As an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, Together! 2012 CIC uses the Culture Counts Impact and Insight Toolkit to assist us in assessing the quality and effectiveness of our work. We find the Quality Metrics particularly helpful in measuring our work against national and international standards of excellence. Self-assessing our work alongside feedback from peers and consumers (for which we use different systems) is invaluable in continuing to improve everything that we do.

However, we don’t believe there can be real Quality without E-quality. We have therefore created our own Metrics to measure Equality within the content of our artistic and participatory programmes, together with the Access to and Inclusion of the audience and participants. To devise these Metrics, we started with the Equality Act 2010 and the characteristics it ‘protects’ – age, gender (including trans), pregnancy, religion, sexual orientation, disability and race/culture – and asked how these were reflected in the content of the work, the artists delivering it and the audience/participants? We also looked at the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), and specifically Article 30. This gives Disabled people the right to access the arts on equal terms as artists, audience members and arts workers, as well as to be resourced to organise and participate in our own cultural activities, and underpins all of our work. For Access and Inclusion, we used our own training materials and policies which list practical ways in which the Equality Act 2010 and the UNCPRD can be implemented.

These Metrics offer a quick and straightforward method to measure compliance with the obligation placed on all arts providers by the Equality Act 2010 to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ to enable full inclusion, not just of Disabled people but of women, young people, older people, people from the LGBTQI+ communities, people from different cultural and religious groups and pregnant women. (Not forgetting that Disabled people may also belong to any of these other groups.) This is a ‘tick box exercise’ with real meaning. It is important to note, though, that completing the Notes section for additional information is essential to creating an honest reflection of the activity being assessed. We also advise being clear on why you believe an element is ‘Not Applicable’ (NA). As a whole, we have found this system to be  invaluable in assessing our programmes from 2017 onwards alongside feedback forms (click here to download ours), vox-pops, video and photographic documentation and external evaluation.

You can download the Metrics here in Word format and here as a spreadsheet. The Metrics are released under the terms of the Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND, meaning you can use them for non-commercial purposes only, share them so long as you credit us, and adapt them for your own use but cannot share the adapted version.

NB: For more information about Disability, see our Resource here.