Creative Lives
Mapping Learning and participation activity
Creative Lives was initiated by The Audience Business and the City of Edinburgh Council. It aimed to celebrate the scale and scope of the learning and participation sector in Edinburgh.
30 cultural organisations participated in the project providing information on their activity including the type of activity and levels of participation.
Key findings included:
- 5,000 activities were offered with over 10,000 sessions engaging 250,00 participants
- 75% of activities were provided to organised groups including schools
- Organised groups (excluding education) accounted for 20,000 participants who took part in 800 different activities
- 25% of all activity was offered to the general public attracting 120,000 participants
- 10% of activities open to the public were offered to groups defined by particular characteristics including age, gender, health condition etc. The remaining 90% were open to everyone
- Every CEC school attended an event or participated in at least once arts or cultural learning and or participation activity during the 2013/14 period
- CEC schools participated in a third of the activity delivered to schools (the other 2/3 of schools activity was taken up by non CEC and independent schools)
- 23,000 CEC Primary School pupils, 5,500 High School students and over 700 CEC Special School students engaged in a learning and/or participation activity
This data provided a strategic overview of the activity for the first time. This enabled strategic interventions to be made to increase levels of activity where they were low and allow cultural organisations to effectively direct their activity.
As part of the project the participating cultural organisations came together as a network to share their experiences and expertise. These sharing sessions led to the development of new partnerships and joint activity.
Clair was the project manager for Creative Lives and worked with a steering group to devise and deliver the project. The findings were presented to stakeholders and shared with councillors.
Forget Me Not
Evaluation in the context of dementia
The Festival and King's Theatres Edinburgh were awarded 3 year funding by the Life Changes Trust to create a dementia friendly community at the theatres. The project involved staff training, capital developments and the creation of a programme of activities and events for people living with dementia. Clair worked with the theatres to evaluate the Forget Me Not project. Objectives were set with the Life Changes Trust and the evaluation sought to identify whether these objectives had been met.
The evaluation included the following:
- Consultation with the general audience to measure their awareness of the Forget Me Not project and their knowledge and awareness of living with dementia. The survey identified whether the components of the Forget Me Not project (capital improvements, staff training) had a positive impact on the wider audience as well as PLwD specifically. The survey was conducted as a baseline at the start of the project and repeated at the end of the project to measure change and impact. The survey was conducted as an online survey which was emailed to the theatres whole database.
- Consultation with the Capital Theatres staff team. The aim of this was to identify the staff's awareness of the Forget Me Not project and their confidence in delivering a dementia friendly service for attenders and how this changed as a result of the Forget Me Not project and staff training.
- Mystery shopping – the purpose of the mystery shopping was to test whether the service provided by Capital Theatres met the needs of PLwD. Time was taken to develop a template for the mystery shopping and to test these for PLwD and their families to ensure that they were achievable. The mystery shopping was conducted by PLwD with the support of a family member. It included all aspects of the experience in attending the theatre from booking a ticket to attending including aspects such as toilets.
- Consultation with attenders living with dementia – this was the hardest part of the project and the one which saw the greatest iteration. Initially simple surveys were designed following DEEP guidelines and these were tested with PLwD. However it was not possible to complete these at many of the events as staff did not have the capacity to deploy these as there were too many other practical and engagement requirements. A team of researchers was deployed to attend the biggest dementia friendly event (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) to undertake observation to identify whether there were visible signs that attenders were enjoying and engaging with the event. The researchers also undertook simplified face to face interviews with PLwD to capture their immediate response to the event. Online surveys were also used although these were typically completed by families proxying for the person with dementia
Throughout the consultation Clair worked closely with the Forget Me Not project coordinator to understand how the project was evolving and to ensure that the evaluation continued to meet the right needs as the project inevitably changed. The final report identified the outcomes for all the measures including some areas where further development was required to fully achieve a successful project.
Clair learnt a huge amount as a result of the project which has informed all of her research going forward. This includes the importance of working with the community at the heart of a research project to ensure that it is tailored to their requirements and that the evaluation is flexible to respond to changes in the wider project or where an evaluation method does not provide the results expected.