The £45 million Strategic touring programme is designed to encourage collaboration between organisations, so that more people across England experience and are inspired by the arts, particularly in places which rely on touring for much of their arts provision. Applications for the first round are now open, and must be submitted online by 5pm on Friday 2 March 2012. For more information visit http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/touring

1. Strategic touring
programme
Briefing slides
Updated January 2013
Monkey: Journey to the West
performed at the Royal Opera House
Photo: Robert Piwko

2. An introduction to
the Arts Council’s development
areas for touring 2012-15

3. Achieving great art for everyone
• Touring is one of the 13 priorities within Achieving great art for
everyone, and features in the Arts Council Plan 2011-15
• In order to explain how we will meet this priority, we have
published our development areas for touring 2012-15 on our
website
http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/what-we-do/our-priorities-2011-
15/touring/
• These areas cover all of our investment, development and
advocacy work

4. Definitions
Touring: where the same artistic programme or event is taking
place in two or more venues. Could involve live performers
and/or exhibition artworks; it would be fundamentally the same
event offered to all, but may involve some adaptation to suit the
different spaces and contexts in which it was being presented.
Venue: any space into which work that tours can be
programmed or booked.
Promoter: the individual responsible for booking or
programming work into a venue or circuit of venues. In most
cases, this would be the person who takes the financial
responsibility for booking or programming the event on behalf of
their organisation.

5. Improving local access to high quality art
We will:
• strengthen access to high quality work for people in places
that rely on touring for much of their arts provision
• develop arts opportunities for people and places with the least
engagement, by enabling more quality work to reach people
in these areas

6. Partnership working
We will:
• work in partnership with those on the demand (promoters,
curators, audiences) and supply (artists, producers) side of
touring
• encourage stronger collaborative working among all of our
partners
• support and develop the community, schools and outdoor
infrastructure so that quality work can have the widest
possible reach
• support and develop networks and consortia, to help widen
the reach and diversity of work that tours

7. National portfolio organisations
We will:
• work more strategically with the Arts Council National portfolio
and other key organisations which tour, with equal importance
given to how and where they tour and the work they produce
• work in partnership with National portfolio organisations and
the wider sector to ensure the best return for our investment
in large scale work that tours, in terms of quality and range of
work, geographic reach and audience numbers

8. Content development
We will:
• support more high quality work for children and young people
to tour across a wider network, including schools
• ensure that artists and companies from diverse backgrounds
have the skills and opportunities to tour their work, so that
people across England are able to experience work by the
widest range of artists

9. The aims of the strategic touring
programme

10. Strategic touring programme - aims
• People across England having improved access to great art
visiting their local area. This includes:
• Better access to high quality work for people in places in
England which rely on touring for much of their arts
provision
• More high quality work to reach people and places with the
least engagement
• More high quality work on tour connecting more effectively
with people across a wide range of venues

11. Strategic touring programme - aims
• Stronger relationships forged between those involved in
artistic, audience and programme development on both the
supply and demand side of touring
• a wide range of high quality work on tour, including in
particular more work by and for children and young people,
and more work by and for people from diverse backgrounds

12. Strategic touring programme – what we want to encourage
• all of those involved in touring to play an active role in
ensuring that high quality work successfully reaches more
people and places across England
• a positive step-change in collaborative behaviour between all
of those involved in creating and programming high quality
work which tours
• more effective touring, programming and audience
development of high quality work on tour, including in
particular work by and for children and young people, and
work by and for people from diverse backgrounds

13. Strategic touring programme – what we will do
• Actively encourage the development of partnerships,
networks and consortia that help to strengthen the reach of
high quality work on tour
• Ensure that those working within National portfolio
organisations that wish to engage in the programme do so in
a way that spreads the benefit beyond themselves, for
example by contributing actively as partners, catalysts,
mentors and sharing good practice

14. Explaining the application
process for the strategic touring
programme

15. Strategic touring programme deadlines 2013
Deadline for submissions: Date you will hear outcome:
Friday 15 February Monday 15 April
Friday 19 April Monday 10 June
Friday 14 June Monday 5 August
Friday 9 August Monday 30 September
Friday 4 October Monday 25 November
Friday 29 November Monday 27 January 2014

16. What we will fund
• the programme is for awards over £15,000
• the activity must be time-limited and take place over a
maximum of three years
• The kinds of activity we will support include:
o artistic activity including the creation of work to be toured,
commissioning, re-production of work that has already
been presented to the public
o audience development activity
o skills development activity
o proportionate management and administrative costs

17. Who can apply
• Open to any individual or organisation, including museums
and libraries, for the touring of projects which are explicitly
linked with arts activity
Partnerships, networks and consortia can also apply:
• partners can include: promoters, producers, artists, agencies,
or any other kind of organisation or individual
• they must include at least one promoter as a partner
• they must include individuals or organisations with audience
development expertise, or else explain how they would
address this deficit within the project

18. National portfolio organisations
• National portfolio organisations wishing to apply to the
strategic programme, either as lead organisations or partners
within an application, will be asked to demonstrate within the
application how the proposed activity they will benefit from is
additional to their National portfolio-funded activity
• Grants will not be awarded for extending currently funded,
existing or planned tours by NPOs

19. Activity outside England
• We have a cross border touring agreement with the other UK
Arts bodies (Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland), which
applies to this programme. This covers all our funded activity
• International incoming tours which benefit people in England
and the UK can be supported
• We will be limited in our ability to support outgoing
international touring work through this Lottery-funded
programme. Projects which include international partners can
be eligible if they can demonstrate the benefit of these
partnerships to the public in England

20. Writing your application
We ask for your proposal to cover these four areas:
• Proposed activity
• Audience development
• Finance
• Managing the project
Throughout, your proposal should address the quality of
the activity proposed and the nature of collaboration
involved.

21. Writing your application
We will also ask you to tell us:
• How the project will help to develop touring in England, in line
with the programme’s aims
• How relationships will be sustained and developed through
and, if appropriate, beyond the life of the project
• How the project will be evaluated, and how what you learn
from the project will be shared across all partners as well as
more widely across the arts sector

22. The tour schedule
• You must complete the tour schedule in the application form
• The venue where the activity has been created/initiated can
be included as a venue in applications for touring. However,
in addition there should be at least two other venues within
the provisional tour schedule. This would be the minimum
length for any tour we would consider through the programme
• We do not expect you to have fully confirmed your tour by the
time you apply
• You may provide us with an update to the tour schedule after
you have submitted your application

23. Talking with us about your proposal: mandatory conversation
• Once you have read the guidance and started to think about
your application, you should speak with a member of staff in
one of our regional offices in more detail about your proposal.
Please contact our Enquiries team to find out more about this
• We will arrange a time to talk with you
• We will not be able to read or provide written comment on
draft applications
• Once you have spoken to us, you can submit your application
at any time. It is your responsibility to develop and write the
application, including what you feel to be all the relevant
information

24. What our conversation with you may cover
• Have you considered the programme aims, and can you
describe how your project will help to meet them?
• Is the ‘touring’ aspect of your project (as opposed to the
‘arts production’ aspect) strategic and well thought-
through?
• Can you explain what you are adding to the ‘artistic offer’ in
each venue you are touring to? What is the balance
between ‘breadth of provision’ (reaching more people and
places) and ‘depth of provision’ (offering more provision to
places which already have it)?
• How are you ‘stretching’ your reach to go beyond your
regular touring network?

25. What happens next
• This is a national programme; all applications are sent to one
national decision-making panel
• We will involve specialist staff across the country to inform our
assessment of applications
• We have a budget in 2013/14 of £15 million, which will cover
all six rounds of the programme
• We expect to receive more applications than we can fund,
and therefore not all projects that successfully meet the aims
and criteria for the programme will be funded

26. Touring and Grants for the arts
Grants for the arts remains open for touring applications from non-
NPOs:
• Who wish to apply for funding of less than £15,000
• Who wish to apply for funding for a range of activity which
includes a touring element
• Who wish to apply for touring activity where the main purpose
of that activity does not meet the aims or the criteria for the
strategic touring programme, for example artistic development
• Applicants wishing to apply to Grants for the arts for funding of
over £80,000 for touring activity should speak to us

27. Thank you
www.artscouncil.org.uk