The Stage

Training council will ‘shortchange’ arts

Published Tuesday 30 March 2004 at 14:40 by Ruth Gillespie

Bectu general secretary Roger Bolton has attacked the new national body to oversee skills development and training in the arts for failing to demonstrate genuine financial commitment from employers, who will be asked to invest as little as £1.50 per employee into the scheme during its first year.

A draft business proposal explicitly states the organisation, entitled the Creative and Cultural Industries Sector Skills Council, will be “employer-led”. Companies with between 251 and 499 staff will contribute just £750 a year through an annual subscriptions scheme, while those with between 500 and 999 staff will be asked to give £999.

The CCI SSC has responsibility for performing arts and music, as well as visual arts, literary arts, crafts, design, museums, galleries and heritage organisations. Groups from each sector will identify the employment needs of each area. But theatre representatives fear that the performing arts is in danger of receiving a lower priority.

Although Bolton welcomed the move to develop a comprehensive approach to training, he added: “Historically, theatre employers have shown no interest in training and the level of neglect in this area is appalling when you consider the amount of funding subsidised theatres receive from the arts council.

“The CCI SSC has so far failed to ensure trade union representation on the board of this body as is required by the government and I am concerned that it will simply carry on with the same haphazard approach to training we have seen for the last 30 years.”

In 2002 the government announced that National Training Organisations - centrally funded quangos with nationwide responsibilities - were to be replaced by new independent Sector Skills Councils, licensed by the Secretary of State for Education and Skills.

Prior to the change Metier, the former government organisation responsible for overseeing training and development within the theatre sector, had come under fire from within the industry for spending too much time fundraising and investing in the wrong projects. Following its failure to become a SSC, Metier has developed into a more hands-on research and development agency, concentrating on improving vocational education and tackling social exclusion in the arts, leaving the industry without a central body to oversee skills development.

Bolton said he feared that now the new training body had a wider remit than Metier, the theatre industry would lose out. His fears are shared by technical consultant Roger Fox.

Fox remarked: “The real dilemma with this scheme is that theatre has been lumped together with all these other cultural industries and if you look at the list theatre, especially technical theatre, plays a very small part. This sort of set up won’t work in our industry and it is unlikely that anything beneficial will happen.”

The comments come following the appointment of Royal Opera House chief executive Tony Hall as chairman of the proposed CCI SSC. He said: “We are at the beginning of something here and we have got to think about things like subscription levels. Our first task is to get a group of people together who can work through these questions but theatre won’t be pushed to the back of the queue as it is so important to the work of the SSC.

“We have entered a six-month development period, during which some of these issues will be addressed. I want to listen to these concerns and I accept that none of this is easy but we are working towards one organisation that will be properly funded to make a real difference.”