As part of ASSITEJ International’s ‘Creating Cultural Equity’ project (which is co-funded by the European Union), ASSITEJ International has appointed researchers to help collect and disseminate data, information, practices, ideas, and solutions around the themes of ‘Value & Impact’ and ‘Audience Demographic Data’ in TYA (Theatre for Young Audiences).
Often, the TYA sector is described as extensive and diverse – not only geographically and culturally, but also in terms of practice. This is a far-reaching sector in every country in ASSITEJ‘s global membership: reaching children and young people in schools, universities, streets, parks, theatre houses, remote communities, sports clubs, crèches, homes, hospitals, and prisons. However, TYA is often as marginalised as some of the children we serve and struggles as a sector to gain full recognition for its value and impact. Impact evidence is almost always anecdotal, and there is often little solid evidence or hard data to back up claims about who the sector is, what it does, and, most importantly, who it serves.
One of the aims for the research projects is to better recognise the value of our sector. The research will be advocacy-focused and beneficial to ASSITEJ members, ASSITEJ National Centres, ASSITEJ International Professional Networks, TYA practitioners, and the wider TYA community. The research outputs will be published on an open-access basis. The research is intended to serve as a reference for practitioners in their day-to-day work, for example, to boost advocacy initiatives and funding applications, offer learning opportunities, and foster networking and collaboration. The findings are also intended to inform advocacy discussions in cultural-policy forums and to support our sector’s participation in relevant consultations, presentations, conferences, and events.
These research projects build on ASSITEJ International’s pilot advocacy-focused research that took place as part of the previous ‘Building Collective Resilience’ project. You can learn more about this past research here.
STAGE WORTHY
The Value of Theatre & Performing Arts
for Children & Young People
The project aims to bring together existing published and unpublished impact-focused evidence to collect, curate, and signpost resources that qualify and quantify claims about the value and impact of Theatre & Performing Arts for Children & Young People. It aims to build a comprehensive, accessible global evidence base that supports advocacy and funding and helps ASSITEJ members and other stakeholders demonstrate the sector’s value and impact.
YOUNG AUDIENCES COUNT
Supporting Data Gathering
& Evidence-Based Advocacy in TYA
This project invites ASSITEJ National Centres to participate in a new international training and research collaboration focused on strengthening our understanding of young audiences through data. The project is designed to fulfil an advocacy role and champion practical outcomes from data collection, exploring how to find existing data sources and how to generate new data that tells the story of how many (and which) children and young people access and engage in Theatre & Performing Arts.
Project Coordinators:
- Professor Selina Busby of The Royal Central School of Speech & Drama
- Professor Kelly Freebody, Professor Michael Anderson, Dr Eliza Oliver, Dr Katy Alexander, and Dr Thomas De Angelis of The University of Sydney
Project Coordinators:
- Dr Kai Roland Green of Aarhus University
- Dr Lanora Callahan, of the New York City Department of Social Services and Marist University
The Project team brings complementary expertise across applied and social theatre, participatory and emancipatory research, qualitative case-based inquiry, drama and theatre education, social justice, creativity, and arts education, with substantial experience in research ethics, work with young people, and engagement with marginalised communities.
Collectively, their backgrounds span both practice and scholarship, including extensive work on how children and young people engage with theatre and the arts, as well as experience with literature review and evidence-mapping methodologies.
Dr Kai Roland Green is a postdoctoral researcher whose work spans gender, social enterprise, the creative industries, and theatre dramaturgy, bringing qualitative and contextual expertise that helps connect data collection to cultural practice and interpretation.
Dr Lanora Callahan is a Research Scientist specialising in quantitative and mixed-methods research, evaluation, and performance management in public administration and the arts, with substantial experience designing, implementing, and managing studies involving young people and socioeconomically vulnerable populations.
Learn More About This Evidence Mapping Project:
Why Is ASSITEJ International Launching The 'Stage Worthy' Project?
ASSITEJ International is launching this project because, although Theatre & Performing Arts for Children & Young Audiences is widely understood to have artistic, cultural, social, educational, developmental, health, and other forms of value, the evidence for these claims is often scattered, anecdotal, undocumented, or difficult to access. TYA offers significant opportunities for impact through its diverse, risk-taking, multi-artform and cross-sectoral practice. It engages children, young people, and their families in intersectional and intergenerational ways, and recognises young people as cultural participants and contributors.
As part of its ‘Creating Cultural Equity’ project, ASSITEJ wants a more systematic, globally relevant body of evidence that can qualify and quantify the sector’s impact, strengthen recognition of its value, and support advocacy with funders, policymakers, and partner sectors.
TYA can be particularly challenging to document because much of its work is embodied, undocumented, or recorded in ways that are not easily accessible. As a result, the breadth and impact of the sector can be difficult to demonstrate through systematically collected evidence. Existing evidence often fails to capture the full scale of the sector’s work. It may also overlook work in areas such as disability, health, prisons and detention centres. Despite its reach and potential, TYA can itself be marginalised and struggles to gain full recognition for its value and impact.
‘Stage Worthy’ seeks to strengthen recognition of theatre and performance for, with, and by children and young people among the wider arts sector and other partner sectors.
What Is The Aim Of The 'Stage Worthy' Project?
The project aims to collect, curate, synthesise, and signpost published and unpublished evidence demonstrating the value and impact of Theatre & Performing Arts for Children & Young People. In doing so, the project seeks to produce collated, annotated, and segmented evidence across different performance art forms, geographies, languages, and impact types, so that ASSITEJ members and other stakeholders can more clearly understand and use this evidence in advocacy, policy, and practice.
Children and young people are central to this project not only as audiences, but also as cultural contributors and co-creators of knowledge about impact. The research will draw on existing records, evaluations, and accounts of their experiences and insights to explore both the benefits they receive from, and the contributions they make to, the sector. In doing so, it recognises children and young people as cultural citizens with agency.
What Will The 'Stage Worthy' Project Involve?
The project involves a multi-phase research process, including planning and preparation; an initial systematic review of multilingual texts; stakeholder engagement through ASSITEJ members; a final systematic review and evidence gap map; knowledge translation; and reflection. In practice, this means conducting literature searches across academic, other published, and unpublished sources; coding and categorising evidence; collecting submissions from ASSITEJ National Centres; producing qualitative case studies of impact in practice; and developing accessible advocacy tools such as visual outputs, webinars, and an interactive evidence map. The curated evidence will be presented in an accessible, interactive, and visual Evidence Map format, making the findings easier to explore and navigate.
The research will consider both qualitative and quantitative impact studies, from individual project investigations to meta-analyses of multiple reports. It will also draw on grey literature from multiple language contexts, including TYA programme reports, evaluation documents, theatre company reports, studies commissioned by NGOs, and other material considered relevant by practitioners and researchers.
How Will ASSITEJ National Centres & International Professional Networks Participate In The 'Stage Worthy' Project?
ASSITEJ National Centres and International Professional Networks can participate by responding to an open call and, if selected, contributing evidence from their own contexts. They will participate in webinar briefing sessions that explore how to identify, submit, and use impact evidence; they can choose to meet with researchers for optional follow-ups about how to collect evidence; they will be able to provide feedback to researchers on their cultural, linguistic, and geographic contexts; they will collect both published and grey literature; and they may act as critical friends to the researchers in order to strengthen the inclusivity and relevance of the research.
What Do We Hope The 'Stage Worthy' Project Will Achieve?
ASSITEJ International hopes the project will achieve a stronger, more accessible global evidence base on the value of Theatre & Performing Arts for Children & Young People, while also showing where research gaps remain. More broadly, it aims to strengthen the sector’s advocacy, funding applications, professional learning, and policy influence; help non-academic stakeholders point to credible literature on impact; and provide a proof of concept for expanded future research and collaboration.
Learn More About This Data Gathering Project:
Why Is ASSITEJ International Launching The 'Young Audiences Count' Project?
ASSITEJ International is launching this collaborative project to address a long-standing challenge in the Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) field: while our work’s impact, reach, and social value are widely felt, we sometimes lack the ‘language game’ to make that impact known to wider circles. We still lack data (and the stories the data tell) about the children and young people who engage with TYA, and how we might encourage more diverse participation.
In many countries, audience statistics are not collected systematically or consistently enough to show how many children and young people access theatre and the performing arts, or how participation differs across demographic groups. Information about young audiences’ demographics, preferences and levels of access can therefore be difficult to obtain and compare.
Without this information, the sector lacks a strong foundation to demonstrate the artistic, social, and economic relevance of TYA. It is also important to identify which groups of children and young people are not accessing theatre and the performing arts, so that gaps in participation can be better understood.
What Is The Aim Of The 'Young Audiences Count' Project?
This project is an opportunity for ASSITEJ National Centres to collaborate closely with a small team of specialist data researchers to develop and implement their own knowledge, tools, and methods for collecting, analysing, and presenting meaningful data on young people’s engagement with Theatre & Performing Arts in their national contexts.
The frameworks, methods and records developed through the project should be useful to National Centres within their own national contexts, while also allowing data to be compared across countries. This will help build a clearer understanding of the scale of children and young people’s access to theatre and the performing arts in different geographical contexts.
Through this project, we aim to support ASSITEJ National Centres in building a clearer, more reliable evidence base for future advocacy, funding applications, policy engagement, and strategic development.
What Will The 'Young Audiences Count' Project Involve?
The National Centres involved in the project are receiving bespoke training to develop and implement their own methods for capturing data and using it to support their advocacy initiatives, while also contributing to a growing global evidence base for TYA.
Participating National Centres are being supported to:
- Learn about different types of data collection – enabling them to deepen their understanding of their audiences;
- Identify existing data sources relevant to TYA audiences in their country;
- Collaborate in the creation of national data frameworks;
- Participate in data analysis alongside the research team;
- Assist in producing charts, graphs, and visualisations to present their findings clearly and accessibly.
How Will ASSITEJ National Centres Participate In The 'Young Audiences Count' Project?
The project is designed as both a research collaboration and a capacity-building programme. Participating National Centres are currently engaged in a structured international learning framework.
The training programme includes the following:
1. Regular Interactive Training Webinars
Live ZOOM sessions focusing on key themes in data collection, analysis, and interpretation, with practical guidance tailored to the TYA sector.
2. A Library of Tools & Templates
Including data collection tools, reporting formats, and analysis methods that National Centres can continue to use beyond the project.
3. A Basic Data Entry Framework & Data Dashboard
Instructions and tools to support consistent national data entry and comparison.
4. Regular Drop-In Mentoring Sessions
Optional drop-in ZOOM sessions for troubleshooting, advice, and peer exchange with the research team.
The webinars are action-oriented: after each session, participants will be given a practical task to complete before the next meeting, helping to ensure steady progress toward national data collection and analysis.
What Do We Hope The 'Young Audiences Count' Project Will Achieve?
ASSITEJ International hopes the project will achieve a stronger evidence base for the TYA sector worldwide by showing both who is currently being reached and where geographic or demographic gaps remain.
ASSITEJ National Centres involved in the project are:
- Gaining practical skills in data management and analysis;
- Strengthening national advocacy and arguments for funding;
- Working to use data to support marketing and long-term audience development;
- Contributing to a global evidence base for TYA;
- Building new relationships with international peers and researchers;
- Helping the TYA sector become more visible and better represented in policy circles.
The project’s outputs will also help demonstrate the value of this research and provide a basis for considering how it could be expanded through future funding. The methodological resources developed through the project, including workshop plans, templates and tools, are important outputs in their own right.
How This Builds On Our Existing Evidence Mapping Work:
In collaboration with ASSITEJ International, the researchers from the University of Sydney have already completed a pilot evidence-mapping project. Additionally, Dr Selina Busby from The Royal Central School of Speech & Drama has completed first-phase pilot multinational case studies on access and dissemination structures within the TYA sector.
To learn more about this work, click on the multimedia links below:
How This Builds On Our Existing Data Gathering Work:
In collaboration with ASSITEJ International, Dr Kai Roland Green and Dr Lanora Callahan have already completed a first-phase pilot study on this topic.
To learn more about this work, click on the multimedia links below:
