SCOTLAND'S arts, culture and creative industries, companies and artists are not unfamiliar with being surveyed, assessed, consulted, and strategised. But perhaps they not been questioned quite as thoroughly as this.
From the end of this month, and through October, what Creative Scotland, the nation's primary arts funder, say is a very different kind of survey will be published online. And they want as many artists, dancers, writers, producers, board members, composers, students, directors, poets, actors, programmers and even arts journalists and critics to fill it in. The Arts and Diversity Survey will ask direct questions on age, gender, disability, religion, sexual orientation, and, in a series of questions, will attempt to dig into subjects such as income, class, education, finance, and, most importantly, barriers to artistic endeavour.
The survey is a direct follow up from the funding body's recent Arts Strategy, which, perhaps surprisingly, spoke directly about social justice, the somewhat uniform nature of arts boards, and, perhaps in its most headline-grabbing lines, the vexed issue of artists' pay. That strategy, penned primarily by Leonie Bell, the body's relatively new head of arts, pointed out at two thirds of the nation's artists earn less than £5000 a year from their endeavours. It also said that if cultural work was only feasible, financially, to those from more affluent backgrounds who are able to "self fund" then "culture becomes homogenised and disconnected from the breath of society and loses its edge and relevance".
At the time of the report, Ms Bell said it was only the start of two years of "sophisticated advocacy" and the new survey, which she hopes will be filled in by as many people in the arts as possible (so it is as accurate and weighty a piece of evidence as can be gathered), will provide detailed evidence which will lead directly to changes in, or new, arts funding strategies.
The answers to what Ms Bell says are "direct questions", around 40 of them, are all anonymous, she said. It will run online for at least a month, perhaps longer. "We have surveyed a lot," she admits, "but not at such a high level."
On the question of the make up of arts boards, the art strategy laid out an argument for change, saying "boards can be relatively homogeneous and disengaged from the perspective of people practising the arts in increasingly non-traditional and emerging ways." The make up of boards can be dominated by people drawn from the worlds of business, financial services, HR and marketing. This means, some in Creative Scotland feel, that their life experiences and world view may be very different from the artists working for or in the companies on whose boards they sit. The survey, therefore, is also aimed at board members.
Will it lead to anything concrete? Ms Bell hopes it will "provide a more robust evidence base that will guide and support our priorities going forward" as well as "better understand the experiences of under represented groups". A report and analysis will follow the survey. The true value of this exercise will be in what changes it brings to Creative Scotland's strategies and initiatives in the coming years.
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