New Voices: An Evaluation of 15 Access Radio Projects

Excerpts from the Executive Summary follow:

Enrolling the Community:

The Access Radio projects have recruited many hundreds of volunteers and provided training for most of them in radio and ICT skills. This capacity to attract participation by members of local communities makes Access Radio attractive to regeneration and development agencies. There has been a growing tendency towards individual training or mentoring.

Work experience targets have often not been met because of insufficient experienced personnel at the projects.

Public sector agencies and voluntary sector organisations are enthusiastic about Access Radio's power to communicate information to local communities and are co-operating with the pilot projects. Some excellent radio training and programming have been produced with schools and colleges.

Linguistic Impact:

Large numbers of people are disempowered and disheartened by an inability to use words fluently and confidently. Many languages, especially from the Middle East and the Asian sub-continent, which are seldom heard on radio in the United Kingdom, have been accorded substantial air-time.

A study of selected recordings of broadcast output and reports by station managers suggest that volunteers with low self-esteem and educational attainments have profited from training in radio skills and the experience of broadcasting. They have often been able to transfer what they have learned to real-life situations in the form of greater expressive assertiveness.

Most of the projects make a point of encouraging presenters to reflect local patterns of speech and dialects and to avoid the stereotypes of conventional broadcasting.

Staffing Needs:

The human resources required to run an Access Radio service were under-estimated by many of the pilot projects, especially in fund-raising (whether in the form of grants or advertising sales), external liaison with local groups, financial and general administration and management and training of volunteers. Most of the pilot projects did not have the money to pay for all these skills...

Local Alliances:

Partnerships between different groups in a community to operate an Access Radio station may be a necessary feature of the community broadcasting ecology. Experience during the pilot scheme suggests that they can be difficultto manage. Thorough advance negotiation, administrative transparency and clear decisionmaking procedures are necessary for such alliances to succeed.

Local Radio Ecology:

The Access Radio experiment had little or no negative financial impact on commercial radio stations in the pilot projects' areas. However, the effects of an Access Radio station that sells advertising could be serious for small ILR [Independent Local Radio] stations with similar catchments and advertising markets, few of which make large profits. In the case of very small communities, there will not be enough listeners to sustain two stations...

There is much to be said for limited, practical co-operation between local BBC stations and Access Radio, with the former offering training and technical support and the latter local news poorer reception...

Licensing Methodology and Evaluation:

A methodology for awarding and evaluating Access Radio stations is proposed, which would be administratively lean but robust, especially so far as the measurement of social gain is concerned. Lessons can be learned from the current Evaluation of the pilot scheme. It is argued that weight should be placed on an applicant's track record of RSLs [Restricted Service Licences] when judging programming ability, managerial competence and fund-raising potential, that self-evaluation should be a component of the process and that the local community should participate in evaluations...

The full evaluation is no longer online. Our apologies.