You might imagine that working as a freelance community artist and undertaking a research project for Newcastle City Council on youth employment would be very different experiences. However, there were for me a number of unexpected confluences and overlaps. Most clearly, in the shared languages we used to talk about the people we worked with: how we would identify those that needed support; how we might work with them; and how in helping them we might capture or measure the value of the work we did. This chapter specifically examines arts-based employment interventions in order to interrogate the implications of shifts in social policy discourse, the growth of cultural commissioning, and the marketisation of public services for socially committed arts practices. Applied performance scholarship has offered extensive critiques of instrumentalisation over the past decade,1 as Michael Balfour warned in 2009, ‘[a]pplied theatre needs to be conscious of its orientation within a complex political and social web, and while it may not always be able to extricate itself from it, at least it needs to be conscious of the implications of inertia or struggle’.2 Here I explore the language used within social policy, employment interventions in the arts sector, and applied theatre practice in order to understand the implications of competing discourses within such a complex and shifting field of arts and social provision.
I focus on two government-funded arts-based employability projects, the Creative Employment Programme (CEP) (2013–15) and Talent Match (2014–). Specifically, I reflect on South Tyneside Council’s implementation of the CEP and Immediate Theatre’s delivery of Talent Match in London. I deploy Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework of analysis that examines the text (‘a spoken or written language’), the discourse practice (‘the production and interpretation of text’), and the social practice (the social and cultural events which surround the discourse).3 I examine the languages and patterns deployed in texts and assert the interdependency of these rhetorical shifts with the social and artistic practices they operate within. I begin by identifying macro shifts in public service provision and arts funding in the UK, proposing that such shifts are bound up with the migration of language between these two discrete fields. I then explore the appearance of artistically inflected terminology in state employment policy as the government seeks more ‘creative’ solutions to unemployment. Analysis of such arts-based interventions is vital, as cultural policy scholar Kate Oakley states, ‘[u]nless the creative industries can find way of addressing their own labour market problems and thus develop a more inclusive and representative workforce, the sense of the cultural sectors as a source of progressive political alternatives will begin to seem absurd’.4 Finally, I argue that this interchangeable language results in new practices emerging both in employability programmes and arts practice. I acknowledge that discourses are not isolated but instead exist enmeshed in a discursive network acting on and acted upon by one another; they are never static but are instead an infinitely shifting and complex. Therefore, I interrogate the dialogic relationship between the differing ideological discourses of arts practice and social policy. I consider instances where arts practice shifts the way unemployed individuals are conceived of in discourse and, equally, where employability rhetoric modifies the practice of an arts organisation.
Shifting Policy Landscapes: Open Public Services and Cultural Commissioning
The state, rather than delivering services, reframes itself as the ‘commissioner’ of outsourced contracts, encouraging competition between private, public, and third sector providers.8 This invoking of competition and market economies, where the best results for the best price yield the greatest uptake, has become endemic across public service provision.9the principles of open public services will switch the default from one where the state provides the service itself to one where the state commissions the service from a range of diverse providers.7
But what are the practical and ideological implications of rendering different practices legible to one another? Linguistics scholars Lilie Chouliaraki and Fairclough propose that the interaction of discrete discourses can develop into an interruption, where one discourse ‘colonises’ another.14 This becomes a strategy of dialectic appropriation or potentially invasion, wherein discourses originate in one field and migrate to another. There is a risk that in the transition one discourse becomes dominant and in doing so substitutes or deletes forms of social practice that were bound to the initial discourse. Therefore, arts practitioners delivering projects in public service settings must be reflective as to the dynamics at play in the language exchange and consider the potential implications of shifting the discourse of your practice to align with a different set of agendas or contexts.work with arts and cultural organisations across England to help them better engage in public sector commissioning, with public service commissioners to help them understand the potential of arts and culture to deliver their outcomes, and with policy makers and stakeholders nationally.13
Such considerations resonate with the linguistic framing of applied theatre practice, a pressing concern since the turn of the twenty-first century, where a stream of increasing and diversifying funding, as Balfour notes, ‘infects the ways in which applied theatre defines and talks about itself’.15 In the CCP evaluation, there is a clear intent to promote hybridised discourses which enable public service commissioners to identify how arts practice can ‘deliver their [social] outcomes’.16 The language throughout this evaluation report casts the commissioner as the agentic party. The arts practitioner is framed in the responsive role of service provider, required to demonstrate how their practice can fit the brief of particular projects sent out to tender. The central recommendations made in the evaluation are raising awareness and changing attitudes about the arts and cultural sector, building provider capacity and knowledge, market engagement and relationship building with the arts and cultural sector, improving procurement processes to engage and support the arts and culture sector, and improving monitoring and evaluation approaches to support arts and cultural organisations.17 As these recommendations indicate (excepting the advised changes to procurement processes), the CCP remains focused on shifting how arts organisations frame their practice in relation to commissioning priorities, cultivate stronger relationships with public service providers, and build frameworks to monitor their ‘outputs’ in ways that are legible to commissioners.
Given that arts budgets are under such strain, both in terms of significant cuts to arts council funding and local authority budgets,18 a key aim of CCP was to establish whether involvement in cultural commissioning could diversify income streams for arts organisations, enabling them greater access to a broader range of funding.19 However, as the public purse continues to dwindle, a CCP report identifies, ‘there is a danger of commissioners retrenching and focusing on more traditional service models rather than exploring and co-designing new services in collaboration with the arts and cultural sector’.20 So while the Open Public Services strategy presents opportunities for arts organisations, it is accompanied by a pressure to provide tangible evidence that demonstrates the social efficacy of artistic approaches. Given the lack of public money available to the arts, they are placed in direct competition with education, health, and social care services, who are themselves facing increasingly diminishing budgets. While the CEP and Talent Match are not directly engaged with cultural commissioning, the marketisation of state services alongside ACE’s emphasis on arts organisations tendering for social service contracts has profoundly inflected discussions around the arts’ role in social provision.
Approaches to Employability
Talent Match (2014–) is a five-year strategic programme funded by Big Lottery, investing £108 million in 21 Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs).21 The programme aims to support unemployed 16–24-year-olds living in 21 youth unemployment ‘hotspots’, areas identified as having particularly high proportions of young people not in employment, education, or training. The programme set out to support young people classified as hard to engage, primarily those who were not accessing any support services or had been out of work for over a year.22 Talent Match London received a significant proportion of the national funding (£9,944,800) and was the only LEP in which a theatre company was included as a partnership organisation.23 London Youth was the lead partner in the London consortium, indicating an emphasis on youth-led interventions, a common characteristic of and continued ambition for Talent Match. Through cultivating local collaborations, Talent Match aimed to improve the provision and support available to young people with most partnerships offering a range of one-to-one job search support, enterprise and business training, advice around skills training and education institutions, and guidance around available volunteering opportunities.
Immediate Theatre was the only performance-based organisation in the partnership. Located in the borough of Hackney, Immediate Theatre was established in 1996 to make creative and artistic work with young people ‘especially those at risk of marginalisation or exclusion’.24 Artistic Director Jo Carter founded the company with the aim to ‘make theatre where I lived, helping people to explore the process of change in a safe environment’.25 Consequently, Immediate Theatre have always been deeply embedded within their community. Their website outlines four company aims, the third being ‘[t]o improve employability for young people and create pathways to employment in the arts’.26 This focus on employment has threaded throughout company’s repertoire of projects.27 Immediate Theatre delivered the Talent Match programme between 2014 and 2018, building on their experience of similar employability provision and utilising the company’s connections in Hackney, an area with high levels of unemployment, to engage young people in that borough.28 Their programme consisted of one-to-one support with CV writing and job searches as well as group sessions on interview skills. This approach was underpinned by a youth work approach to supporting young people to navigate complex issues. In addition to this targeted support, the participants met weekly as a group and worked towards creating several performances focused on their experiences of looking for work and using the Jobcentre.29
This indicates a desire to engage directly with government-driven employability strategies. Over the two-year period of the programme, the CEP facilitated the creation of around 4500 employment opportunities, made up of approximately 1650 apprenticeships, 1450 paid internships, and 1400 traineeships.31to get organisations talking to and working with Jobcentres, FE Colleges, local enterprise partnerships, Universities, Work Programme Providers and other youth services. This type of partnership working is vital if we want to take this opportunity to change recruitment culture in this industry in the long term.30
I particularly focus on the delivery of the CEP by South Tyneside Council that ran between July 2013 and November 2015, supporting 45 apprentices and interns during that period. Situated in North East England, South Tyneside is a borough in Tyne and Wear in which the unemployment rate is higher than the national average; for young people, this is a particularly acute problem.32 The CEP in the area was a collaboration between cultural organisations, administered and co-ordinated by South Tyneside Council and overseen by a consortium of partners. This consortium was made up of Customs House Theatre, Souter Lighthouse (National Trust), South Tyneside Council (Events Team and Libraries Service), and museums Bede’s World, Arbeia, and South Shields Museum. These cultural venues hosted apprentices and interns who worked alongside Gateshead College to obtain supporting qualifications. The CEP was thus supplemented by South Tyneside Adult Education, who accessed funding to deliver the apprenticeship qualifications at Gateshead College. The Council could also access additional funding from the Department for Work and Pensions who provided £2275, if a Young Person was eligible for the Youth Contract, or the National Apprenticeship Service Employer Incentive (£1500) if they were not.33 In total, the CEP brought £499,535 into the region over two years through education, employment, and CEP funding. This allowed South Tyneside Council to provide a ‘no cost programme’, which temporarily built capacity in the region’s arts labour market.34
Talent Match and the CEP sought to make tacit interventions in the employment status of young people by deploying arts practices to develop participants’ employability and through providing viable routes into the creative industries. Examining these interventions together demonstrates the diverse responses to government active labour market agendas happening across arts practice in the UK. This identifies thematic similarities that emerge across approaches to unemployment in the arts concerning the discursive, financial, ideological, and practical relationships between social policy and the arts sector.
Incentives and Outputs: Monetising Claimants, Supporting Participants
Launched in June 2011, the Work Programme, the Coalition’s flagship welfare-to-work scheme, was a mandatory work and employability scheme targeted at the long-term unemployed that outsourced contracts for employment support to a combination of private, public, and third sector organisations. This programme constituted the most significant iteration of the open public service agenda in employment policy and has been the touchstone for much open public services ideology and practice since its inception. Further, the Work Programme was lauded by the DWP as ‘at the leading edge of wider government commissioning of payment-for-results public services’.35 Payment-for-results markets are compelled by a heightened sense of risk for organisations embarking on programmes given that, as the Open Public Services White Paper stated, ‘payments to providers will be based primarily on the results they achieve, with challenging minimum performance levels and year-on-year price reductions to drive improved performance’.36 This shift in funding models and the accompanying corporatised language underscores the relentless pressure on organisations, often working with clients with deeply complex needs, to deliver quantifiable results to meet preset targets or risk not recouping the financial investment they must initially outlay to support a client in gaining work. Public services increasingly model the free market structures of the commercial sector where organisations compete for inputs (contracts, in which they must appear to offer the best value for the public purse) to produce measurable outputs (moving clients into work and off state support).
The CEP did not have any regulations regarding future employment; however, the programme did require participants to obtain their apprenticeship qualification before education providers and arts organisations could draw down the full amount of funding available to them. The focus of this programme was firmly located in preparing young people for the labour market but did not emphasise ongoing employment as a marker of success.37 This navigates the payment-by-results metrics usually deployed around employability; instead, the CEP is more deeply entwined with the notion of payment-by-result in the Further Education (FE) sector, that is, based on learners completing qualifications rather than securing employment. Since the introduction of the Further and Higher Education Act 1992, the FE sector has been subject to aggressive marketisation. As Educationalists Rob Smith and Matt O’Leary state, ‘FE in England can be regarded as the crucible in which an emerging model of marketisation in education has been tested out’.38 At the outset of the twenty-first century, pervasive frameworks of marketisation operate in FE where, because funding is tethered to learners’ success, policy researcher Nehal Panchamia notes an ‘output related funding system generated a perverse incentive structure’.39 As part of the CEP was delivered by further education providers, it is important to reflect on how arts organisations sit within this intensely marketised system.
In terms of the arts and culture organisations involved in the CEP in South Tyneside, there was a resistance to the incentivised structure of further education. However, the structure of the apprenticeship programme meant that labour of these young people operated in a kind of doubly productive way: providing cheaper labour for the arts organisations involved (in 2013–14 the Apprenticeship Minimum Wage was £2.68 per hour) but also creating revenue for Gateshead College via the funding they could draw down for delivering the qualification.40 Education institutions, themselves under extreme financial strain due to central FE budgets being reduced by a third since 2010, could potentially utilise the CEP as a way to generate income. Thus, the CEP navigated the monetisation of participants in relation to open public services employability schemes, yet the programme was unavoidably entwined with the economics of FE. Generating funding for FE provision is not in itself problematic but I would argue achieving this whilst only remunerating individuals for their work at 41% of the National Minimum Wage devalues the labour those young people are engaged in and exposes them to an exploitation of that labour.41 This speaks to broader concerns around value in relation to apprenticeship provision and the distribution of power occurring between the employer, education provider, and apprentice. If arts organisations and ACE are seeking to develop skills and diversify recruitment in the industry, those delivering these schemes need to further reflect on who is benefitting from such a programme and ensure the apprentices’ learning and material circumstances are prioritised.
The potential monetisation of participants in payment-by-results structures is also apparent in the risks posed to organisations delivering services that are funded in this way. As policy advisors Daniel Crowe, Tom Gash, and Henry Kippin identify, if smaller organisations do engage in such contracts, they are required to take a disproportionate amount of risk, at times aware that ‘this is the last throw of the dice for smaller social sector organisations’ who ‘don’t have the financial back up to meet the bill if things go wrong’.42 This further intensifies the pressure on specialist and often locally embedded organisations to provide help to the communities they operate within, meaning that increasingly national providers are commissioned to deliver such social and public service contracts. In order for South Tyneside Council to draw down the full funding for the provision of the CEP, the young people involved were required to complete their apprenticeship qualification. A small amount of funding was provided upfront, another instalment six months into the project, and then the majority was paid in arrears. Such funding structures have damaging implications for smaller organisations and community-based groups who often are unable to generate sufficient funds upfront to cover their provision prior to receiving recompense. Particularly given that, as Cultural Development Officer at South Tyneside Council Richard Barber articulated, the programme was working with young people who were often coping with a lot of other external factors, the completion of the qualification was not guaranteed.43 The cultural organisations in South Tyneside were not in a financial position to expose themselves to the possible loss of funding that these young people could come to represent; as Barber notes, ‘it was a bit of a risk from the beginning, but the Council took the risk’.44 Payment-by-completion was embedded in the project, but South Tyneside Council operated as a protective mediator able to absorb the financial risk of learners not completing their apprenticeship. The Council were prepared to shoulder the financial risk and so enable arts organisations, already dealing with a harsh funding climate, to participate in the programme. As such, when two learners were unable to complete the programme, the Council absorbed the financial loss.45 This demonstrates the importance of local authority support and funding to regional arts ecologies.
Alternatively, Talent Match (and Immediate Theatre’s involvement in it) maps more closely onto the traditional funding model of impact-driven applied theatre practice. That is, the programme was grant-funded, providing companies with a set annual amount of money for delivery rather than tying money explicitly to the success of participants. These organisational funding structures, as with the South Tyneside CEP example, functioned to resist frameworks of ‘easy wins’ where more ‘work-ready’ individuals are intensively supported while others are neglected as, in payment-by-results structures, the sooner individuals are in work, the sooner money is released to organisations. However, this funding was coupled with fixed targets for organisations to meet regarding moving young people into employment. Given that Talent Match aimed to offer support to young people facing a number of complex obstacles in relation to obtaining work, these targets were adjusted appropriately. Immediate Theatre only had to support five young people into employment in their first year in operation.46 This structure allows organisations to take more ‘risks,’ and support young people in a range of ways, and it provides a greater sense of stability across organisations who have secured project funding. However, in introducing fixed targets, Talent Match has adopted a linguistic and functional framework akin to the rhetoric of the Coalition’s Open Public Services agenda.
Emerging out of this target-driven and financially precarious payment-by-results structure, a widely acknowledged and endemic practice of ‘creaming’ and ‘parking’ occurred across the Work Programme.47 That is, clients who have the most complex needs are identified by providers who assume they will not be able to get the client to a point of work readiness and so do not offer them appropriate levels of support (they are ‘parked’). Concurrently, organisations mark those who present as easier to move into work and offer them intensive support to do so (these clients are ‘creamed’). This ensures that time is invested in individuals deemed most likely to provide a financial return.48 Such discourse reconceives people as points that organisations must accumulate in order to make a profit. This functions to dehumanise individuals and undermine caring pathways of authentic support in favour of fast-track solutions and short-term results. Challenging the ideology and practice of ‘creaming’ and ‘parking’, both the CEP and Talent Match intentionally sought to engage young people that might be defined as particularly complex and who face a number of obstacles to the labour market. In the case of Talent Match, the programme attempted to engage ‘young people who are not accessing statutory services, who are furthest from the labour market and who face a number of barriers to entering work without a new approach’.49 By targeting this client group, Talent Match removed the possibility of ‘creaming’ and ‘parking’, instead seeking to prioritise those with the greatest needs.
The language Jones adopts highlights the pervasive commodification of these young people and the need for arts practitioners in this field to be able to navigate such discourse. The reassurance Jones gives regarding ‘double counting’ and ‘both tak[ing] the commission’ points to the need to ease worries around competition: ‘you do have to kind of really persuade other providers that we’re not just going to take their young people away’.51 In such a competitive public services arena, there is an increased need for accountability and a fierce concern over the ownership of ‘successful outputs’. This is an indicative example of the mixture of discourses operating within arts-based employability projects: while Jones is deploying language that affirms the commodification of participants, she also advocates for the importance of supporting young people. There is thus a tension at play between the communal and the competitive arts organisations engaging in this kind of practice.We’re not double counting […]. You can have your targets and we can have our targets and they’re kind of different projects and I think that as long as that young person is getting the support we can both take the commission.50
In such a hostile and incentive-driven marketplace, there is a reticence to share client support across agencies as when someone is claiming multi-agency support, it is difficult to establish who can claim the individual’s success should they secure work. As Jones outlines, ‘[n]ow there’s a lot more competition for the young people which is kind of really sad but I guess that’s how it works. […] there’s a kind of sharing issue’.52 Beyond payment-for-results, across services, the majority of funders require evidence of high levels of participant engagement in order to demonstrate value for money and justify increased funding. This breeds a reticence to ‘share’ participants, particularly when working with overlapping demographics, occupying the same locality, and drawing money from similar funders.
This is an acute problem when trying to engage young unemployed people as, on a practical level, they can be disengaged from services and difficult to find. The Work Foundation reported in 2012 that around a third of 16–24-year-olds (excluding student populations) looking for work were not receiving unemployment benefit.53 Not claiming benefits also often excludes these young people from engaging with services that can signpost them to community-based projects such as Talent Match. If numbers at projects are low, it is natural for organisations to want to retain the participants they have; however, this can lead to fragmented services and a lack of joined up support for young people. The Work Foundation identified the damaging implications of such fragmentation: ‘[t]his inconsistency around support for young people, moving between one service and another, and with possible gaps […], appears at odds with the critical task of providing support around the education to employment transition’.54 When supporting people, particularly young people, into employment, there needs to be a joined up provision which provides a holistic level of support to service users. This requires organisations to communicate effectively with one another and refer across agencies to ensure the participant is receiving the best support available to them.
Such a model attempts to intervene in the culture of individual organisations claiming successful outputs as their own and recognises the value in being able to refer people to specialist services that will be responsive to their particular needs. Talent Match London’s advice to policy makers and commissioners calls for them to ‘[i]ncentivise collaboration rather than competition for easy wins’.56 Nationally, the Talent Match programme is underpinned a consistent desire to foster collaboration between partners and promote engagement across a range of social sector organisations. This both recognises the competitive and uncooperative landscape these organisations occupy and pushes back against it.Talent Match is good because it is about collaboration and we do try and work together and as long as someone’s engaging the young people—people from other places can come to our groups, our young people can go to their groups. It’s a lot more open.55
In the employability sector where funding is bound up with metrics of success, it is difficult to protect participants from being reduced to a valuable (or non-valuable) output, a result by which to leverage funds. Talent Match and CEP both structurally and ideologically reject this commodification, and yet the inflection of such discourses within their practice and the landscape they occupy is clear: the monetisation of education, the need for larger organisations to function as protectors from risk, and anxiety around collaborative working and sharing outputs. While operating amid this rhetoric of competition and marketisation, both projects in different ways enacted and resisted such a monetised framing of service users. Working in such contexts creates arts practitioners who deploy a complex and contradictory layered discourse that is both engaged with commissioning priorities and concerned with community practices.
Apprenticeships: Training or Exploitation
State apprenticeship programmes are indicative of the confluence and conflict of financial, social, and educational objectives that I have outlined above. In 2010, the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties’ Coalition Agreement stated: ‘[w]e will seek ways to support the creation of apprenticeships, internships, work pairings, and college and workplace training places as part of our wider programme to get Britain working’.57 The emphasis was placed on these as active labour market approaches ‘to get Britain working’. This is indicative of these schemes as being driven by a desire to move people off state benefit rather than as an extension to education provision or an investment in learning. This emphasis on skills training as a means to promote employment was underpinned by a myriad of reports that changed the face of such skills delivery over the following five years.58 Concurrently, there was an overt move to redistribute the responsibility for apprenticeship provision from education providers to employers. The Education Act 2011 replaced what was previously a state duty to provide apprenticeship places to all qualified 16–19-year-olds, with one to ‘make reasonable efforts to ensure employers participate in Apprenticeship training’.59 This shift towards an emphasis on employers’ participation has been a consistent objective for both the Coalition and Conservative governments. In 2015 the Conservatives pledged they would create three million more apprenticeships by 2020, funding this through the introduction of an Apprenticeship Levy to businesses, inducing the most significant investment in UK apprenticeships ever. Tellingly, alongside this unparalleled investment in apprenticeships, the Adult Skills Budget was cut by 35% between 2009 and 2015, undermining the notion that the state was investing in learning and skills.60
The language asserts a renegotiated relationship between employers and government particularly around the role of consumer and provider. As above, the employer is placed as the agentic party, demanding increasing control of the financial regulation and content design of the apprenticeship system. The launch of the Richard Review was accompanied by a speech from, then Business Secretary, Vince Cable that affirmed the government’s desire to prioritise the needs of employers: ‘Doug Richard’s review echoes the Government’s current thinking on putting employers in the driving seat of our apprenticeship programme. This will be vital to ensure the skills of our workforce fit with employer needs’.63 There was a continual deference to industry in the Coalition rhetoric that goes beyond Conservative anti-statism and amounts to a handing over of skills education to employers. This has continued, and expanded, during the Conservative administration, as the Institute for Public Policy Research notes:The purchasing power for training must lie firmly in the hands of employers. […] To become real consumers of training, employers should have control of Government funding and, also, contribute themselves to the cost of training.62
This relaxing of regulation further asserts the dominance of industry over the education and employment markets and highlights the prioritisation of education for work as opposed to education for knowledge, not to mention broader ‘betterment’ or even pleasure. It also marks the importance of developing analyses of how apprenticeships are being deployed in the arts at the outset of the twenty-first century.The government is handing more responsibility to employers for funding, designing, buying and delivering apprenticeships, while at the same time removing the requirement that they include a nationally recognised qualification.64
This shifting apprenticeship landscape has inflected how arts organisations delivering the CEP navigated the provision of work and training for learners. Cultural industries scholars David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker have sought to examine definitions and delineations of ‘good work’ and ‘bad work’ in the creative industries. Their study established that ‘good work’ was largely characterised by good wages and working hours, autonomy, interest and involvement, sociality, self-esteem, self-realisation, work-life balance, and security, while ‘bad work’ was aligned with poor wages and working hours, powerlessness, boredom, isolation, low self-esteem and shame, frustrated development, overwork, and risk.65 This categorisation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is productive as it identifies the ambiguous experiences of the creative worker in the labour market, with individuals regularly experiencing both good and bad work.
The CEP was developed as a response to the poor employment conditions, particularly around security and self-realisation—two key aspects of ‘good work’—for people entering the creative industries. The programme offered a year of secure employment to those wanting to join the industry and gave the opportunity to engage in a broad range of activities to develop people’s skills.66 The CEP offered an opportunity to cultivate skilled workers in arts management, production, technical theatre, community theatre, and administration. Similar to discourses emerging in policy at the same time, the CEP sought to broaden what could be conceived of as an apprentice and underscore the need for specific skills training for different roles. South Tyneside Creative Apprentices undertook a number of different job roles at the various cultural venues including operational support such as ushering and box office/reception duties; administrative duties; development and delivery of education and outreach programmes; marketing and promotion activities; production, event, and technical support; and supporting a range of cafe/restaurant hospitality and catering functions.67 The breadth of the roles apprentices were engaged in and the number of organisations they worked at functioned as training for a future in the cultural industries. This mirrors a freelance or sessional worker’s schedule, where working in set blocks and moving across organisations is common practice. This need to constantly cultivate new relationships and build supportive networks as the worker moves from organisation to organisation replicates the affective requirements of a significant amount of employment in this sector. However, in providing these young people with a year of stability, the CEP offered a relatively secure period of work for the apprentices. It thus enacted a kind of structural training for precarity that young people may encounter if they pursue a career in this industry, but did so over the course of a comparatively stable fixed-term contract.
In South Tyneside Council’s review of the programme, a number of apprentices alluded to negotiating the terms of their work pattern and job roles at different organisations, stating that ‘the experience, both hands-on in a cultural venue specifically and generally in terms of skills development were attractive’.68 This facilitated apprentices’ relationships with the local arts ecology and enabled them to gain useful contacts in the industry, increasing their access to cultural capital. Further, apprentices reported that there was a collegiality that emerged out of working with a cohort of other young people who were often in similar situations to themselves. This promoted Hesmondhalgh and Baker’s assertion of ‘sociality’ as crucial to good work, with a number of apprentices stating that they had grown in confidence, networking, and improved relationships with others over the course of the year.69 The South Tyneside partnership’s delivery of the CEP therefore equipped participants with specialist creative abilities but also developed participants’ relational skills, necessary to navigate the arts labour market during this period.
However, given that this particular iteration of the CEP was a collaboration between different organisations, the potential for poor understandings of the role of apprentices also emerged as a significant weakness in particular organisations. Unsurprisingly apprentices ‘felt that menial tasks such as washing dishes, cleaning toilets, doing bins and administrative work were the least useful [experiences]’.70 This description does not evoke the development of skills but rather suggests undertaking a role with no underpinning learning or support and so one that should be assigned to an employee receiving at least the Living Wage. This highlights the potential murky parameters of an apprenticeship given that it is both an entry-level role and a training opportunity. That is, Structural Hierarchies operating within cultural institutions, as with most workplaces, demand a certain amount of ‘bad work’ in entry-level positions (poor pay, overwork, boredom); however, the status of an apprentice as learner, whose labour is financially remunerated at a lower rate in recognition of this discrete status, is more ambiguous. There is thus a potential for the devaluing of labour through an apprenticeship model if there are not stricter structures making their role distinct and governing the legal obligations of employers during apprenticeships.
Despite the language of creativity that framed the scheme, this lack of ‘creative activity’ that Barber cites highlights challenges of the CEP. Barber’s comments note that the functional roles apprentices were assigned to were in part due to the lack of skills they had already. If organisations are unable to facilitate young people developing their industry-focused skills, then such apprenticeships become focused on ‘supporting [the] functions’ of the cultural institution in which they are located. Such a flexible conception of Creative Apprenticeships coupled with a lack of sufficient financial support for organisations or guidance for learners can lead to individuals in these roles undertaking a disproportionate amount of ‘bad work’, which fails to develop apprentices experience and understanding of cultural work.One of the difficult things looking back is, we didn’t really get young people doing that much creative activity. Often, they were in things like supporting functions. For example, the young people involved in museum services were in attendant type role[s] rather than curatorial type roles. Those who were involved in Customs House were involved with technicians, marketing and the restaurant part. There was neither the opportunity nor the skill base to put them into the Participation and Learning Team.72
Requiring lengthy periods of voluntary work in order to establish a foothold in the industry excludes a large number of people from engaging in that workforce and homogenises the sector. Similarly, sociologists Kimberly Allen, Jocey Quinn, Sumi Hollingworth, and Antheathe Rose identify that the ‘discursive construction of the ideal work placement student and potential creative worker—with a currency on flexibility, enterprise and self-sufficiency—privileges whiteness, middle class-ness, masculinity and able-bodiedness’.77 The increase in unpaid labour and voluntary placements in overstretched arts organisations instigates exclusionary practices that foster an elitist and monocultural industry.we will narrow the talent pool to only those who can afford to take unpaid opportunities, and those who can afford education. That will be a danger to us and to our creativity and to the wealth of experiences we need to bring into our industry to make it valuable.76
The CEP attempted to reduce barriers to participating in the arts workforce, addressing the fact that, in 2014, 58.8% of jobs in the ‘Creative Economy’ were filled by individuals with degree qualifications. This figure is significantly more than that of all UK jobs (31.8%).78 This intervention by Creative and Cultural Skills therefore sought to offer accessible pathways into operational roles such as arts administration or project management in the cultural sector. Of the 40 apprentices involved in the CEP in South Tyneside, none of them had previously been employed in the arts and cultural sector prior to undertaking the apprenticeship and all stated that they felt ‘lack of experience’ and ‘not having a degree’ had meant they would not have applied for arts jobs in the past.79 After the apprenticeship, they felt more equipped and confident to pursue careers in the creative industries. However, apprentices also noted that the low wage they received during the apprenticeship was restrictive, particularly to those with dependents and cautioned that this could impede access.80 The CEP in South Tyneside did expand accessibility; however, the low wages attached to apprenticeships in the UK mean not everyone can afford to undertake one.
Alongside increasing access to non-graduates, the CEP enabled investment in arts organisations across all regions in England. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) noted in 2015 that there is a significant disparity in employment in the creative sector across regions: ‘across the whole of the UK, around 1 in 12 jobs (8.5%) were in the Creative Economy and ranged from 1 in 20 jobs (5.1%) in the North East to 1 in 6 jobs (16.2%) in London’.81 The CEP brought just under half a million pounds into South Tyneside to underpin employment opportunities in the arts and cultural sector and thus expand the region’s arts ecology. Through investing in different regions, the CEP presented a small intervention in the London-centric landscape of arts employment, enabling local markets to grow. If such interventions were more sustained, then this model holds the potential to rebalance the geography of the arts and cultural sector in the UK.
Beyond a definition of quality, Hesmondhalgh and Baker’s conception of work is concerned with how ‘good’ and ‘bad’ work is distributed, arguing that ‘the problem of good work should be understood as part of [the] broader political problems of freedom, equality and the social division of labour’.82 As the aforementioned figures attest, there is significant inequality in the distribution of roles in the creative industries. Figures relating to the success of the CEP in engaging a more diverse workforce are yet to be published. However, as my analysis of the CEP demonstrates, it is important that ACE consider diversity through the quality, not only the quantity, of work individuals are engaging in. The CEP provided a number of opportunities to young people who may not have been able to engage in creative work otherwise; however, it is important that we continue to track the kind of tasks individuals undertake in order to capture the nuances of shifts in access to the creative industries.
Examining the apprenticeship landscape in the UK illuminates the persistent recession of the state, growing control of the employer, and intensifying the responsibility felt by the individual to sufficiently equip themselves for the workplace. In this context, ACE’s attempt to intervene in exploitative labour practices operating within the arts does provide more accessible roots into the cultural sector that seek to diversify this workforce. However, the combination of the ambiguity of roles in the arts sector and the increasingly deregulated area of apprenticeships means that the CEP opens learners up to both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ work. If organisations are to sufficiently support individuals and ensure their progression in the arts, it is vital to recognise an apprenticeship as uniquely positioned at the intersection of education and employment.
Practice Changing the Discourse or Discourse Changing the Practice?
Above I have focused on structural analysis of the intersections and overlaps between employment and artistic policy that have emerged in Talent Match and the CEP. I now turn to an exploration of how these discourses around employability effect, and are effected by, a specific performance project. In their first year as part of the Talent Match Partnership, Immediate Theatre delivered what became The First Door. Named by participants, one of whom stated it meant ‘[i]f someone would just help us to open that first door—well, the rest we can open ourselves’, The First Door was an employment-focused performance project for those young people.83
His impression seemed to be that [JCP] were doing a reasonable job. Anyway so our young people were there and the more they listened to him the more visibly angry they were getting about it.84
This work-in-progress sharing demonstrates the active role that socially committed performance addressing unemployment can play in rupturing state-sanctioned discourses surrounding unemployment. The discursive event that Talent Match London and Immediate Theatre facilitated between these young people and a senior London Jobcentre Plus manager allowed a disruption to occur within JCP rhetoric. As Adamson notes, the value of amplifying these young people’s voices illuminates how small companies dependent on funding from schemes like Talent Match might be unable to challenge key stakeholders in the same way that the Immediate Theatre participants did.I think that they were able to get involved in that discussion meant a lot to them […]. But also having some people who weren’t just playing the game and on message about ‘thanks for the funding, we’re so happy to be working with you’, they were actually like ‘no, this is not my experience, what you’re saying is wrong’. And this Jobcentre guy, bless him, took a bit of a beating during that panel discussion but stayed afterwards […] and he was saying ‘I’m happy to listen’.86
The relationships cultivated through this encounter, and fostered through Talent Match, continued to inform the practice of both Immediate Theatre and Jobcentre Plus. In her role as Training Co-ordinator, Jones discussed how the two organisations might work together to improve understanding on both sides. Immediate Theatre initially proposed taking their performance into Jobcentre and following it with a youth-led workshop for advisors to attend, in the hope that the discussion that occurred at the Talent Match London conference could be provoked across JCP offices. However, given the logistical and economic strains on Jobcentres during this period this initial plan was significantly pared back. Instead, it was decided that the participants would make a film for use at staff training events within the Jobcentres where they had established links.
The 13-minute film initially follows the story of the fictional character of Joe and his struggle to gain work and resist getting involved in the black market economy prevalent in his community. The tone then shifts and viewers are introduced to the real participants who share things about themselves; this is intercut with the scenes about difficulties of using the Jobcentre that the participants performed for the Talent Match conference.87 The film has a Do-It-Yourself aesthetic, there are no costumes or lighting, and the camera does not have a strong mic, resulting in the regular use of voiceovers. This visual sparseness elevates the value of the vocal performances and importance of the language deployed in the piece. This primacy of language creates a platform for the participants to be vocal, to amplify their experiences of the Jobcentre, and to be heard by the organisation’s staff.
- voice 1:
This is Joe. He goes by Joe, Jay, JJ, Joker, Joey. Others call him Joseph or The Young Person.
- joe:
What’s young person?
- voice 2:
There are young people and then there are The Young People.
- voice 3:
Apparently Joe’s NEET, whatever that means.88
By utilising a number of different nicknames for Joe, the audience is given a sense of this character and the playfulness of his personality. This playful naming is significant as it bestows a three dimensionality to Joe that affords the audience a connection to him. This is punctured by the coldness of the bureaucratic naming of the character by the, at this point, unidentified other voices. This opening introduces us to the disconnect felt by young people between themselves and the linguistic construction of ‘The Young Person’ in the bureaucratic sites they find themselves entangled in.
The film then proceeds to counter this construct of ‘The Young Person’ by introducing us to the participants who have created the film and their individual personalities. Shot in a close up, each participant raises their head and looks directly at the camera telling us their name and describing themselves in three words: ‘Taurus, Funny, and Caring’; ‘ambitious, driven, enigma’. This acts in a similar way to the naming of Joe at the outset, giving audience insight into them as people, rather than them as ‘The [generalised] Young Person’. To reinforce this, shot in a similar style, at the close of the film the participants share their aspirations: ‘I want to own my own beekeeping company, and make all natural honey with no pesticides. And also to try and protect the world as we know it. Also I want to own my own house and just, to have a good life’.89 While access to safe and stable housing was a common thread, the beekeeping was not. The motivations of the participants were diverse, varied, and ambitious; a key struggle that they articulated was the inability of services such as JCP to be able to acknowledge their diversity or support them in achieving their personal goals. The film also included a section where each participant shared their frustration at JCP, the struggles they have encountered with form filling, their four-minute meetings with advisors, and the impossibility of them imparting the complexities of their lives to JCP staff within these rigid confines. The film partially seeks to recreate the discussion that occurred at the Talent Match London conference and disseminate the learning across JCP staff. Through articulating their characteristics, ambitions, and specific circumstances, which are not given space in the bureaucratic discourse of ‘The Young Person’, participants are able to present a personal narrative. This allows a more nuanced representation of their identity to emerge that nuances their identity beyond just their employment status, expressing a new conception of these individuals in a state of possibility, potentiality, and hope. The importance of language in this piece evidences the stakes involved in generating positive discourse around young unemployed individuals. Additionally, The First Door film demonstrates that there is a desire among young people to co-construct these discourses to make them more representative of their diverse personal narratives.
The First Door project enabled participants to feel listened to and be proud of their creative work; further, it extended beyond participants and provided a provocation for local JCP staff. Indeed, Jones accompanied some young people to a showing of the film at a JCP senior management meeting, and despite initial reticence—‘[t]hey found it quite hard to believe I think, or didn’t wanna believe it’—the staff engaged in a reflective discussion around improvements that could be made to more appropriately support engagement with young people.90 Immediate Theatre made a small-scale intervention in Jobcentre Plus training at a local level around providing appropriate support to young people. However, Jones also spoke of her despair at trying to penetrate such a vast and unwieldy system as DWP: missed meetings, difficulty in accessing the right people, and a service stretched to the limit meant that the relationship between Immediate Theatre and Jobcentre Plus subsequently broke down. While this relationship dissolved, it is important that it was forged, even fleetingly, to foster a different quality of engagement between young welfare claimants and Jobcentre Plus staff. The impenetrability of the wider DWP structure points to the utility of performance developing local strategies and regional partnerships in order to tackle the systemic removal of claimants’ humanity. In such contexts, applied performance can offer otherwise divergent discourses the opportunities to meet and clash, creating spaces for listening and articulating wherein performances of language might shift particular understandings of communities.
Having explored how arts practice might intervene in discourses around unemployment, I now consider how arts projects might decentre artistic practice in service of employability objectives. Shifts in skills rhetoric have increasingly focused on labourers developing ‘portable’ or ‘transferrable’ skill sets. There is an increasing awareness that employability courses need to equip people for the realities of the insecure workplace, and as Jane Mulderrig asserts to prepare individuals for ‘a life of uncertainty in which risk and responsibility for one’s own welfare and security must be accepted’.91 ‘Transferrable’ skills have gained considerable traction in applied and community theatre. There has been an intensification of a skills-based rhetoric focusing on the application and utility of soft skills gained through artistic practice.92 The language surrounding transferrable skills therefore becomes central to a consideration of the interaction of policy discourse and artistic practice concerned with unemployment.
There is an understanding in the partnership that theatre accesses a different mode of engagement beyond individual job support, application mentoring, and volunteering opportunities. Theatre offers participants a collective experience and a space for collaboration. This potentially interrupts the construction of individual responsibility that is cultivated by the experience of unemployment, where there is not regularly room for group work in the systems you encounter. This isolation is intensified by a discourse that is consistently rendering individuals at fault for not accruing the appropriate skills to be able to traverse the labour market successfully.94 In approaching Immediate Theatre to be involved in the partnership, the consortium acknowledges the importance of these spaces for collaboration and the capacity of drama projects to deliver them.it’s a theatre company doing it alongside other partner organisations who aren’t theatre based at all. And how you’re engaging with them is quite different […]. You’re sort of added value doing the group sessions, whereas the other organisations I think all they’re having is the one to one stuff.93
There is an absence of aesthetic or artistic language in Jones’ discussion of what participants gain from involvement in The First Door. While the competencies she outlines are certainly important, they are indicative of the transferrable skills discourse that has emerged across employability provision and arts projects that address social outcomes. I propose that there is a porousness in this language which surrounds applied performance, which has the potential to enable an ‘interruption’ or ‘substitution’ of the language of artistic practice in service to the linguistic constructions of state employment policy.96 These shifts in language lead to shifts in practice.I think they’re supportive of it, I think they can understand ‘you do interview skills and role play’ but it’s more for us […]. It is the confidence building, it is the team building, it is the trust, it’s being able to learn to communicate in a more positive way. Those kind of things that build up slowly, which I guess if you haven’t done drama or you’re not aware of that process you don’t see it.95
This decentres the role of performance in favour of employability skills and ‘office etiquette’. As I have alluded to above, the value of including a theatre company lies in its ability to creatively provoke discussion and give voice to young people through performance.It is about building self-confidence, looking at things like body language, status, managing your emotions, stress, and time management. So it’s like building in different skills, step by step and then interview skills, office etiquette. So it’s much more employability focused which I think is what the programme are asking for.97
While arts organisations responding to shifts in the political landscape echo the rhetoric surrounding social inclusion and funding during the New Labour period, I suggest that the climate of scarce funding and intensified competition has further raised the stakes of such practices. Given the political focus on unemployment since the economic crash in 2008, the subsequent wealth of funding available for employability projects has more overtly aligned arts organisations with the provision of employment skills, subsidised labour schemes, and work-focused training. Arts organisations need to reassert the distinctive value of arts practice in community settings rather than shifting their discourse and practice to fit with existing provision or commissioner priorities. This context requires practitioners and scholars to be alert and critical of the functions of the complex discourse of creativity, competition, and skills operating within this field.arts and community based organisations, have to follow where the political lead is. So now suddenly there’s lots of money for employability projects, so obviously as an arts organisation, you are need to think about developing in that area. So you are kind of led by policy.98
Conclusion
As unemployment remains unjustly stigmatised, apprenticeship numbers increase, and exploitative labour practices persist, it is an important time to review the position of arts organisations involved in employability provision. In investigating how the CEP and Talent Match traverse the new marketised arena of social provision, I have evidenced where arts provision has been inculcated in discourses and practices of payment-by-results. I identified micro-instances where arts funding models, which allow for the non-linear outcomes of the arts project, might seek to disrupt this notion of ‘results’. Indeed, the collaborative model, embedded in much socially motivated arts practice, might intervene in the increasingly individualised and competitive employability marketplace. My discussion of the developing UK apprenticeship sector identifies a new area of analysis for questions around ‘good work’ and ‘bad work’ in the arts sector, advocating for continuing to develop interventions in arts employment in order to improve the accessibility, distribution, and quality of creative work. Finally, in exploring performances of employability enacted in Immediate Theatre’s First Door project, I have demonstrated how applied theatre might stage dialogue across different stakeholders around work, value, and support. Conversely, I evidenced how the language utilised by Immediate Theatre shifted over the course of their collaboration with Talent Match and argued that this, in turn, led to a shift in the practice the company deliver in this area. This exposes the dialogic relationship between policy and practice in arts-based employability projects. The ‘interruption’ and linguistic co-optation of arts discourse by state-sanctioned economic vocabularies that serve employability agendas can effectively contaminate ideologies of community and creative practices which exist in applied performance. However, arts organisations continue to disrupt established frameworks of employability and payment-by-results models through rejecting the monetisation of learners, cultivating community practice, encouraging collaborative working. In such a landscape arts practitioners must be self-reflexive about the language they deploy and be able to navigate a complex and contradictory layered discourse of public service commissioning priorities and applied arts practices.