©Tom Maguire ITYARN 2014

Regulation, research and the creative gap: the context and practice of TYA in contemporary Northern Ireland

Dr Tom Maguire

University of Ulster

INTRODUCTION

A significant legacy of the period of violent conflict in Northern Ireland and the subsequent peace process is that children and childhood have been the focus of much academic research. This research has been focused largely on concerns about the reproduction of sectarianism by children and its impact on them, particularly through schooling and the influence of the media. There has been almost no equivalent research into children's engagement with the arts in general and theatre specifically. In the first part of this essay, I examine the relationship between such research into childhood and the legislative frameworks that regulate children's lives in Northern Ireland to show how their socially constructed model of childhood has emphasized children as vulnerable.

The appointment of a Children's Commissioner in Northern Ireland has represented one move away from such a traditional model of children as dependent and into consideration of children as agents with definable rights. This has foregrounded participatory processes in every sphere of life. While this has re-balanced some aspects of the traditional model of childhood, it has also intersected with it to produce and sustain 'a culture of concern' within which children have to be protected from a world fraught with dangers. By surveying the productions of Theatre for Young Audiences over the last decade, I contrast this culture with the work of Northern Ireland's theatre companies who are seeking to engage children's imaginations as a way of expanding their sense of childhood, engaging them in sometimes disturbing and difficult material, but orientating them as children within a context of which Northern Ireland is only a small part.

RESEARCHING CHILDREN IN NORTHERN IRELAND

The dominant discourse that has sought to explain the history of violence in Northern Ireland has attributed it to the persistence of historically-rooted sectarian divisions between Catholics and Protestants. Ewart and Schubotz et al provide a succinct summary of how sectarianism has divided society in Northern Ireland,

A history of conflict within Northern Ireland has diversified the cultural, political and religious identities of Catholics and Protestants. It has created the climate within which sectarianism and segregation permeates every facet of Northern Irish society, on personal, social, political and economic levels (Connolly and Maginn 1999). There is widespread residential, educational and social segregation, reflected in the fact that 95% of children attend schools segregated by religion, and 80% of social housing is also segregated (Kelly and Sinclair 2003).

(2004: 12)

While the analysis provided by this discourse is problematic in its failure to engage with the complexity of the conflict (Maguire 2006), children are presented within it as vulnerable to sectarian attitudes from a very young age:

Research indicates that children can recognise diversity and hold sectarian prejudices from the age of three; by the age of five or six, a considerable number of children display an awareness of sectarian and paramilitary violence; and by the age of ten or eleven, many have developed deeply entrenched sectarian opinions

(Ewart, S. and Schubotz, D. et al 2004: 14)

Against this backdrop, then, research into childhood in Northern Ireland has largely been focused on the ways in which sectarianism has been inculcated within children and with what effects (Connolly and Maginn 1999; Ewart, Schubotz et al 2004; Messenger Davies 2006; Young NCB Northern Ireland 2013).

In 2012, a new Children’s Research Network for Ireland and Northern Ireland was established that widened the research focus. As well as being engaged in methodological concerns of research into children, its conferences have focused on measuring outcomes in health and education and, in December 2013, on children's mental health and well-being. The measures of well-being (such as the Laeken Indicators used by the European Union) focus exclusively on factors relating to poverty such as income, unemployment and access to housing.

Taken together, such research activities and reports have replicated many of the anxieties of what Jackie Marsh has identified as the traditional approach to researching childhood. This traditional approach has three dimensions.

·  Child as dependent upon adults

·  Child as developing through various stages of immaturity on the way to becoming adult

·  Children as an object of adult study (2010: 13)

Marsh also traces the work of 'the new sociologists of childhood from the late twentieth century' that has contributed to different research approaches. This work has contributed to a new model of childhood in which the child is regarded as

·  an agent

·  being, not becoming

·  having rights

·  an active participant in, and impacting upon, wider social world (2010: 13)

This has been reflected too in the significant shift in research approaches to childhood in Northern Ireland whereby children themselves feature more prominently as experts in their own lives, with researchers increasingly keen to elicit their views and attitudes, rather than studying them from outside. From 1998, an annual survey into children's experiences has been conducted, firstly as part of the Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey, then separately as the Young Life and Times Survey from 2003, recording the attitudes of 16 year-olds (ARK 2003). A parallel annual Kids Life and Times Survey was initiated in 2008 that has used an online questionnaire to gather the experiences of children in the final year of primary school (ARK 2013). While both these surveys have extended the focus of the research into childhood into the realms of economics and a wide range of social policy issues, two significant reports that have engaged children directly as part of their research process have been focused on sectarianism. The first was Voices behind the Statistics: Young People’s Views of Sectarianism in Northern Ireland (Ewart and Schubotz et al 2004). It engaged directly with young people to elicit their views on sectarianism. Almost a decade later, young people themselves acted as peer researchers for a second report, Following in Their Footsteps? Investigating Young People's Attitudes to Sectarianism in Northern Ireland, a topic chosen by the Young National Children's Bureau Board. This suggests that even where children are engaged as agents and commissioners in the research, they too are concerned with childhood as something constantly under threat from sectarianism.[1]

REGULATING CHILDHOOD

This sense of the vulnerability of children has been reinforced consistently through significant interventions in the legislative structures that have sought to regulate childhood. Child protection has been given paramount importance, even before the revelations of widespread abuse by members of the Roman Catholic clergy and holy orders in Ireland and elsewhere that emerged in this century. The primary piece of safeguarding legislation dates back to theChildren (Northern Ireland) Order 1995. Since 1998, child protection in Northern Ireland has been fully devolved to the Northern Ireland Executive and Northern Ireland Government departments. Their responsibilities were divided between five Health and Social Care Trusts, holding delegated responsibility for child protection in each geographical area. This responsibility was explicitly understood in terms of Article 3 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)whereby, 'States Parties undertake to ensure the child such protection and care as is necessary for his or her well-being, taking into account the rights and duties of his parents, legal guardians or other individuals legally responsible for him and, to this end, shall take all appropriate legislative and administrative measures'. An overall Safeguarding Board for Northern Irelandtook over responsibility from September 2012.[2] Alongside this body, many employers and voluntary groups have instituted Criminal Records checks for employees and volunteers working with children and vulnerable adults as part of their safeguarding policies or in compliance with legal responsibilities.[3]

-1. A further area of legislation has been education. Northern Ireland has a number of different structures within which schooling is provided. Controlled schools are under the management of the schools Board of Governors and the Employing Authorities are the five Education and Library Boards. Maintained schools are under the management of the Board of Governors and the Employing Authority is the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools. There are a small number of other church-based Maintained school. A third body seeks to provide integrated education, that is schools where Catholic and Protestant children learn together, again as a response to the discourse of sectarianism. In 1989, the Education Reform Order (NI) gave the Department of Education a duty to ‘encourage and facilitate the development of integrated education’ breaking with decades of divided education. Moreover, six mandatory educational (cross curricular) themes were introduced in the same order, including the two complementary themes of Education for Mutual Understanding and Cultural Heritage. These formally came into statute in September 1992. Even before this, government programmes such as Education for Mutual Understanding and a voluntary Cross Contact Scheme were introduced in the 1980s to bring school children together (Richardson 1997).

-1. However another division has remained less tractable: the separation of children on the basis of academic selection tests at the age of 11 (Gallagher and Smith 2003). In 2001, a government-sponsored proposal for ending these tests in the final year of primary school was published, the 'Burns Report'. Eventually in November 2008, the last state-sponsored tests to allocate places to grammar schools were sat by children. Nonetheless, a significant number of grammar schools continue to operate highly contentious examinations for entry. Education and legislation governing it had been significant political battlegrounds even before devolution and political parties have taken up positions on these issues along religio-political lines. These fierce debates are symptomatic, I suggest, of that same 'culture of concern' that has driven legislation around child protection and much of the research into childhood in Northern Ireland.

-1. A third articulation of that concern has been the institution of the office of Northern Ireland's Commissioner for Children and Young People (NICCY) since 2003. Operating 'at arms-length' from the government, the Commissioner's role is to safeguard and promote the rights and best interests of children and young people. The principles guiding the work of the Commissioner are derived from the UNCRC. In an information leaflet,[4] current Commissioner Patricia Lewsley-Mooney, explains, 'The Government and ‘relevant authorities’ (including health, education and justice agencies) provide services for children and young people. My job is to check they do this in a way that is in the best interests of young people'. While the commission involves young people in many aspects of its work, however, there is still a large degree of asymmetry within its construction of childhood between the traditional and new models. There is a persistent focus here on protecting children from harm, discrimination and social exclusion in line with UNCRC. Children's participation in the work of the Commissioner's office is presented as the best way to ensure that their rights are protected. NICCY's 2009 review of children's rights in Northern Ireland included an extensive chapter on Play, Leisure and Culture. It concluded that, 'many children and young people continue to be denied their Article 31 right to access safe [my emphasis], age-appropriate recreational facilities, activities and spaces within their local area, on the grounds of safety, age, cost, availability and accessibility (2009b: 347). Taken together research and regulation suggest that in Northern Ireland children have been constructed as the locus of anxiety and that childhood as fraught with dangers. These are, then a continuation in these different spheres of the recurrent motifs noted by Gilligan (2008) in the representations of children that focus above all else on vulnerability. A child, in this construction, is an innocent who requires protection from the contamination of the world as an 'an adult-in-the-making [that] therefore requires quality care and attention' (Kehily 2008: 5). Little bigots may grow into adult bigots and paramilitaries.

TYA IN NORTHERN IRELAND

NICCY's (2009) discussion of Leisure, Play and Culture is focused primarily (almost exclusively) on children's rights to play and to participate in making culture: children's access to watching high quality live performance is never explicitly mentioned. It refers to the Youth Arts Strategy of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI), the principal public funding body. The most recent version of the Youth Arts Strategy for 2013-2017, emphasises the function of the arts in bringing communities together; improving cognitive development; supporting good mental health; and increasing personal confidence. It draws together quantitative and qualitative data from a range of sources and using different methodologies. It identifies benchmarks in relation to other public bodies funding youth arts. However, aside from a brief case study of one of Northern Ireland's leading companies, CAHOOTS NI, TYA gets hardly a mention. This is a critical omission since TYA is a burgeoning part of the cultural landscape of Northern Ireland. Furthermore, it overlooks the critical role that theatre for children and young people has in redressing the culture of concern and engaging the many other capacities of young audiences.

The first sustained theatre venture for children came with Replay Productions, Northern Ireland’s longest established professional theatre company for children and young people[5]. It was founded in 1988 under the artistic directorship of Brenda Winter and, established initially as an educational theatre company.[6] Some of the company's work has engaged directly with social issues such as Bulletproof (2010) that engaged with young people's mental health experiences, drawing on a verbatim process with young people and a number of projects engaging with alcohol use by young people. However, it has been focused from the outset on the provision of high quality theatre for young people. Its work has embraced different age groups, a wide range of topics and stories and a plethora of different forms and processes. Replay's work has involved original commissions of plays from Northern Irish playwrights, including Winter herself, Marie Jones, Nicola McCartney and Gary Mitchell; productions of existing works, such as The Lost Child by Mike Kenny (1998) and Moira Buffini's Marianne Dreams (2012); devised work; and site-specific performances such as Brenda Winter's Timetrekker To Tea Lane (1989) at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum and The Normans at Carrick (1992) at Carrickfergus Castle. It engages in outreach and participatory projects, alongside this production work, with its most recent projects, such as Bliss (2012) with children with Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities, blending participation and performance.