Family Friendly

The Family Friendly Iniative

– Making Your Arts Venue Family Friendly Getting Started. Imaginate (an arts organisation that promotes and develops the performing arts for children and young people in Scotland) was funded by the Scottish Arts Council to run the Family Friendly Initiative in 2003 over two years. The aim was to improve children and families access to and participation in arts activities by encouraging Scottish arts organisations to become more child and family friendly.

The guide produced gives a step by step  approach to making your centre, event, activity more family friendly.

Family-Friendly.net is the website which resulted from the Imaginate and SAC Family Friendly Iniaitive project. It is a vast resource of information and guides on how to implement your own family friendly initiative. Their Resource page offers free downloads including:

• Consulting with children and young people
• Making your arts venue user-friendly for families with children and young people with disabilities
• Arts for All published by Mencap (is a charity that campaigns for children with learning disabilities)
• Making your venue family friendly – getting started
• Marketing to families
• Family friendly checklist and action plan.  

The Family Friendly Toolkit (2006) was produced by Arts Council England in partnership with Network (an audience development body based in the UK) to devise a national family friendly framework for the arts and cultural sector. This is a really practical guide designed to support arts organisations seeking to build relationships and connect with families, making it easier for families to take part in the arts, as audiences and participants.

The toolkit also provides an introduction to the concept of being a family friendly organisation, an Audit to assess how you support families, tools for getting started, facts and figures about family friendly audiences and tried and tested ideas to develop your work.

What to do with the kids? was set up in 2004 as a useful resource for parents on the web. It is an online listing of all the information that would be useful and of interest for families with children. This is a great resource to discover the breath of activities on offer for families with children. This site would make for a fantastic markting tool to help promote your activities across the UK. You can add your own event as well as an attraction, the site offers a really comprehensive database of venues across the UK.

Glow – There has been alot of discussion around Glow, Scotland’s online education community, and a number of arts and cultural organisations have worked successfully through the Glow network to engage with young people. Glow is ‘The world’s first national intranet for education which is transforming the way the cirriculum is delivered in Scotland.’ It has been designed to break down ‘geographical and social barriers and provides tools to ensure a first class education for Scotland.’ (Glow website)

Glow has been designed to engage with pupils, practioners and parents, it is the advent of virtual learning for all. All 32 Scottish local authorities now use Glow, with the purpose of enhancing the quality of learning and teaching in the classroom, through supporting the Cirriculum for Excellence. Glow provides a National Directory, where users can find others within similar areas of interest or expertise, to collaborate across the country and make connections with others to improve learning as well as teaching.

In 2010 ten arts organisations were selected to deliver projects in partnership with local authorities, teachers, learners and new media/technology companies. These ten included Citizen’s Theatre, Drake Music School, Feis Rois, Horsecross Arts, Imaginate, Scottish Youth Dance, NVA, Street Level Photoworks, Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Art Gallery, and the Visible Fictions Theatre Company.  These ten organisations formed the basis for the Co-Create Glow Arts Project and was set up to be a ‘pioneering new iniaitive to bring arts education resources online for schools across Scotland…[with the] potential to enable artists, performers, writers and schools to work and learn together in new ways, developing practice and demonstrating the key role the arts and creativity play in supporting the Cirriculum for Excellence’. For mroe information about the Co-Create project and Glow visit the LTScotland website: http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/ and http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/usingglowandict//