No change is good news

I was surprised by the interpretation of the Taking Part research in the front page article 'No Change: Six years of audience development work has not upped engagement levels'. And I think Liz Hill is being somewhat unfair in her ‘My research is better than your research’ castigation of the critics.

I saw the results reporting “No change” as good news, since I had expected them to report a decline. The tone of the report however, appeared to make clear that, all other things being equal, engagement with the arts should have increased because of the ACE investment in audience development initiatives and agencies.

The first problem is that ACE does not fund the majority of arts activities in England, so its funding should not be expected to impact on the majority. Expecting a minority of provision delivered mostly through individual RFOs to have a national impact across the country seems unrealistic.

The audience development agencies receive together about £1m from ACE, a serious level of under-funding given that the arts organisations they work with are under-funded in the first place, so that expenditure on arts marketing, let alone audience development, is definitely not optimum. The second problem is that it would be a reasonable expectation for attendances at the arts to decline in the serious economic crisis that started in 2007, and indeed there is some evidence that in some parts of the country some organisations have suffered reduced audiences. So no change would be good news?

In the US, the National Endowment for the Arts has consistently reported a decline in attendance and participation in the arts across the last decade, one significant problem being the ageing elderly audience reducing engagement, and the ‘baby boomers’ not behaving as the previous cohorts. The UK appears to be bucking that trend to an extent, so no change would again appear to be good news.

The ACE spokesperson correctly reported that for their funded clients attendances had increased by 6 million. That definitely sounds like good news. Here the universe of data – the actual arts attendances at ACE funded clients – is what we should be discussing.

In that context, I do have some concerns about the research sample. Peter Verwey at ACE used to qualify regional results from the 25,000 people per annum Target Group Index tracking research because at regional level, inside an artform, changes were often not statistically significant for socio-economic sub groups. Yet Taking Part reports with confidence changes in behaviour by small groups of the population such as BME or 16-24 year olds, per region. It started out in 2005/6 with a sample size of 28,000 and is down to 11,417 in 2010: why reduce the sample? For 2009/10 the BME results were based on a sample of 630 people?

I know a number of local authorities who had signed up to NI-11 targets who were very concerned about the validity of the results at local level from these sample sizes and the nature of the questions. For example, Northamptonshire ran a campaign to badge events as "the arts". It is foggy out there. My interpretation would be: No Change: Six years of audience development has halted any decline in engagement levels.