Radio and Education: how are we doing?
The Mission of the BBC is to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain.
That’s Clause 5 of our Charter — “the BBC’s mission”.
To measure whether we are serving all audiences, we track something called reach — essentially the proportion of the audience using the BBC at least once a week.
As I wrote recently, young people use the BBC a lot, but less than they did.
Four years ago, we were reaching 95% of 15–44 year olds. Now that’s 92%.
We want to turn that around so we continue to serve all audiences.
In my division, Radio and Education, we’ve set ourselves the goal of stopping that decline this year and starting to grow the year after.
Every quarter I’ll let you know how that’s going.
The first set of results are in.
In radio, we’ve just got the RAJAR figures for the 2nd quarter — so April to June. It’s just one quarter, but they’re encouraging — BBC radio’s reach to 15–44s is up this quarter from 54.6% to 56.2%. It was 56.4% in the same quarter last year.
This has happened in a quarter when radio overall (i.e the BBC and commercial radio) has reached more people than ever before — 49.2m adults (15+) every week.
Congratulations to commercial radio, who had a great set of results, and overtook us to have higher reach than the BBC.
They are doing particularly well with younger audiences, and reach 73% of 15–44s.
This all shows that radio is growing. We’re not fighting over a fixed cake — commercial and public service radio can grow at the same time.
That makes sense — radio is now addressing new competitors like streaming services. We need to keep on giving young people reasons to listen to the radio — and this quarter’s results show the whole industry is succeeding.
In children’s, we’ve just started our new plans, so they’re not yet a factor in our figures.
Latest data for CBeebies (June) shows us that reach is up 1.3% on last year to 45.4% of parents/carers with children aged 0–3 and kids aged 4–6.
Reach for CBBC is down marginally on last year, but slightly up on the month, to 22.9% (6–12s) while share (the percentage of the available audience) is up on last month to 7.8% — this is in part because we’ve launched a clearer way of scheduling our drama, called Faves at Five, which audiences seem to be enjoying. We’re encouraged by that.
This data shows me a couple of things: first, that it’s right that we’re investing in the BBC’s services for children, and second that we need a better way of measuring how we’re doing with younger audiences. We don’t currently have a way of measuring the total reach to under 16s of all BBC services.
The good news is that we’re working on a new measurement system that will do just that. I‘ll share what these and other measurements mean in future posts — but rest assured young people are firmly in our sights when it comes to looking at our performance.
