Starcatchers’ Approach

We work across sectors in collaboration with organisations and services in health, education, the arts and culture, and the third sector to deliver community engagement and early years development projects and programmes, and to design creative experiences for an early years audience.

If you are interested in talking to our team about our approach and would like to discuss mentorship or consulting opportunities, please get in touch with us today.

Read more about our approach to partnership working here.

Starcatchers’ Core Outcomes

Our work is focused around five core outcomes. Through the activity taking place across all of our activity, we monitor and evaluate progress to ensure our work achieves its aims.

Quality ​early childhood experiences
Starcatchers’ advocates for access to the earliest artistic encounters for Scotland’s babies, and understands the power of the arts settings and creative experiences in helping very young children realise their rights, even when they do not have the language to articulate it. Through our Early Years Development work, we offer training and development opportunities to empower and inspire the early years workforce to embed the expressive arts in their practice. This in turn benefits the young children they work with every day.

Artistic Excellence
Starcatchers’ productions tour locally, nationally and internationally, in accessible, inclusive and welcoming environments. Our work ignites curiosity and fuels imagination in our young audiences. Our Artist Development programme seeks to offer time, space and resources to upcoming and established artists who push boundaries, and challenge what it means to create work and creative experiences for this unique audience.

Wellbeing
We embed our artists in communities across Scotland, deepening our engagement and building trust and relationships with the families who take part in our creative experiences. We embrace the outdoors, accessibility, imagination, and FUN. Above all, we let the babies make their own choices in their play.  Through the use of easy to find, every day materials, artistic provocations turn community spaces into new worlds for families to explore together. We value our participants and our time with them.

Whole Family Support
Participants and their babies are at the centre of everything we do. Our artists ensure a Starcatchers’ experience is one that offers safety, a non-judgmental environment and a space our participants have ownership of. Starcatchers creative experiences are unique in this way – these spaces belong to the babies and their grown-ups in the community, and our knowledge of the communities we work in, and the partnerships we develop allow us to support the whole family in a friendly, informal artistic setting.

Children’s Rights
Children’s rights underpins everything we do, and drives the ambition, creation and delivery of our work. We strive for and further best practice in children’s rights through robust academic research, cross-sectoral partnerships, and through our approach to engagement with babies, toddlers, very young children, and their grown-ups. Starcatchers has a unique position in the discourse around children’s rights, as an early years arts organisation advocating for and amplifying the voice of the baby, to ensure that the needs of pre- and non-verbal children in Scotland are heard and understood.

Our People

The image below captures the people (or beneficiaries) at the heart of Starcatchers’ work. Surrounding our audiences and participants are our approaches and practices, which are the practical application of a child-rights approach in action. Children’s rights underpins everything we do, with the people we work with – who make what we do possible – creating, driving and delivering the work that strives for and furthers best practice in children’s rights.

Starcatchers’ artists use Engagement Signals and our newly developed Reflective Guide for the Arts to listen to the voice of the child. Explore these resources below.