Fairer funding for all: how Youth Music ensures an equitable funding spread across England

Since publication of the ‘Rebalancing our cultural capital’ report, there has been much debate about regional funding allocations for the arts. Indeed, the current Culture Media and Sport Select Committee inquiry of Arts Council England is asking specifically whether the geographical distribution of funding is ‘fair’.

At the National Foundation for Youth Music (Youth Music), fair distribution of funding is of paramount importance to us. In 2011 we introduced a regional allocation formula into our grant-making process, which is beginning to lead to a more equitable balance of funding across our portfolio.

Youth Music’s vision is that life-changing music-making is available to all children and young people. As a charity, our explicit focus is on those with least opportunity. In this way we differ from many other arts funders: our priority is not the production of art for audiences, but the positive outcomes arising from children and young people producing art, in our case making music. Among our diverse portfolio we have projects working with young people in very challenging circumstances, from work in hospital settings, looked-after children’s choirs, projects offering music-mentoring to children in special schools and lullaby composition projects for young children with development delay.

Youth Music is a designated distributor of £10million per year of Lottery funding via Arts Council England. We currently invest in 411 projects across England, supporting over 90,000 children and young people each year. We take an evidenced-based approach to distributing funds, which means we look at our own data regarding existing provision, as well as the ever-evolving needs of regions and localities based on evidence created and published elsewhere. When we launched our most recent grants programme in 2011, we wanted to ensure fairness and equity within our investment allocations, so we introduced a regional weighting system into our decision-making process.

Our approach

Our regional investment process is made up of two steps. First, we use a range of internal and external data to identify the priority status of each region. We then adjust the application success rates for each region according to their priority status.

1. Determining the priority status of each region

We use a number of indices to determine how regional investment should be prioritised:

Youth Music historical investment Youth Music current spend-per-child investment Indices of Multiple Deprivation – overall levels and the education, skills and training deprivation domain Current Arts Council investment in Music Education Hubs DCMS active people (cultural engagement) data

The data is entered for each region and leads to a corresponding points score based on distance from the overall average (mean) in each category (areas that are most deprived are furthest from the mean and score the highest number of points). Points for each criterion are added together to give an overall rank, and a tertile rank (i.e. distributed into three - low priority, average priority, high priority) for each region.

2. Weighting of success rates

After undertaking the prioritisation exercise, we identify the value of applications we have received overall to determine what the average success rate would be (it’s usually between 30 and 40%). We then weight the success rates for each region by up +/- 20% of the average rate depending on the priority score of each region (so the high priority regions receive positive discrimination, and their success rate at each funding round could typically be around 10% higher than the average priority regions). This gives each region a notional investment amount at the assessment panel, with applications working across regions or nationally considered separately.

The reason we weight success rates (rather than working to pre-determined investment amounts) is to ensure all regions have a minimum level of investment at every round. While we want to increase our investment in certain regions, we also need to ensure a minimum quality threshold amongst the projects that we fund.

What has been the impact?

Since introducing this approach we have seen a re-balancing of our investment away from the South East and the South West (areas where we historically received the most applications and therefore funded the most projects). Funding to London has increased slightly over the period but it does not receive disproportionately more than other regions and is broadly in line with the proportion of the under-19 population resident in London (15%).

We have started to see greater equity across all regions, with the North East and Yorkshire (the two top-priority regions when we first undertook the exercise in 2011) moving closer to the average in terms of their points scoring. In addition, Youth Music investment in the 20% most deprived Local Authority areas (according to the Index of Multiple Deprivation) has increased by 8% - from 37% in 2011/12 to 45% in 2012/13.

Other ways of addressing regional imbalances

It’s not just about being responsive to the number of applications we receive. If there has been a historic lack of investment in an area then chances are we’ll see fewer applications located there.

That’s why funders need to be intelligent and respond in appropriate ways. One way Youth Music has done this is by introducing additional funding for our strategic ‘Musical Inclusion’ grant-holders, who are charged with identifying areas where there is little activity taking place (‘cold spots’), and developing sustainable provision and working with emerging (‘breakthrough’) practitioners, who are nurtured to deliver future activity.

Other funders have tackled these issues in different ways. Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places Fund specifically targets areas of low cultural engagement. Garfield Weston recently introduced the Weston Charity Awards (a package of funding and organisational development support) for organisations in the North East, after seeing a decline in applications from that region in recent years.

Undertaking the regional prioritisation process at the start of every funding round is a useful exercise, as it enables us to gain an up-to-date picture of the current scene. We run a training course for Youth Music grant-holders and potential applicants on taking an outcomes approach, and in the latest round the location of this training in two regions (North East and West Midlands) was in direct response to their priority status. As we undertake a review of our funding programme we will explore how we can better respond to geographical imbalances, building infrastructure where it is currently lacking and responding to ever evolving need.

A recent Arts Professional survey asked ‘should the distribution of Lottery funding for the arts reflect regional population densities?’ This may be a simple formula for funders to adopt, but we argue strongly against this being used as a sole measure, as it takes no account of deprivation (which is not evenly spread across the country) and hides rural isolation and other geographical issues.

Funder responsibilities

We strongly agree with ACE that great art should be available to everyone. We all want a diverse, thriving and accessible arts infrastructure, reflective of the culture in which it exists. To achieve this, funders need to take an intelligent approach to ensure an equitable and ‘fair’ distribution of funds across the country. This approach might start with the development of a geographical investment process, but this will never be an end in itself. Funders should be (and are) looking further than this to try and overcome the root causes of the imbalances. This will not be an overnight process, but it is only by being honest about where we can improve, using evidence, and taking action now that we will start to redress the balance.