The National Festival of Youth Theatre has always aimed to be an inclusive event, bringing together a wide range of youth theatre groups, participants and leaders to celebrate their shared passion.
In recent years, we’ve received growing interest from youth groups who support young people that may experience barriers to attending the festival. We have been on hand to help these groups as they plan and fundraise to attend NFYT. We have also been able to make adaptations to the festival to meet different access requirements, including BSL interpreters (ensuring that all our workshops and performances are D/deaf accessible) and accessible facilities at our campsite, and in 2022 were able to introduce an Access Bursary for the first time.
For 2024, we wanted to continue to put access and inclusion at the heart of our festival. Thanks to support from our funders, we were able to offer bursaries to enable more disabled and disadvantaged youth theatre participants to experience the benefits of attending #NFYT2024.
What is an Access Bursary?
Groups could apply for an NFYT Access Bursary to request support for access costs unique to their group.
There were two types of bursaries available:
Financial Access Needs: we were keen to support groups which might face additional financial barriers to attend the festival. Groups could apply for an NFYT Access Bursary to reduce participant fees by up to one third, pay for camping equipment or help to subsidise travel costs for their groups.
Disability Access and Additional Support Needs: we worked with groups to ensure any access needs could be met during the festival, and they could apply for support towards costs such as: additional access support workers, sensory equipment or additional transport costs incurred.
Who could apply?
Bursaries were available to groups attending on all ticket types – including full weekend and one-day tickets. Please read the Event Information for Group Leaders document on our NFYT 2024 page for more details on eligibility and criteria.