Fury as SAC puts damning reports online

Published Tuesday 9 May 2006 at 15:35 by Alistair Smith

Scotland’s arts council is facing a backlash from many of the country’s leading theatre organisations after it published a series of damning assessments of their work.

The SAC has posted more than 1,500 documents on its website, detailing the reasons for recent grant decisions affecting some 100 clients. Although new legislation means such documents can be requested by the public, no funding body has ever made so much information so easily available.

Officers were not told prior to assessment of the council’s plans to publish the reports online. Now their outspoken judgments have caused outrage among those companies recommended for cuts and are being used as ammunition for appeals.

Borderline Theatre, which lost its core funding status, had been accused of not having met “any key policy areas particularly well”, with most of its productions rated only competent or poor.

Borderline chief Eddie Jackson claims that statistics used to justify the grant cut are fundamentally flawed and has enlisted a leading mathematician to argue Borderline’s case.

Oxford mathematician Professor Dan Segal called the SAC’s use of figures inaccurate and misleading, specifically its claim that “the majority of B[orderline]’s productions are competent or poor (59%).”

He countered that the data revealed 55% of Borderline’s productions were evaluated as excellent or good, which “directly contradicts” the SAC’s interpretation. In fact, only 15% of the productions had been rated as poor, meaning that 85% were competent or better.

A host of other well known groups have been heavily criticised, with assessors claiming:

• Edinburgh International Festival is in a “precarious position”.

• The Citizens Theatre in Glasgow offers “low value for money”.

• 7:84 company cannot “deliver an acceptable level of quality”.

• Pitlochry Festival Theatre has little hope of raising additional ongoing revenue.

• Theatre Babel, “does not represent the best value for money” and its work could be done by others.

• Byre Theatre should be downgraded from a producing to a receiving house.

Professor Segal said it was clear from the Borderline case that the arts council had used judgments from multiple officers on some of the productions and then counted the results twice.

He explained: “There is a huge and unjustified variation in the weighting given to the (observed) quality of the various productions.

“[It resembles] a university exam in which some of the papers are marked by one examiner and some by two examiners; instead of giving the latter papers the average of the grades proposed by the two examiners, one gives them the sum of the grades. This would plainly be unfair.”

Lizzi Nicoll, director of the Federation of Scottish Theatre, welcomed the openness and transparency of SAC in publishing the documents,. However she warned that “the publication of assessments [might] not be in the commercial interests” of some of its members and recognised that when the assessments were made the officers might not have been aware the results would be published on the website.”