When Eight Becomes Three

JUDI MENABNEY accepted Northings’ invitation in last month’s Editorial to explain the current reconstruction of the Education, Culture, and Sport division at Highland Council

NORTHINGS: Judi, we said last month that there was considerable confusion and no little apprehension about the current changes to the structure of the Council’s Arts Officers around the Highlands & Islands. As Principal Cultural Officer, you head the team – can you first of all explain the context for this reorganisation?

JUDI MENABNEY: The driver is the overall Highland Council reconstruction. There are now three operational areas instead of the previous eight, so we have moved to one regional HQ in Inverness and three strategic operational areas. All of the Council’s services have had to be restructured in the light of that change.

Within Education, Culture and Sport all of our services have been re-arranged across the three areas, which includes the management team, area librarians, sports development officers and the former arts development officers, who are now known as Cultural Development Officers. We still have basically the same number of posts, but we have moved from one pan-Highland and eight area teams to one pan-Highland and three area teams.

N: For those who haven’t followed the restructuring, can you specify the new areas?

JM: Their official designations are: Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross; Ross, Skye and Lochaber; and Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey. We didn’t have an Arts Officer in Skye before, so it has now been brought in.

N: So how will the team be set up in each area – is one Cultural Development Officer expected to look after that whole huge area?

JM: No! The thing I am pleased about is that we have created posts for one area Cultural Officer and an assistant in each area, which means that we have the same number of posts as we had before. The Cultural Officers are promoted posts, while the Assistant Cultural Officers are now on the same grade and responsibility level as the previous Arts Officers, which for me means that we have created a kind of career structure within the Council for cultural staff, which Iʼm very pleased about.

So we have an area Cultural Officer and an assistant in each of the three areas, and we hope there will also be two Cultural Coordinators in each area, subject to final funding. As before, the Cultural Development Officer will be a full-time post, and the assistants in two of the areas will be part-time, as was previously the case – in fact, it is the same people who hold those posts, Shona Arthur in the Inverness area and Helen Semple in Lochaber.

So it will be six people adding up to five full-time posts, and there is also a new post of Arts Links Officer, a pan-Highland post which Lynn Johnson has taken up, which is basically a creative links officer funded by the Arts Council with a remit of looking at arts and education and helping both schools and the community in each of the areas.

Lynn will be working on arts education in the informal sense, developing arts learning opportunities both within and outside school time, assisting in curriculum development, and also managing the Cultural Coordinator programme, which is funded by the Scottish Government and the Arts Council. This type of post was actually required this time as part of the criteria for applying for Cultural Coordinator funding.
 The upshot is that there were seven posts before and there are seven now, but in a different grouping, and myself.

N: Since it is a new factor in the equation, can you just say a bit more about the Arts Link Officer’s post, and also how the Cultural Coordinators will work, assuming your funding application is successful?

JM: Lynn’s post is part of a national programme laid down by the Scottish Government and the Scottish Arts Council, and she has responsibility for strategic management of that programme in the Highlands and Islands. The Arts Council sees what they call creative links posts and cultural coordinators as one and the same, and Lynn will be looking at the work programmes and making sure that we have equity of provision across the region, but the local day-to-day stuff the Coordinators will do on the ground will be managed by the Cultural Officer in each of the regions.

We are awaiting final approval of our plans, but what we are hoping to have is six full-time posts for the Coordinators, divided equally across the three areas, so in total there will be four posts in each of the regions, plus myself and Lynn, and we still have John McNaught and Bob Pegg in post as arts workers.

N: What is the remit for the Cultural Development Officers – are they responsible for heritage and sports and all the rest of it?

JM: Definitely not. Their remit is a bit more broadly-based than before, but I’d like to make it clear that their posts have no formal ties to museums or heritage or sports – we have a separate team in those fields. We are very keen to encourage the development of community events and festivals, and looking at the way that communities are organising local activities now, we see that community celebrations have a broader base. They are usually arts-driven and that will remain a priority, but very often there are heritage or environmental elements tied in to the events, and we are acknowledging that element in the new posts, so there is little more flexibility in terms of what we define as Arts.

The Council’s Gaelic plan is another factor. That is something the Council wants to develop, and will be part of community activity. The Scottish Government are quite clear that Cultural Coordinators have a strong heritage remit as well, and since they will be working with the Cultural Officers, their new remit also takes that into account. So they won’t “just do arts”, but arts will be the key driver of what they do.
 
N: And the focus will be on community projects rather than promoting events and so on?

JM: Community projects will be their primary responsibility rather than direct provision, yes, and it has been going that way for a while now. We are looking to maximise cultural activity on the ground and enable the communities to realise their ambitions and ideas, and also to fulfil the statutory obligations that are put upon us. To be honest, nothing has really changed that much on the ground.

N: Will the size of the areas not be a major problem?

JM: Again, I don’t see it as all that much different. The areas that the Arts Officers covered were always big. Wherever you draw the line it really comes down to the communities therein, rather than the whole geographic spread of the area. People and communities and facilities are still in the same places, they just have different administrative boundaries drawn around them.

The whole service is moving towards basing provision around what we call integrated learning communities, which basically means the secondary school and the primary schools around it.

N: Have all the appointments been made?

JM: We are still in the process of appointing the Cultural Development Officer for the Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey post. The other two are filled – Adrian Clark is moving north from Inverness to take the position for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross and Wendy Sanders is in position in Ross, Skye and Lochaber, and we have three assistants in post.

We are coming to the end of the current two-year programme of Cultural Coordinators, but they will all be finished by next month, and hopefully we can recruit a new team then, although again it will be two-year funding should we get it.

N: And will this information be readily accessible on the Highland Council website once the posts are all in place – it’s very difficult to find anything there at the moment?

JM: Yes, it should be readily available, and the teams are already working on making contacts in their own areas.

N: So you would maintain that this is a reorganisation rather than actual cuts to the service?

JM: Absolutely. We have the same number of people, and half of them are on enhanced remuneration, and I think that speaks for itself. This was purely driven by the overall Council reorganisation.

N: We’ve been talking for a while now about the officers, but why should we be concerned about this issue – why are they important?

JM: I think they are phenomenally committed and fantastic value for money in terms of helping community groups in particular to maximise their potential, both in terms of drawing in funding for projects and plans, and just in terms of providing advice and support.

N: Assuming the new system settles down once the current reorganisation is complete, are the projected cuts in Council budgets for next year a looming problem?

JM: The budget situation doesn’t look great, but it is too early to say for sure how that might impact. My concern now is to complete the restructuring and let us all get on with the job.

Judi Menabney is the Principal Cultural Officer, Highland Council Education Culture & Sport Service

© Kenny Mathieson, 2007