Eurovision 2023: wellbeing impact and schools programme

Liverpool City Council

Grantholder

The Eurovision Song Contest’s first ever schools programme and wellbeing evaluation.

£200,000

Grant amount

February 2023

Date awarded

February – September 2023

Project duration

Liverpool

Location

In partnership with:

University of Liverpool

Eurovision 2023 – Community and Wellbeing report

Project Detail

Project summary

Following Liverpool’s designation as Eurovision host for 2023 on behalf of Ukraine, Spirit of 2012 awarded Liverpool City Council a grant of £200,000 for two separate strands of work.

The first strand of work funded by Spirit of 2012 was EuroLearn: the first time ever that Eurovision has had an education and schools’ programme. EuroLearn celebrated the power of music to bring people together and promoted language learning. Open-access learning and resource packs were produced for primary school teachers to use with curriculum-aligned content for Visual Arts, Music, Creative Writing, Early Years, and Maths. Projects included:

міні Eurovision (‘mini Eurovision’): A festival of languages through music – 360 children from 16 schools were taught songs by Languages students and teachers at the University of Liverpool and Resonate, culminating in a concert in the Tung Auditorium. The film below brings to life how learning through music sparked the children’s imaginations and gave them chance to be part of something bigger – as well as conveying the benefits of the project for the student volunteers.

Land & Sky, Hope & Dreams: 1,500 children at schools across Liverpool and our cities in Ukraine created their own kites, decorated with their hopes and dreams, which were then all flown at the same time. Children in both countries spoke about their hopes that the war would end, and there would be lasting peace, alongside other personal hopes and dreams. Matviy, age 8 in Kyiv said “I dream of harmony, happiness for every child….and a chameleon and parrot for myself”.

Pysanka Eggs: Based on Ukrainian tradition of egg painting called pysanka, artists worked in local primary schools with Year 2 and Year 4 children on a collaborative art project. The evaluation report describes how: “an artist used the story of Ukraine milk jug that survived bombing with the school children she worked with as a metaphor of hope. And this worked well with the pupils who realised that there were children just like them suffering.”

The second strand of Spirit’s funding was to support the evaluation of Eurovision’s social impact on the city: the first time in the competition’s history that social impacts had been explored comprehensively. The research project was led by the University of Liverpool and overseen by the Public Health team at Liverpool City Council. The Community and Wellbeing Impact Evaluation Report focused on wellbeing, civic pride and citizenship. It aimed to measure the impact community projects and commissioned events, as well as capture overall benefits to residents through a household survey delivered by MEL Research conducted before (late April/May) and immediately after the event, and again in September. The evaluation included a pre and post event household survey, which measured civic pride, tolerance of difference and a scale of felt citizenship, alongside a thematic analysis of focus group evidence.

Impact & Learning

Key achievements:

Liverpool citizens engaged more in Eurovision events than they anticipated. Less than one fifth of pre-Eurovision survey respondents expected to get involved in the public events held in Liverpool, but more than one third actually reported attending a city or community event in a follow-up survey.
1% of those surveyed were enthusiastic about Liverpool hosting Eurovision on behalf of Ukraine, with women in particular being more enthusiastic about hosting Eurovision.
Interviews conducted as part of the study showed that volunteers made new friends and felt valued for their work, and those from minoritized communities felt that Eurovision had created safe spaces for expression.
EuroLearn events created a sense of solidarity with Ukraine. Participants valued the opportunity to share in Ukrainian culture and show their support.
Many formal and informal partnerships began through the Eurovision activities: “we even inspired another school, another local school …. the art coordinator now has teamed up with me we are basically doing the same projects… so that’s children up to year 6 in art club studying the same artists so its lovely… and their demographic is very different from ours as well. They are in quite a deprived area so their demographic is different, so that’s good for us and good for them as well.”
Liverpool City Council developed an ambitious evaluation plan for capturing the impact of Eurovision, experimenting with new ways to measure the impact of the competition. These methods are openly available for other major events to learn from.

Key learnings:

The unique position of hosting the event on behalf of Ukraine helped to inspire the theme of “United by Music”, a slogan that the European Broadcasting Union, which owns the Eurovision franchise, has now adopted going forward. This meant the event was particularly suited to explore themes about social connection, bridging divides, citizenship and peace.
The team at Liverpool City Council had the vision and expertise to expand an event beyond what was traditionally expected and draw in their wider community, despite having just 6 months between been designated and the global spectacle coming to town. The success of the event in some ways contradicts our arguments about the necessity of long-term planning. Much of this is down to the technical and creative skill, developed over many years before and after Liverpool was European Capital of Culture – but it is also down to a belief that events can achieve social outcomes for the community, and that the benefits go beyond the (large) economic boost from tourism.
The Community & Wellbeing Evaluation found that average levels of wellbeing in Liverpool were already higher than the UK average before the event had taken place – report authors suggest that this was due to ‘anticipatory effects’ of people looking forward to the event. This report adds to other work highlighting the challenges of understand what the baseline should be to pick up the wellbeing and pride benefits of hosting major events.
The ambitious evaluation programme was led by Prof Matthew Ashton, Director of Public Health for Liverpool City Council. This is unusual for a major event evaluation, and a strong indication of cross-government collaboration that makes achieving social outcomes more likely. In Liverpool, departments outside the Culture Team recognise the power of these activities to achieve things for their city.

80%

of survey respondents felt proud that Liverpool had won the competition to host the Contest.

74.1%

of those surveyed were enthusiastic about Liverpool hosting Eurovision on behalf of Ukraine, with women in particular being more enthusiastic about hosting Eurovision.

17,746

participants

EuroLearn projects had huge reach and successfully engaged 17,746 participants, through 257 schools. A resource pack, which engaged 1,000 young people, was produced to support the curriculum and enable teachers to have access to free materials to use in the classroom linked to the cultural activity taking place within the city.

£2,000

distributed

EuroGrant funding of up to £2,000 was distributed by Culture Liverpool to 29 schools to develop their own Eurovision projects, involving 6,000 children and young people.