Membership Support Portal: Support Zone Three

Welcome to Support Zone Three of our Membership Support Portal! Our Portal is made up of four Support Zones designed to help run your youth theatre. We’ve pulled together resources, tools and templates that are out there in Scotland to support youth and third sector organisations to run as legal and sustainable businesses. In short, we’ve done the searching for you!

If you are in the process of setting up a youth theatre or restructuring an existing one, this Support Zone will guide you through what you should prioritise when working with staff or volunteers.

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Support Zone Three: Your Team

This guide outlines what you should prioritise when working with staff or volunteers. We recognise that youth theatre comes in all different shapes and sizes. Some are stand-alone businesses, others are part of bigger theatres and some are volunteer-led. Your team could range anywhere from being a young company comprised of two freelancers all the way up to a decades-old theatre company with multiple departments. This section is therefore deliberately quite generalised, but we hope we can point you in the right direction to guidance that fulfils your specific needs.

As a priority, please ensure that you have Staff, Trustee, and/or Volunteer Handbooks for induction purposes and for people to refer to whilst part of your organisation. At the bottom of this page, you can download SCVO’s Employee Handbook template, which can be adapted to suit your purposes.

1. Recruitment

Before you recruit staff or volunteers, you need to be ready. It is a big responsibility and needs to be a fair and well considered process. You want to get it right, follow legislation, and attract and employ the best person or people for your organisation. Put in the prep time and follow legal requirements: ensure you have a Staff and/or Volunteer Handbook ready before you recruit, and that it is kept up-to-date.

The UK Government has a useful step-by-step guide on their website for organisations getting ready to employ staff for the first time, and Business Gateway have a helpful Recruitment Guide. If you have the funds, you could sign-up to SCVO’s HR Service (SCVO Running your Organisation) to guide you through the whole process and to refer to when people are in place or a change in management occurs. SCVO also has guidance on recruiting and working with volunteers.

There are specialist organisations like PiPA (Parents and Carers in the Performing Arts) who can also advise on recruiting people with intersectional caring responsibilities. You can email them and they will send you a pack. Encouraging diverse representation should be part of any recruitment process.

Build in an induction process. Whether the induction is for a new trustee, staff member or volunteer, everyone should have the opportunity to get to know the way your youth theatre works, what their roles and responsibilities are, how to access support and benefits, and all other aspects of the organisation that are relevant to them.

2. Contracts and Agreements

It is amazing how many arts projects still take place without contracts or written agreements. Contracts are there to protect and guide both the contractor and the staff member, partner organisation or volunteer. They are a point of reference when negotiating a project or staff role and can be referred to throughout the project and at the end. For example, if towards the end of term, you suddenly decide you want to ask a freelance artist to do some evaluation work which doesn’t feature in their original contract, you can’t expect them to do it without first consulting them, and reaching an agreement to update their contract to include this additional work.

SCVO have guidance on contracting employed staff and volunteers. Ensure you are covering volunteer expenses, including trustees and that you are paying freelance staff industry rates. If you don’t currently use industry rates when contracting freelancers, the Scottish Artist Union keeps up-to-date guidance. Employed staff should be paid the Living Wage as a minimum.

ACAS have excellent guidance on employment contracts including terminating contracts. For further guidance, sign-up for SCVO’s HR Service or as a starting point, please follow the following links.

Some other useful links about Contracts and Agreements

3. Administration

It is best practice to maintain consistency in administrative processes across both office-based work and external activity in your youth theatre. In today’s world with prevalent remote working, ‘the office’ could be someone’s house. If there is a disconnect, information can become lost, inaccessible or quickly out of date. Delivery staff should know how to access documents such as participant registers, incident report forms, consent forms, policies and procedures. Team members working face to face with children or young people should know where documents are kept and how to access them in an emergency or if information needs to be updated. SCVO have guidance on good record keeping and provide a handy Record Keeping Guidance Template.

Traditionally parents or guardians completed paper forms but nowadays digital forms are being used more frequently. There are apps that can be used for registration, analytics and payments, such as Pembee, Class for Kids or Eventbrite. Some of these services charge so look at the small print carefully. If it’s just a digital registration form you need, you could use Google or Microsoft Forms.

4. Human Resources

Human beings are our most important resource and require nurturing, inspiration, guidance and a feeling of safety in order to excel in their roles. Human Resources (HR) is a broad term and may look different depending on the size of your youth theatre but no matter the size, good management of HR, including strong policies and procedures, can increase productivity, positivity and success within your organisation. Where and how we work has changed because of the pandemic so please consider hybrid or remote working practices when building your HR policies and procedures. PiPA (Parents and Carers in Performing Arts), provide home working guidance and remote working toolkits on their website.

As mentioned at the start of this Support Zone, a company Handbook is a good starting point, and it is important to review the Handbook to keep it relevant and updated. SCVO have templates and offer an HR and Employment Support Service. This service incurs a cost but there are also some free HR information and resources on their website to get you started.

5. Professional Development

Employed staff, volunteers, and freelancers must be given the opportunity to grow and develop. The creative and third sectors are under mounting time and financial pressures, especially post-pandemic, but reducing or removing training and development will have a long-term detrimental impact on the sector. When business planning or applying for funding, please remember to budget for professional development. If you manage employed staff and regular volunteers, build in time to identify professional development opportunities into your support and supervision meetings.

YTAS offer sector training resources, events and opportunities for networking as well as the promotion of partner opportunities. Creative Scotland promote professional development opportunities on their website throughout the year. Some provision is free, others come comes at a cost. Please see a suggested list of providers below but there are also many others available.

Some other useful links about professional development

6. Health and Wellbeing

Looking after young people’s health and wellbeing is a priority for most youth theatres, however staff, trustee and volunteer health and wellbeing should be too. If the pandemic taught us anything, it is that we must be health-focused in order to keep ourselves and others safe. This can mean for some, working to change the culture of your organisation and making improvements. There is a lot of free advice out there but depending on the size of your organisation, you might consider signing up with a specific support service for your team through specialist providers such as Education Support or Lifelink.

A good place to start would be carrying out a wellbeing audit and using the results to create a strategy. Education Support have a staff wellbeing audit tool, SAMH have a wellbeing assessment tool, and Culture Amp have a strategy guide which may prove useful.