Your cart is empty.
Your cart is empty.
Providing a comprehensive education for our children, both in and outside of school, improves the wellbeing and prosperity of our society. The arts have intersected with education strongly and inextricably for all of human history and studies repeatedly show the positive effects on students when the arts are part of a well-rounded education.
Globally, both formal and informal education have demonstrated imagination, better test scores, more civic engagement, public savings, increased lifelong earning potential, better community cohesion, and more. Arts and youth development also extends beyond the classroom to the domain of what is now called Creative Youth Development, which means the longstanding theory of practice that integrates creative skill-building, inquiry, and expression with positive youth development principles, fuelling young people’s imaginations and building critical learning and life skills.
The South Australian Government, through the Department for Education, is striving to be recognised as one of the best public education systems in the world by 2028 – where every children’s centre, preschool and school is world-class. One of the 13 objectives for Arts South Australia’s Arts and Culture Plan South Australia 2019-2024 ‘Education in the arts – new learning opportunities’ (Objective 10) and includes a series of recommended actions to support this objective for primary, secondary, tertiary and VET education in South Australia.
Each of Adelaide’s major festivals have different objectives and strategies when it comes to engaging children and young people – be that programming specific events/shows as part of the festival program, offering kids spaces/activities within a festival, offering social spaces, food and drinks that appeal or offering discounted pricing for children and young people. The extent to which the public are aware of the options for children and young people depends on each festival’s marketing and communication strategies.
DreamBIG Children’s Festival is the state’s arts festival for children, delivered every two years by the Adelaide Festival Centre, with support from the SA Department for Education. It is the largest children’s festival in Australia and the oldest in the world, starting back in 1974. While there is a public program for the festival, a large component is a schools program which delivers events and activities specifically for preschools and schools to engage with, along with a series of teacher workshops around the state to support teachers to bring quality curriculum aligned Arts learning into their classrooms.
In 2022, Festival City Adelaide in collaboration with the City of Adelaide, sought to better understand the needs and motivations of young people in relation to their interactions with Festivals presented in the Adelaide CBD. Feedback was gathered through a series of focus group workshops and an online survey engaging 90 people aged between 13 and 30. The project found most of the respondents had attended multiple festivals in the last five years, with the Adelaide Fringe and Illuminate Adelaide being the most popular. Young people are motivated to attend Adelaide’s festivals if the festival type is of interest to them, if the cost to participate fits with their limited income, and if the festival provided opportunity to attend with and socialise with friends and family so they can have fun and enjoy the company of others. The project report, Youth Consultation Report, provides a series of recommended actions to increase engagement of young people in Adelaide’s major festivals.
