BBC Children’s & Education: Why do we care?

By Patricia Hidalgo 20-08-2024

In an article written for the Children’s Media Yearbook, Patricia Hidalgo, director of BBC Children’s & Education, reveals how the pubcaster has altered its business model to continue reaching kids as they migrate to online viewing.

Long running series Malory Towers

Recently I was in a meeting with a senior politician to talk about our work and he asked me a really good question about the topic we were addressing: why do you care? It was helpful because it made me pull back for a moment and reflect.

I’m glad to say that it isn’t difficult for me to express why we care about our audience at BBC Children’s & Education. I will say a bit more at the end of this article, but I want to come at this from a different angle. Over the last few years we have made many changes in our part of the BBC. Now seems a good moment to reflect on them, to see how they have stacked up.

To put it another way: we care so much about our audience that we have been prepared to radically redefine our children’s TV business in order to keep reaching them with public service content. In headline terms this has meant our wholesale switch of attention away from linear channels and instead following the audience to focus on BBC iPlayer.

I’m delighted to say that we have had success. In the financial year 23/24, viewing of BBC Children’s content has grown 24% on BBC iPlayer and there’s been a 17% increase in BBC iPlayer accounts accessing children’s content. Overall, BBC Children’s & Education content was streamed an amazing 2.2 billion times on iPlayer during 23/24.

I make no apology for what follows being an ‘industry’ piece and for recapping things we have said in our commissioning briefings. We’re the biggest commissioner of children’s TV content in the UK and I believe that everyone should know what we’ve been doing.

For public service content to matter, it has to be watched. It has to have an impact and it has to be relevant, which means getting the magic elixir of inform, educate and – especially – entertain exactly right. We absolutely want to boost children’s intellects, but that alone won’t take you very far. You have to be just as passionate about richly entertaining kids as educating them. Luckily, the UK is full of creative people who want to do just that.

Blue Zoo Animation Studio makes Numberblocks for CBeebies

To best reach kids in the on-demand world, we have properly moved over from running just a schedule to managing our library in iPlayer as well. If creating a schedule is like a game of draughts, managing a streaming library is more like 3D chess. It requires the right amount of titles, the right amount of genres, the right amount of box sets, the right amount of weekly episodes and of course the right amount of new material. This last point is very important. With an ‘everlasting’ library, new programming has a different importance than it used to. It is completely different to the old linear equation of new equals good and repeats equals bad.

Being iPlayer-first gave us a different perspective on how much new content we needed across a year, along with when it should be released. It took us away from prior linear patterns where we would launch a raft of new series all at once for the start of a season.

We combined this new perspective with the most efficient use of our budget, in order to gauge the ideal mix of titles, episodes, ideas and production values that could cut through in a hypercompetitive market and make an impact on our audience. We were finally completing a journey that BBC Children’s had been on for some years: fewer, bigger, better.

Simply put, brutal market realities mean there is no point making things if they won’t land with the audience. Quality may be excellent, but if you create too many small things they will get lost. We needed to maintain this quality but distil it into a tighter range of titles that could be sufficiently promoted such that the audience would find them.

Very importantly, this more focused range of titles and hours is still supported by the same commissioning budget. We are spending as much as we did three years ago, it’s the emphasis that has changed. To help make the funding work and to capitalise on audience success we have committed to longer runs of series, with double commissions for titles such as Malory Towers, The Dumping Ground, Numberblocks and One Zoo Three. We’ve done audience research more upfront to identify what is working and push on with commissions, rather than wait for series data to come in over a long period of time.

An essential component of enabling these changes has been the flexibility within Ofcom’s new BBC operating licence. This has moved on from being a rigid framework of annual hours and sub-genres, and has been of great help in allowing us to focus resources and transition to be iPlayer-first. The growth that we’ve shown is, I hope, a testament to Ofcom’s forward-thinking on this.

Over the past three years our commissioning focus has been on drama, animation and high-impact factual. We have done this because they are the key components in making our whole public service offer attractive to children. I want to re-state this point about our whole offer. We commission now and will always commission a very wide range of content genres so that we bring the very best of everything to kids. But it is drama, animation and high-impact factual that are the primary drivers in getting the audience to find and engage with our content.

Fortunately we were already tremendously strong in live-action drama for all ages and for animation with 0–sixs. We lacked a UK public service offer in seven-plus animation and we’ve been seeking to address that in our commissioning and with the Ignite initiative. It’s been a long road and we’re seeing the green shoots of that coming through now.

Even in drama we couldn’t just sit back. Audience expectations have never been higher, thanks to the global streaming competition. We are always having to push hard to gain the production values and ambitious narratives we need. One way has been to raise the level of additional income to our slate. It has meant working with our indie suppliers across many different forms of international coproduction, distributors, tax reliefs and financing support.

Horrible Histories

Together we have considerably increased the income that can be generated in this way, amounting to an additional 50% of value on top of our annual funding – double what we achieved last year and over three times what we have managed in the past. In so doing we have boosted the BBC’s offer for children, against the headwinds of inflation.

High-impact factual is an area of great interest for us. We already have some highly successful brands in the form of Operation Ouch, Horrible Histories and Steve Backshall’s Deadly series. We are always looking for more. Without doubt it’s the hardest genre to punch through in and we’re delighted to have commissioned Horrible Science this year as an exciting new addition.

Another aspect to our changes has been how we commission, as well as what. In the past our commissioning team was closely involved in managing both the linear schedule and iPlayer library, putting pressure on their time as a result. Our new content and programming strategy (CPS) team untethered them from this, allowing commissioning to focus on finding the very best projects. Now CPS manages the long-term view, looking at what the iPlayer library needs and how commissioning can respond. We may, for instance, be over-served in one genre for the next couple of years but then need to address a gap after that.

One great outcome for British children has been the new agreement with Pact, which allows our titles to live on iPlayer for four years before being relicensed. This may seem like an operational detail but it helps us to build an attractive public service streaming library full of original British content, in the face of global giants who have the buying power to amass huge volumes of material. It’s a good example of how the whole UK industry has worked together to get the best for the audience – and is something worth shouting about.

Acquisitions have an important role in building our library, and our intentions around these can often be misunderstood. Just as with getting the balance right between entertainment and ‘pure’ education, so too we need a balance of acquisitions and originals in our programming mix if we are to reach all UK children. We have actively set out to use acquisitions for three key purposes: great content that is attractive in and of itself; bringing kids titles from around the world that we could never make; and giving us a boost in animation where our UK commissions have not yet come through. Some acquired titles are able to do all these three things at once.

We remain far and away the primary maker of UK original children’s television content; compared to the whole of the rest of the children’s sector, we are off the chart. And in the streaming world that we now inhabit, acquisitions are not substitutional. Once upon a time playing an acquired show on linear meant denying a slot for an original show. But now there is room for everything. It’s ‘as well as’ not ‘instead of.’ Plus, everyone will recall how acquisitions have long been a keystone of the BBC Children’s offer, whether you grew up with Scooby Doo or Rugrats.

Returning to the iPlayer library, and all the various elements described above, we had to devise intertwined strategies for making all this content work in harmony – and for letting the audience know about it. We have titles such as A Kind of Spark and Phoenix Rise which drop all at once, while others are best served with episodic or batch drops like Bluey and The Dumping Ground. Some new series will spark an interest in older episodes, and on the flipside care is needed around titles migrating away from iPlayer. There is more to manage than ever.

We owe thanks to the BBC marketing team as well, who have also evolved new approaches to meet our audience challenge. Children are scattered across a huge variety of platforms and there is no choice but to use at least some of these if we are to reach them. In the absence of big tech-style budgets, our marketing team has been highly adept in using video messages in places like YouTube and gaming platforms, plus interactive mini-games, cinema moments and bigger BBC family campaigns, such as last year’s Screens – It’s What’s on Them that Counts.

Even with this marketing activity, the multitude of digital spaces requires us to find other ways of being where the audience is. We created a digital media platforms and planning team. Their role is to raise the awareness of our key content titles, using different means depending on the platform type. Their work ranges from Operation Ouch website games, showing how the gut works, teen-friendly TikToks, featuring the cast of The Next Step, and a new BBC Roblox experience.

Planning this support is key, or there is the risk of diluting activities across the endless sea of digital platforms. It goes back to the heart of fewer, bigger, better and being focused on only supporting the right number of titles. When you commission a programme the urge to promote it is almost impossible to resist, no matter how disciplined your intentions were. There is something about making the right amount of content in the first place that drives everything else and prevents effort from being spread too thinly.

As a final note on this theme, while the children’s media world is highly digital, we do seek to reach kids in real life too. Wherever possible we are working with partners to create off-screen experiences that can provide long-lasting family memories. We have built out from the CBeebies Prom at the Royal Albert Hall and now taken it on tour across the UK. It played at 11 venues in 2023 and will reach a further 20 this year. Even CBBC has had a prom now, with the Horrible Histories team performing ‘Orrible Opera last July and now a special Quentin Blake’s Box of Treasures orchestral performance taking place at the Barbican this summer.

Operation Ouch has had its own long-running exhibition at the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry with the digestion-themed Food, Poo & You. It too will be travelling to other locations. And even reading has hit the road with our CBeebies Bedtime Stories tent becoming a feature of family-friendly festivals such as Gloworm, Bestival and even Glastonbury.

I said that I would come back with further reflections on why we care about public service content. For me it is a combination of serving both the audience and UK culture, and in so doing helping to protect both. Historically the UK has enjoyed a strong domestic TV industry, in which funding and culture have been aligned. But what happens when the money moves elsewhere? That’s what we’re seeing now in children’s media both here and abroad, particularly as the global streamers have retreated from kids commissioning. Who safeguards the culture when the money has moved on?

Public service broadcasting is a big part of the answer and I have observed internationally that PSBs have grown in importance again as catalysts to get projects moving. They are the organisations who actually care about children and culture, in the face of global market withdrawal. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the next few years.

For now, our British project goes on. Today, in the interests of space, I have deliberately focused on only narrating the changes made to our children’s TV offer. I could do the same article all over again for BBC Education. It too has had changes and successes: Bitesize on target, 500 Words at Buckingham Palace, the new version of micro:bit. Most exciting of all are the changes we are planning to BBC Bitesize as it passes the quarter-century mark – so I am already looking forward to writing the second part of this article!

This article was written for the Children’s Media Yearbook 2024, put together by the Children’s Media Foundation, and can be purchased here: https://www.thechildrensmediafoundation.org/the-childrens-media-yearbook-2024