Reorganisation at Creative Scotland

In July this year Janet Archer was appointed CEO at Creative Scotland following the departure of Andrew Dixon at the end of last year.  Ms Archer had been a Director at Arts Council England for six years and was involved with Newcastle based National Dance Agency, Dance City before that. Today she has announced plans for Creative Scotland’s  structure and recruitment going forward. This is the statement which she made today:-

I am pleased to announce the first steps in our journey towards Creative Scotland¹s new structure.

As I begin my fourth month as Chief Executive for the organisation, we are working hard to progress the development of our new long-term plan and as importantly, the simplification of our funding programmes. Alongside this, I want to ensure that we have the right structure in place to deliver these changes.

It¹s clear to me that Creative Scotland’s management and staff are highly skilled and experienced. However our current structure isn’t as effective as it should be because it doesn’t make best use of the skills, expertise and knowledge of our staff, or enable best access to these skills. We are also currently operating with four members of our senior team on fixed term contracts. This needs to be addressed.

I want to build up a better knowledge bank of expertise within the areas we serve – the arts, screen and creative industries and make better use of the overview we hold, for the benefit of everyone working in these fields. We don’t plan to lose our commitment to working flexibly and holding a broad perspective. Many staff enjoy working across a number of disciplines alongside their core specialism, and have developed a breadth of knowledge and skills through this approach. We will ensure however that in future we will feed relevant expertise into advice, decision making, and feedback, because we know that’s what is valued.

At the same time as building a new future we need to fulfil the on-going work of the organisation as a funder and development agency that advocates and influences for everyone’s best benefit. The challenge of effective planning, change management and delivery simultaneously should not be underestimated.

My first step in meeting this challenge was to appoint Iain Munro as Deputy Chief Executive. The second has been to revise the structure of the senior leadership team to reflect our priority areas of work and mirror the three sectors that we are here to support.

As soon as is practicable, the senior team will be structured as follows, under CEO: Janet Archer

Deputy CEO: Iain Munro

Director of Arts and Engagement

Director of Film and Media

Director of Creative Industries: Caroline Parkinson

Director of Communications: Kenneth Fowler

Director of HR: Karen Lannigan

Director of Strategy (12 month post)

Director of Funding Operations

Director of Finance

There is no increase in overall salary budget, these new posts are affordable within Creative Scotland’s existing operational budgets which are separate to the budgets we hold for funding.

Five of the Director posts now need to be filled and we will be recruiting this month, starting with the Director of Arts & Engagement; the Director of Film & Media; and the Director of Strategy. Following on from this we will also advertise the Director of Finance and the Director of Funding Operations posts.

The Director of Strategy will be a fixed term post, for 12 months in the first instance, to focus on the significant amount of planning, policy development and strategic partnership work that we need to undertake in the coming year.

I would like to emphasise that these changes are just the first step.

We will be working with our staff over the coming months to ensure that we put in place the right structure to enable us all to do our jobs effectively and provide the funding, development and advocacy that the arts, screen and creative industries deserve.

I am looking forward to strengthening our team and am excited about the potential we could unlock for artists and creative people across Scotland through this increased capacity.

All best wishes,

Janet Archer

Chief Executive Officer