pandemic the five of us met every week and began to talk much more about how we could collaborate and I think each of the companies national companies has incredible skills and try not to overlap and looking at where we map out our geographical reach and trying to be sure that we're not competing with each other but we're complementing each other in the regions but I do think we've made enormous steps forward in that pre-post pandemic largely a result I think of more communication between us through the pandemic Alex I just wanted to perhaps colour the discussion a little by saying that it's also true that there are many areas of collaboration small sea that perhaps might not evidence themselves in the public domain but for example at Scottish Opera as a sort of large producing company we have a constant throughput of young technicians young costume makers young marketeers who for example have come to us from say the conservatoire come through our organisation and then go on to populate roles across the rest of the cultural sector and actually oddly we see ourselves as indeed my colleagues do we see ourselves slightly as a training organisation so we don't mind the churn if you like of young people because we know that we're doing our bit to translate the sector there's also cross-pollination between ourselves interestingly in the film and TV sector and what's been fascinating has been for many years it was kind of the seesaw always tipped around a wee bit depending on which sector was slightly busier than the other but now we're losing lost a lot of our freelance folk to the film and TV sector because happily for Scotland that sector's thriving but unhappily or less happily for us it's very clever people have gone over to that world because you know in short term the money's very very fine indeed it's also been interesting that between all the organisations that rely on musicians for example they'll ebb and flow between us according to the needs of each of our projects and also they in turn then provide training and inspiration and mentoring for others so you know between us five of us and also we've also got really strong connections with the conservatoire where all of their skills come in and out of our organisations and actually on the whole the door's very very widely open to all of that I think the other thing that we also that sits slightly outside the five of us is also our partnerships with the likes for example of ourselves and the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow you know as an example of where we've made work together to suit either the scale of the work or the venues or the strengths of the project Can I ask Faisal Chadri to ask a question? Thank you convener and good morning panel on that note I just wanted to ask you how much involvement does the national performance companies have with third sector organisations as you probably know the third sector organisations work with different ethnic minority organisations as well bringing in ideas from different countries so what's your involvement and how do you guys work with third sector organisations? A particular example that we're very proud of is to the summer of 22 we presented our production of Condead in our car park because we were still in the sort of edging out of Covid wanted to present our work outdoors to encourage audiences to come along we spent quite a lot of time thinking about how we could present Condead which has about 15 different scenes and locations in it huge chorus requirements so we had built on a community chorus based in Paisley for a production we'd done in a tent a few summers ago and we enhanced that by a very strong partnership with the Maryhill integration network and we found ourselves in the inn about 80 volunteers drawn from our more obvious Paisley musical lovers and an extraordinary collection of human beings through the Maryhill integration network and as a result of that we've forged some really strong partnerships that have resulted in those singers joining our own Scottish Opera community choir and also beginning to alter the DNA of our audiences so just by way of an example I would say that working with third sector organisations and other cultural partners is incredibly important to all of us an example for National Theatre of Scotland was prior to and all the way through the pandemic we worked with Illuminate, we worked with Glasgow Life we worked with Eden Court Theatre and all the Queensland in Australia on a project called The Coming Back Outfall aimed at older LGBTQ plus Scots who potentially find themselves being discriminated against a second time round as they age as they potentially go into care homes and so that was a way of community building that we started pre-pandemic but were able to really successfully build on during the pandemic online and indeed that's a project that we ultimately had to step away from because we can't be everywhere all of the time but there are still things happening both in Glasgow and in Inverness as a result of that and I would also say that we work extensively internationally with arts organisations we worked with a brilliant arts organisation in Calcutta around called around a kind of imaginary shoe project associated with COP26 where people experienced each other's lives by the metaphor of putting on a digital pair of shoes from someone that might live a thousand or indeed 10,000 miles away from you so I think those sorts of partnerships incredibly important to us all I can just mention two partnerships RSNO, the first one with the system organisation which is an amazing organisation and our musicians have gone into the five big noise centres around Scotland and we've invited these musicians back onto the stage and we give them a platform as the first piece in our concert more next year will be the RSNO infused with young musicians from Systema and their families their supporters come along to the concert and it's a completely joyous occasion one thing that made me very happy was in a recent performance of two Bram symphonies and there was applause unconventionally there was applause after every single movement of every symphony which said to me that there are people in this audience tonight that don't normally come to RSNO and I was thrilled that they applauded every movement that's been a wonderful relationship the other thing which I think is one of the great highlights of my four years in Scotland was a partnership with a group called Musicians in Exile which is made up from refugees in Scotland and that was arranged through the Scottish Refugee Council and a group called Glasgow Barrens which are based in Govind and these people come to our country with incredible skills musical skills but they don't have instruments and they don't have an outlet to express themselves and I think with refugees if we want them to integrate into our communities then they're welcome with their music in their ways and for a chance for them to express themselves and feel that bit more human again I think their chances of successfully integrating into our country goes up so we're looking at more partnerships there and again I think it's particularly I would just like to say credit to the people in Govind Glasgow Barrens and the people that run Musicians in Exile for the amazing work that they're doing there and RSNO has been honoured to collaborate with them Gavin everything that Alice says about working with System of Scotland a great joy for the SCO as well and we have a couple of projects in two of their centres lined up for later this year through our work in Craig Miller we have collaborated with the Craig Miller and Nidry Community Arts Festival was as I'm sure you know an extremely important festival that ran for about 25, 30 years and there was in a bans for a while we worked with partners there to reinstate that festival and we are working towards the next iteration of that for this summer prior to our work in Craig Miller we also worked long term across the community in Westerhales and worked regularly on a number of collaborative projects with Whale with Whale Arts one project that I'm particularly proud of the SCO is the work we do with CAMHS, the Children and Adolescent Mental Health Service everything that we know about CAMHS is extraordinarily overstretched and it's very difficult to be taken on and to be looked after we have run a number of on-going projects with CAMHS over the last few years called New Vibe which is for teenagers with moderate to severe mental health issues not only is the feedback from girls that comes incredibly positive and they can show the actual tangible benefits they have come back systematically for more projects over the last few years which tells me that this is a service that is badly needed Can I move the conversation on to our second theme which is around unmet cultural need as we describe it and I suppose the questions here are how do the national performing companies identify where in Scotland to take performances where to deliver community-based projects and what form of project is delivered and that includes crucially the extent to which co-production happens with local communities and how cultural need is in a way identified I suppose Stephen, would you like to take that question first? I guess there's various layers to that question the first one I would say is that we're the national performing arts companies and therefore we represent Scotland and the arts in Scotland at the very highest level both nationally and internationally therefore we present large scale works in major theatres and you can pick those cities in Scotland where there are major theatres, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Vanessa, Aberdeen and so on with the concert halls there are Perth and other places as well so we have a responsibility and we're funded to be the preeminent national performing arts organisations below that there's a hold of other things we do and we were talking about them just then with the collaborations with third sector and how do we determine where we go as the national performing arts companies for the Scottish Ballet if we're big enough to mount a large production for other things where we have collaborations and partnerships then we will always take the direction from the community and with regard to what is on offer from Scottish Ballet and I'll give you an example we have a large range of of health programmes for MS dementia the Safe To Be Me programme and what's the other and Parkinson's so we could be delivering these across every single community in Scotland because every single community wants them there's a huge need it was identified we've got a partnership with Healthcare Improvement Scotland and Alliance as well so they looked to us to go to areas where there's acute need so for instance the highest per capita sufferers in the United Kingdom is in Orkney and we've partnered with NHS there and the MS Society in Orkney to run a pilot programme of Elevate which is our MS for Dance programme we're also running this programme in other places but that wasn't Scottish Ballet going to MS to Orkney and saying let's do that programme there that was us working in partnership with the NHS, with the Scottish Government with the Healthcare Improvement Scotland and Alliance so they'll identify areas of need and we'll try and fulfil that need where we can and start that collaboration in that way Thank you. One of the things is that we're all incredibly network so for instance for us with the production that we're doing later this year called Throne about Backhold Wrestling we're working with the North East Touring Alliance to talk to them about where is this production potentially right for you we're going to two of their venues they have many one of the advantages that National Theatre of Scotland has is that we can be making work relatively easily unlike some of our colleagues for tiny village halls or for 1000 seat theatres another example this year is that Aberdein performing arts have a real aspiration to be producing more work they often don't have the funds to do that themselves so we're co-producing our production of Dracula with them with a really significant director Sally Cookson who does not often work in Scotland and the sorts of skills that she's going to be bringing into the community here are going to be incredibly valuable and our partnership with Aberdein which absolutely came from them saying this is an aspiration we have can you help us and that is a work that is being relocated to Aberdein a playwright who writes frequently in Doric and will have Doric elements so I think absolutely coming having conversations with organisations about what it is that they need as opposed to as Stephen says imposing things on the other thing I would say is that with our deeper schools work where we actually co-produce works that comes from our relationships from touring into schools so you can start with a relatively light touch you take your production in the experience of theatre when it comes to them in their school but something like our production of light flying which really looks at young people and confidence in mental health grew out of some of those relationships where we were visiting we were then able to have bigger conversations with teachers and particularly head teachers Can I just make one point we go out looking for partnerships in the communities of course we do and sometimes it's the case of getting on the phone trying to find our health trust and trying to find things I'd love to see things coming the other way and maybe I could just I mean I hope it's growing in Scotland the idea of social prescription but NHS England back in 2018 employed I think a thousand link workers and healthcare professionals through these link workers came to arts organisations asking something they could do so I mean it's we can go into a health trust and we can say perhaps we could do this for you but for something to come the other way and to say actually could you help us with this I would really welcome more of that so the partnership building is more even coming from both sides I mean we can guess what might be helpful in some ways we can research what might be helpful but really for healthcare professionals to come back to us and tell us how we can serve them to put ourselves available as a resource to healthcare and NHS England I mean they're not a charity I guess maybe they are I don't know the structures but they're doing it for good business reasons you know what they're investing in in admissions in prescription of drugs goes down you know it's a cost effective I believe they're now increasing to something like four and a half thousand link workers from a thousand it's been incredibly effective I mean I think we are beginning that in Scotland I'd like to go further Gavin just an interesting partnership that has grown out of two different aspects of our work for about ten years musicians from the SCO have worked with NHS Lothian on a project we call Reconnect which is at small scale working in hospitals and day centre day care centres with adults who have a diagnosis of dementia lots of organisations are now working in this field it's clearly very valuable work there's plenty of important research that just shows the extraordinary benefits of music to people who are suffering from this condition and we have been involved in a lot of evaluative work there too and entirely separate to that the SCO has again for many years given a new years V&E's concert in the Urshire Hall on new years day and we've tended to work in partnership with an organisation from the charity sector and use it as a fundraising opportunity so for many years it was Mary Curie it's now Alzheimer's Scotland so the two elements have come together and Alzheimer's Scotland are now working with us on a close and regular basis looking for other opportunities through their networks around the country for us to deliver these workshops and coming back to the first bit of our conversation this morning the ambition is unbounded and limited entirely by resources to be able to deliver it Arrister Anne Thank you, convener I'm just interested in the point that Arrister Mackie you were making there about co-operation between the NHS and the world of culture and the benefits that they can have for each other this is a theme that we've gone to again and again in this committee and I'm just interested here that you feel the initiative is one way so is there any kind of house if you like that exists to promote that kind of contact or is it an ad hoc exercise that you all have to invent over and over again? I'd be interested to hear what my colleague said but from Arrister Anne's perspective I think all the partnerships we have we've probably initiated them largely or it's been through personal relationships experiences that members of our Arrister Anne community have had certainly in my four years no one's flown to me up and said could you come bring the Arrister Anne to do this it's all been stimulated largely from personal relationships from our side Any wider comments on that point Alex? I was just going to offer perhaps slightly more hope to say that Scottish Opera well over a decade ago started a small breathing project around cystic fibrosis just to see whether singing and breathing could help improve the quality of life of those small number of individuals in Scotland there's a big impact on their lives fast forward to the ending of Covid and we had a moment of going I wonder if much of that work could be repurposed to help sufferers with long Covid so we rolled out a digital programme based around the learnings we'd had from the cystic fibrosis process and then a few months ago we were approached by NHS Scotland to put a bid in for some money to help roll this programme out further and it's been rolled out a good deal further and also when you look at the map of the UK where folk have interacted with this programme there are a good lead number of folk over two and a half thousand many of whom are south of the border so we were very happy to be invited to bid and very happy to be able to say there's only so much time we've got nevertheless we'll do our best and the bid was accepted and much of it being anecdotal and or casual is a fair point so I think there's room for a bit more joining up between particularly health and the arts On the subject of defining cultural need I think I'm right in saying that the five NPCs are planning a collective mapping exercise to help understand what's being delivered in terms of social impact cultural activity and the communities that are being reached. I don't know if any of our panel want to speak to that tell us what those plans are because obviously data is really important here so is anyone able to speak to that or comment on it? Work in progress Something we can revisit Yes please The last theme that we are exploring is place-based cultural policy How do the NPCs deliver that kind of approach the extent to which the value that's provided to communities can actually be measured and what challenges are faced in delivering a place-based approach I don't know if we can go around the panel again Gavin, do you want to comment on? I think the I've mentioned the one that's perhaps richest for this conversation already and that's the work that we're doing in Craig Miller at the moment we have around eight separate on-going projects with Craig Miller running across five years but the important thing to say there is that we spent a couple of years before the work started getting to know developing relationships developing ideas that are very much co-curated and I think they will, I'm happy to say now report back that there is a feeling of integration and collaboration and rather than arts organisation comes along and gives so that's something that we are then looking to invest in formal evaluation but also to look at where those ideas can travel elsewhere in a country like Scotland you immediately add an awful lot of expense in terms of taking that kind of regular, we have musicians going to Craig Miller every week for a whole term at a time same time developing long term deep engagement in communities and then their sharing, their performances the orchestra will be going there on mass the first week of the next main concert season in October we will have the orchestra in Castlebury High School to do that at a distance obviously adds a significant extra cost which is difficult to fund however as part of our annual summer touring around the Highlands and Islands we are also developing within those weeks of concert giving residences so we were in Inverness from the Drockett Elgin for a week last year working on a whole range of these community based things so really important that we aim to do it finding the resource and the efficient way of delivering is the key thing but I think we are all learning the value of co-curation any other panel members want to come in on that particular yet Alex I think one of the characteristics of a place based approach is the need for consistency the need for taking a very long term approach and the need for the quality of the relationships so sometimes I guess it could feel to the outside observer that we are not necessarily doing a great deal or that the projects we speak about feel quite specialist because they are specialist and they do require deep dives and they require a great deal of time to invest investment of time by both the companies and the local communities just briefly I'm just going to touch on we were doing a bit of thinking about celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Walter Scott and panellists may not know but there's something like 98 operas based on the novels of Walter Scott as Rich Pickings we wanted to find a way coming out of Covid to address issues around anxiety, isolation and lack of empowerment which was reportedly experienced by a disproportionate number of women as a result of lockdown and through a series of arts led workshops in the borders based on the plot and central themes of Scots novel The Bride of Lamomere and the opera Richie de Lamomere a group of women in the Scottish borders were invited to develop their skills across an array of visual and literary mediums so cutting along the story short is a really interesting visual and musical outcomes which both appeared in our theatre in Glasgow and also will have an exhibition in Gallashields so quite interesting deep dive quite a lot of work person intensive but fascinating and hopefully helpful outcomes for those individuals involved Alasdair Angan did you have questions around a place based in British? Just briefly in very creditable work on two fronts one to ensure that harder to reach groups are being reached and people are overcoming their threshold anxiety if they have it to come to events and also simultaneously to try and get around the country I just wonder how you combine the two things to make sure that when you visit different parts of the country you're not just meeting similar people and what you're doing to make sure that when you get to different parts of the country you're reaching us widely within that community as you can Steve, happy to start with that we always send our engagement team out ahead of the company whenever we're performing and we always have our engagement team on the road with us everywhere including the islands that we're going up to very shortly so they'll go into schools and community organisations if we're running dance health programmes whether it be Parkinson's or dementia or whatever those teams will be there as well and everything then that we do within the region within the local authority is linked to the performance so the themes from the performance whether it be Swan Lake or the Nutcracker or whatever it happens to be will play through those engagement programmes so we have our engagement team going up to Orkney and then on to Lewis one week ahead of the company going there we'll be bringing those communities together to help us build a venue because there aren't venues on those islands where we can perform so we're taking everything with us including electricity generators green hydrogen new hydrogen generators so that we can give those but not enough of it not enough high power electricity to do a show so usually we take two or three generators with us as well but in this case they're green hydrogen generators but we'll build the venues and give those communities the same experience that they would have if they were sitting in the theatre all in Glasgow or the festival theatre in Edinburgh exactly the same experience that comes at a huge cost but I think it's really important that where possible if Alex can send four singers and a pianist to a village hall that happens but we can also where possible take full scale works to places that don't have large scale venues so looking at that in a holistic way we don't just go and perform and go we actually go there and try and enrich those communities and bring those people to us and I think it's important to do it there on the ground in those places because it would be cheaper in fact for us to fly 700 people from Lewis or 700 people from Orkney to the theatre all in Glasgow or Edinburgh and fly them back the next day and it would be for us as a company to put everybody on the road and all those trucks that we need and so on and build the theatre but the importance of doing it in that place is invaluable I think to those communities Thank you Do you have anyone else? I was just going to try and make a point around a place based approach particularly thinking about Covid and coming out of Covid one of the things we were struck by was particularly in the midst of Covid how many of our audience were saying to us we really miss going to live performance and not just opera the general principles of live performance because of all the things that it does to enrich people's lives and we thought about I very much take the point about unmet demand but how do we build an audience are we in danger of speaking into our own echo chamber how can we test ourselves to think more widely than that coming out of Covid pre Covid we had a little model what we would call a pop-up opera a couple of singers and narrators a couple of instrumentalists and that had sort of bimbled its way around doing all sorts of wee things and we thought coming out of Covid there was an opportunity to create live performances that could be presented outdoors and we turned to the habit of seeing work and I'm really delighted that in our 21 summer summer of 21 we managed to get to 46 communities around Scotland and played about 191 performances and the photographs of that are so wonderfully Scottish because some of them you've got people sitting in their social circles it's a sunny day and there's other photos where you've got the mist literally coming in over the hill and everything but the important thing was that the weather and they iterated and reaffirmed their belief and passion for live performance so I think there's something about intense dialogue with the communities but there's also something about our duty of care to ensure that we do our very best to bring as much live performance around the country as we can Gavin Totally agree with what Allie said I think we share a really strong feeling of responsibility as widely as possible it would be too easy and completely wrong for us simply to go to the nice well-appointed largest nice acoustics where we're going to get we can predict what the income is going to be, the ticket income is going to be and go there and don't do anything else we take great care every year in the SCO with the summer touring in particular to make sure that we are simply going back to the same places every year that know us and like us and we kind of know they're going to come but actually reaching every year there are new venues and new places it's much harder, it's considerably more labour intensive it's considerably more expensive and the box office returns are considerably less predictable but it's the right thing to do Yes Alison 32 local authorities in Scotland last year when musicians were committed to getting out there they were successful as local partnerships and the last thing I want to do is to go to someone and say I know what you need, you need some mallar you know it's not relevant but we need to listen to what they want to try and match their need with our resource and again I think we all do our level best to do that but it does often stand or fall on the local relationship on the local partnership and providing a resource that they think meets the need that they have Thank you for that I don't know if any other MSP colleagues yes, Audrey Thanks very much, convener Listening with interest particularly the discussion around place-based policy and one thing that's coming into my head is the economic benefit that you bring into local areas when you're out in communities and cities and so I'm thinking for example the tie-in that some of your annual programme has with hospitality and tourism and what work perhaps has been done to look at that benefit that you bring to local economies and if I may quickly ask a question around in addition to your engagement with partners and communities in terms of performance and forgive me if this has maybe been covered already because there's been a lot discussed is just to outline a little bit about the perhaps mentoring that you do of local actors and local performers through say a masterclass or mentoring opportunities Begin with that Alex Just briefly on the first question just to say whilst I don't have the numbers at my command I do know that in the conversations we have with the colleagues who run Edencourt Theatre in Inverness they witness a very they the theatre and they the city witness tangible uptick in not only ticket attendants companies in Inverness but also it flows through accommodation, shopping food and beverage particularly over the weekends and that's partly because obviously Inverness is at the centre of the Highlands and so many of the distance is required to attend Inverness distance travelled required is significant so I could dig out some stats on that if you like that would help Thank you for that it would be helpful if you could Gavin In terms of our regular summer Scottish touring we work in partnership with Visit Scotland regularly so they help to promote and put us in touch with various partners and those conversations with other delivery partners are developing in its priority for us at the moment interesting you've raised it to one of the challenges of visiting new venues, new communities for a short period of time initially it's just bluntly making people sure people know we're coming we can have those conversations in advance with the likes of Visit Scotland but also their local delivery partners in terms of mentoring we will all have stories to tell around that the SCU has an annual project every year with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland's wind players we work with them on a project and mentor and work with them and then perform as one of their main concerts in Glasgow and we also bring it to Edinburgh and we generally wherever we can take it to a third venue we also run what we call SCU Academy which is for young musicians a young training scheme and in our new season which we've just announced last week in March of next year I think it's March or April we'll have young string players with the orchestra on the stage of the Usher Hall and the city halls playing alongside them and I think I'm sure we can all tell you of regular mentoring that we do with young professionals in our sector I think one of the things that's a really interesting conversation we've been having recently is not just is there an impact when we go into particularly some of the smaller venues so I was speaking to Heart of Hoyke quite recently and they say when we're in their program and I'm pleased to say that we are this year that has a general impact on their theatre program across the year because it sort of raises the profile and I think that's something that's one of the reasons that all of us try and get around to different parts of Scotland and not just go back to the same places and to pick up on your point around mentoring we have a brilliant creation space in the north of Glasgow we have four rehearsal rooms it's well set up and so one of the things that we do really carefully with our artistic development department is that we bring in both companies and also individual artists from quite a young stage in their careers where they might be five or ten years off creating a work for us and we fund them to have mentorships to work on projects sometimes it's just thinking time in a room that they need and for us rather than try to do that when we're out on tour or actually bringing people to us and giving them that concentrated time is what has been working for us and I think the other thing I would say is that we all have a really strong role in training freelancers quite often it's difficult for freelancers to afford to do things like work and health and safety training like anti-racism training and that's something that we provide as part of our induction process it's not only the training paid for but they're paid to do the training and I think that's a really important thing I would love us to do more work on economic benefit of culture. The things you mentioned are very relevant to tourism of course people come into venues it stimulates communities but also I mean maybe I could just say we've talked a lot about our own work I went to Alex inviting me to tritical recently the Scottish Opera production and incredible I actually paid for a ticket to go back a second time and I can tell you the next day I went into work feeling like a different person economic benefit of that experience and what is the economic benefit from culture that people take back into their working lives and that's much more difficult to define than direct economic benefit but in many ways I think that is one of the most powerful economic cases we can make. It's no accident that a country like Germany which has one of the strongest economies has one of the strongest cultural scenes in the world culture and economy are fundamentally linked I think perhaps cultural sector we need to do better at defining that and talking about that we love talking about what we do we're passionate about it, we're not economists but I think if we're going to win the case in the public domain for funding of the arts then we need to do slightly better in articulating the broader economic benefit on that and I don't know if any of before I sort of close the meeting if any of the MSP colleagues have questions but if I could ask as a final question how do you measure and evaluate the impact of the work that you do locally has on communities and I accept there's a sort of rather simplistic way of doing that by box office returns size of audience but I think that's very crude and there's a much wider benefit and we've just spoken about that but I just wonder is it even possible to measure impact if I could leave you that final question and start with Alex thank you I think the short answer is it's a jolly hard thing to do I mean I take the point about the simplistic approach to the maths and also one of my own personal units of measure is being in the foyer at the end of a performance and just trying to catch everyone's eye and get a bit of a thumbs up to the work and that sounds a bit reductivist it's not meant to be it's just to actually have that group of people who've come together that evening had an amazing time or if not why not let's find out why let's do better I think Alistair's point about the overall kind of health of a nation being reflected in and articulated through its cultural sector I think is really important we're doing a bit of work through Edinburgh University on trying to measure this and I think it's probably a little bit it's also one of those kind of questions that's ever just slightly beyond the media answers so that's probably all I'd say at this stage on that topic I mean I'm interested to hear your views on how the performers within your companies we haven't really spoken about them today but is there a role for them in measuring impacts again I think a lot of it is hard to define in an orchestra like the SCO where we are busy but we're not 100% full time there's about 38 weeks of work each year they have space to do other things and I think we can measure our success by retention and the artists that want to come and work with the orchestra I think that is a very important measure for all of us I think one of the key things on this point is that if I may say so myself all five companies are working at a very very high international level you know the chain is really strong and the artistic ambition is very high and the artists that are coming to work with us on a regular basis the soloists actors dancers are of a very very high calibre I think that's important to note as part of the answer it's not the whole answer but as part of the answer Stephen I think we could spend an entire day talking about measuring benefit and impact both the public benefit and impact the community and social benefit not only about art and we've talked about the art a lot and the art form and Alistair was just talking about essentially the feel good factor of what we do how do you measure the impact of that how do you measure the economic benefit of what we do when we were in Aberdein recently for Christmas week there that was the Aberdein Food and Wine Festival they attributed the success of their festival this year to Scottish Ballet being in His Majesty's Theatre with the Snow Queen because every restaurant bar was absolutely jam packed all that season as well so there's that side of the equation then there are all of these other programs that we've been speaking of and we absolutely measure and set out to measure and evaluate every program in a very scientific way both empirical research and anecdotal so for our Safe To Be Me program we've partnered with the University of Strathclyde they're with us in the schools measuring the impact speaking to the students the schools we've got a partnership with the Georgetown Medical Center in the United States who are evaluating our MS program because anything to do with health needs to have rigorous scientific research behind it we've got the Royal Conservatives of Scotland we've got a PhD professor who works with us almost full time measuring and evaluating our work as well the University of Florida we work with on some of our health programs and we do this in every way and we publish that we publish that or the universities publish that research and in essence that's why we've established the National Dance Health Center at Scottish Ballet to bring all of this together because there are so many threads to it that it's really important not just to be going out and doing it because it feels good as we can all talk about all day every day but to actually show that it does is good not only for the individual but their families and then their communities so there's a huge multiplier effect that happens and measuring that takes time and money and you've got to be in there for the long haul and I'll come back to that first point I made earlier about the stop-start mechanism when you've got you've got to chase funding all of the time if you're looking at measuring something over a long term you've got to have enough funding there to be able to do it for 5, 10 years to look at that impact over a long period of time not just one year for instance or one project I would echo what my colleagues have said both about longevity but also about needing the data but also I think for me the expertise particularly of teachers has been really interesting for us and if I could just read a short quote from our neighbourhood project the head teacher of St Teresa's primary said to us it's been a privilege to share this experience with our young people and watch them transform into empowered young activists seeking justice for others in our world and I think the impact that you can have and that you can hear from teachers who are expert in this area going in and doing a project with young people is not to be underestimated Thank you and finally Alasdair do you have anything to add to that? Evaluation is so crucial to focus we need to know what is effective, we need to double up and who has impact and we need to lose what doesn't have it but can I just pick up one very quick thing which is also talked a lot about what national companies do within Scotland but in projecting Scotland's identity as we travel around the world as a vibrant cultural country that has a rich offering for people to come and visit and to come and live and all of us could tell you we are in the music for MVN now, we can Monday we are travelling around Europe and I am proud that our team beats Spain 2-0 at Hamden at football, I was there and I am proud of the work that the national companies do in sending a message out to the wider world of just what a great place Scotland is and if you are talking about evaluation and impact I think that that is incredibly important Thank you all very much for joining what has been a fascinating very stimulating discussion and I think on that note I will now close the meeting Thank you