Shaw to change role in shake-up of Celtic Connections leadership

● Musician will work on major projects as team set for expansion

Donald Shaw is step down as artistic director of Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival in the wake of the record-breaking 25th annual event attracting more than 130,000 concert-goers for the first time.

The musician and composer, who was at the helm of the helm for the 12th time, is to step aside under its biggest ever organisational shake-up.

He has admitted to feeling undergrowingpressuredueto the amount of work involved in overseeing the event, which featured more than 350 concerts on 28 stages this year.

However, Shaw will remain heavily involved as a “creative producer”, masterminding special commissions, one-off shows and major projects like Bothy Culture and Beyond, which was staged at the Hydro and shown by BBC Scotland.

A team of guest programmers will be brought in to work under Shaw and festival manager Jade Hewat – one of a handful of staff at the city council-funded trust Glasgow Life who work year-round on the festival.

Shaw has previously warned that the festival, which has had standstill-level funding from Glasgow City Council and Creative Scotland in recent years, was “over-stretched and under-resourced”.

Shaw has confirmed he

0 Donald Shaw, below, will be around to mastermind big projects such as Bothy Culture & Beyond, above, seen at this year’s festival would be “stepping aside” for the 2019 festival just weeks after it emerged he brokered a deal which will see it given direct funding from the Scottish Government for the first time to the tune of £100,000 a year. His role is expected to include forging new international collaborations and securing overseas funding.

Shaw said: “I am genuinely committed to the festival. This not really about me, it’s about what’s good for the festival. But I felt over the last year that the pressure was getting to me and that I wanted to change the way I work within the festival.

“This has probably been on my mind for the last two or three years. The core team at the moment, which is really only five people, have a huge amount of commitment to and passion for the festival. We’ve never really questioned the amount of time and effort involved in delivering it in its current model, but it got to the point where it felt we were stretched from the point of view of both resources and funding.

“As you build a festival as bespoke as this, with its very different types of audiences, shows and venues, it can take two or three years to perfect each strand and how you deliver it. We’ve almost been learning from our mistakes.

“We literally go from one year to the next. As you come out of one festival we start look at projects for the following one. There’s not a lot of time to stand back and review things.

“It’s not really been a case of us asking for more resources and being told we can’t get them. But we have to make a clear case for them.

“Over the last few years I’ve been working on another four or five big shows like the one we just did at the Hydro but we’ve just not had the funding to do them.”

Glasgow Life chairman David Mcdonald said: “The first 25 years of Celtic Connections have seen it grow into a world-beater. I can’t wait to see what’s to come as we move forward with the city’s musical ambitions.” Fewer than one in ten schools have set up committees to look at how extra cash from Pupil Equity Funding is spent, a new survey has revealed.

The EIS teachers union asked schools across the country if they had a committee to monitor how the cash – which goes directly to headteachers – was used. Of the 262 schools which replied, 239 (91.2 per cent) said the school did not have a committee to monitor the funds, with the union describing that as “disappointing”. Just 23 schools (8.8 per cent of those surveyed) have such a body in place, according to the research.

Pupil Equity Funding was set up by ministers as part of efforts to close the attainment gap, with the Scottish Government confirming in recent days that 2,387 schools will share more than £120 million from the scheme in 2018-19.

EIS general secretary Larry Flanagan said all teachers should have a role in deciding how the extra resources should be spent.

He said: “The EIS fully supports the aim of reducing the impact of poverty on children’s education, and welcomes the additional resources that have come to schools through the Pupil Equity Funding scheme – although we retain concerns over the level of paperwork associated with the model.”