Radio and Education, how are we doing?
In August, I gave an update on how we’re doing against our objectives, and said I’d report in again when we have new data.
I focused on reach, because we want to serve every licence fee payer. Reach is the proportion of the population who use the BBC every week.
Last year for 16–44 year olds, that figure was 92%, and the BBC is the most used media provider for this age group. But the number has been falling slowly, and we want to try to keep it over 90%.
In Radio and Education, we’ve therefore set ourselves the goal of stabilising reach this year.
When I wrote in August, I reported that our reach among 15–44 year olds in radio had crept up. This quarter it’s dipped from 56.2% to 55.7%. In the same quarter last year, it was 56.4%.
It’s normal to see this number fluctuate — and our performance mirrors a small reduction since the last quarter in the same age group listening to commercial radio. They continue to reach more of this age group than the BBC — at 72%.
In Children’s we also have new data on how we’re doing.
Figures for September show that the reach to the CBeebies channel (0–6 year olds) increased to 44.9% (but down slightly on last year).
In the same month that Saturday morning live kids TV returned to the BBC in Saturday Mash Up, we have seen a slight increase in reach (6–12 year olds) compared to last month at 22.5%.
We also saw year on year increases of 13% in reach for Bitesize, and our Opera Passion day reached millions of people across BBC services.
Overall, across the division, we’re broadly stable — but we will keep on focusing on this measure to meet our goal by the year end.
It’s worth adding two other points.
First, this isn’t a competition and it’s good to have a strong, vibrant commercial radio sector in the UK. So I’m delighted they’re doing well, and we at the BBC will continue to ensure that across our radio portfolio, we cater for all licence fee payers.
Second, it’s not all about numbers. Performance is also about quality and innovation, about the services the BBC provides that are unique. So I was delighted to see 1Xtra win station of the year at the ARIAS, and 5Live scoop six awards and be recognised for innovating with podcasts, notably Flintoff, Savage and the Ping Pong Guy. We were proud to win 14 of the 21 awards that night, but BBC Children’s are aiming to repeat the trick at the Children’s BAFTAs at the end of this month, having gleaned 33 of the 72 nominations. Congratulations also to CBeebies Radio who recently won a Jerusalem Award for the CBeebies Radio Nativity, and to the BBC Radio digital team for winning ‘Best European Digital Audio of the Year’ for The Archers at Prix Europa.
Awards aren’t everything either — but this haul is a deserved recognition of the brilliant work of all our teams.
