Every few years, YTAS undertakes a review of Scotland’s youth theatre sector to help identify how we’re developing as a sector, and how we can develop further.
The Sector Review survey is open to all groups (YTAS members and non-members alike) who use drama or performance in their work with young people outside of formal education. Any extra-curricular drama group is eligible to complete it, whether that be one run by a theatre company, through a school, by volunteers or paid staff, as a charity or a for-profit organisation… It doesn’t matter if it takes place in a village hall or a theatre, if it’s weekly or a summer school, we want to know about it, to help us to understand the richness of activity taking place across the nation.
The Sector Review enables us to map the current picture of youth theatre activity across the whole of Scotland. This helps YTAS to capture the big picture of the sector, and sharpen the focus of our work. If you want your youth theatre group to be included in this picture, please make sure you complete our survey.
We’ll be asking questions about how many young people attend your sessions, what they pay (if anything) to take part, how many practitioners you have, what they’re paid, where you are in Scotland, what sources of funding you use, and more.
Some other questions, like the EDI characteristics of your young people, are asked so that we can provide an overview to funders like Creative Scotland. Any data you are able to share with YTAS will give us a better picture of who the sector is working with today, and if there are any gaps we need to address on a national level. Whilst the analysis helps us identify trends, individual group data isn’t published – the reports later in the year will let organisations to see where they sit in comparison to others, if they want to make any changes. So there are no right or wrong answers in any of the questions!
In 2020 specifically, the data YTAS got from the COVID-19 Impact add-on survey (which focussed on the post-lockdown part of 2020) helped us secure funding to provide emergency funds to the sector, and in turn helped us to grow our own grant-making work.
Following past Sector Reviews, groups across the country have used its insights to help them identify priorities, invigorate funding applications, support communities, and develop opportunities for their participants and leaders. If you’re new to the sector, or just haven’t seen the last sector review in a wee while, the full overview and reports are available to read here, or you can check out the resources below.
2023’s survey will open the week beginning Monday 17 April, and will be open until midnight on Tuesday 30 May, so there’s lots of time for you to complete it. It should take around fifteen minutes to complete, and we’ll publish the results online in the autumn.
So please make some time to join in with our research when it goes live: share it far and wide, and be sure to cajole your sector colleagues into completing it too! Help us to shout out, loud and proud, for the amazing work you do to make the lives of young people better through youth theatre and build strong, resilient youth arts organisations.
