There is a particular quality of attention a child brings to the theatre for the first time. It is not the same as the attention of the habitual concertgoer, the season-ticket holder, the person who already knows where the stage is and what it means. It is charged with something closer to biological alertness — a sensitivity to sound, colour, darkness, the vibration of an instrument heard not just through the ears but through the chest. Educators and developmental researchers have long recognised this quality, and the science of early childhood development increasingly affirms what artists and teachers have known intuitively for generations: that engagement with the performing arts in a child’s formative years has a measurable, lasting effect on cognitive development, emotional literacy, and the capacity for empathetic imagination.

The Queensland Performing Arts Centre has built its education work around this recognition, not as a sideline to its main programming activity but as a constitutive part of what it believes a state performing arts centre is for. QPAC is seeking to build on its existing commitment to children’s programming by establishing a year-round education program catering to children of all year levels, recognising and demonstrating the importance of the arts in education and life-long learning. That ambition, stated as a living institutional goal rather than a historical achievement, says something significant about how the Centre understands its civic role. A performing arts centre that exists only for audiences already disposed to attend is a performing arts centre serving a fraction of the population it was built to serve. QPAC’s education and outreach programming is, in this sense, the mechanism by which the institution makes good on its broader public mandate.

This article concerns that mechanism: the programs, partnerships, and pedagogical philosophies that carry QPAC’s work beyond its stages and into the life of Queensland’s schools, regional communities, and early childhood settings. As the Centre establishes its permanent civic identity — anchored onchain at qpac.queensland — the depth and reach of its education work represents one of the most significant and least-examined dimensions of what makes it genuinely foundational to Queensland’s cultural life.

OUT OF THE BOX: AN INSTITUTION WITHIN AN INSTITUTION.

No account of QPAC’s education work can begin anywhere other than the Out of the Box festival. In 1992, QPAC established Out of the Box, Australia’s premier arts festival for children aged eight and under. What started as an experiment in arts-based early childhood programming has grown into one of the most significant children’s festivals in the country. More than a million people have attended an Out of the Box event throughout its lifetime, with over 1,600 performances, 2,500 workshops and 9,500 free events delivered. QPAC is proud to have played a leading role in Australia in developing children’s performing arts programming, commissioning over 100 new works during the festival’s history and connecting arts and education.

These numbers deserve to be held for a moment. Over 100 new works commissioned specifically for children, many of which — according to QPAC’s own documentation — have gone on to enjoy sustained touring lives. This is not a programming convenience; it is a structural investment in the aesthetic lives of the very young. Since its very beginning in 1992, Out of the Box has always placed children at the centre of the festival as artistic collaborators and experts in imaginative play. Every step is taken with children in mind, from the development of new work and the curation of in-theatre productions and workshops through to the adapted onsite experience to design an inclusive, child-friendly environment.

The philosophical underpinning here is important and worth making explicit. The success of Out of the Box lies in placing children at the centre of programming, as artistic collaborators and experts in imaginative play. The approach is driven by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, in particular the right of children to participate fully in artistic and cultural life. This is not the language of entertainment provision. It is the language of rights, participation, and civic inclusion — a recognition that access to the performing arts is not a luxury to be distributed unevenly across class and geography, but a dimension of what it means to be a full participant in society.

The 2025 festival saw QPAC deliver more than 80 performances by 180 artists. Over 120 volunteers gave 2,000 hours of their time to the more than 20,000 children, carers and parents who attended. After a seven-year hiatus, the festival’s return in 2025 was widely celebrated. More than one million children enjoyed Out of the Box since its beginnings in 1992, and after a seven-year hiatus the celebrated festival returned for a week dedicated to arts-rich participatory experiences curated especially for young children. The 2025 edition expanded well beyond QPAC’s own walls: this is not just a QPAC initiative but rather one expanding across the South Bank Cultural Precinct, partnering with Queensland Museum, State Library of Queensland, and QAGOMA to deliver activities across the Queensland Cultural Centre.

QPAC’s ‘Care for a Class’ initiative secured philanthropic support which enabled 16 schools — approximately 1,000 children — to attend the festival, ensuring that geographic and financial distance from South Bank did not become an insurmountable obstacle. The festival also served as the site for the National Early Years Policy Summit, which QPAC hosted in partnership with the Investment Dialogue for Australia’s Children, bringing together Australian and international leaders, federal and state politicians, policy experts, practitioners, artists, researchers, Elders, and community voices to discuss early childhood development, education, and maternal and child health policy. In staging this conversation at the same moment and place as a children’s arts festival, QPAC made an implicit argument about the relationship between arts practice and policy — that the two belong together, that the evidence of the stage is relevant evidence for those making decisions about children’s futures.

THE CREATIVE LEARNING PROGRAM: CURRICULUM, CRAFT, AND CLASSROOM.

Beyond the festival, QPAC’s education work operates through what the Centre calls its Creative Learning Program — a structured, curriculum-aligned offering designed to serve schools throughout the academic year rather than at a single festival moment.

The curriculum-aligned program features an exceptional suite of works across theatre, circus, puppetry, music and First Nations storytelling. This breadth is deliberate. The Australian Curriculum’s arts learning area encompasses five distinct strands — dance, drama, media arts, music, and visual arts — and a program that confined itself to a single form would serve only a portion of the teachers and students who might benefit from it. By spanning forms, QPAC gives itself the capacity to meet teachers where their curriculum commitments already lie.

Artists in Classrooms is part of QPAC’s Creative Learning Program. It has been developed to extend the learning beyond the stage; these workshops are designed to be delivered in-school and provide inspiring, curriculum-linked experiences to students. This in-school delivery model matters enormously for schools that cannot easily transport whole classes to South Bank, or for students whose circumstances — disability, geographic remoteness, financial constraint — make excursions logistically difficult. The principle is consistent: if the students cannot come to the performance, QPAC will come to the students.

Education Concerts provide experiences of famous film scores, and the activities for students are part of the Interdisciplinary Learning Program, designed to extend the experience beyond the performance. The suite of student workshops within the program reflects a sophisticated awareness of contemporary concerns in Australian education — including a panel that brings together educators, artists and industry voices to explore the opportunities, challenges and ethical questions AI presents in both the classroom and creative process. That QPAC is now addressing questions of artificial intelligence within its educational programming speaks to the Centre’s willingness to treat its school audiences as participants in contemporary intellectual and cultural life, not merely passive recipients of inherited art forms.

Schools receive assistance with best available seating allocation, information regarding the production, workshops and other learning resources. QPAC’s Public Engagement and Learning team is available to talk with teachers about how the program meets their curriculum needs. This last detail is worth noting: QPAC maintains a dedicated team whose specific function is to serve as a bridge between the artistic program and the pedagogical reality of Queensland classrooms. This is infrastructure, not incidental service.

FIRST NATIONS KNOWLEDGE IN THE CLASSROOM.

Across the Creative Learning Program, First Nations content is not a token addition but a structural commitment. Guided by First Nations musicians, students explore how song becomes a voice for truth and transformation — investigating stories of colonialism, the Stolen Generations, and resilience. This is rigorous material. It does not soften or abstract the history it addresses. It places students in relation to one of Australia’s most consequential and ongoing stories, mediated by the craft of artists who carry that history as lived inheritance.

Newer theatrical experiences available to schools are connected to the Cross-Curriculum priority Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures in learning areas such as The Arts and English. This alignment with the Cross-Curriculum Priorities is significant because it means QPAC’s First Nations content arrives in schools not as an optional cultural extra but as support for mandatory learning that teachers are already required to embed across their programs. The artistic experience and the curricular requirement converge.

The Out of the Box festival has its own dedicated First Nations dimension for young children. Children can discover more about their country through song and traditional language from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Songwoman Jessie Lloyd in the Sing on Country music workshop. And the broader QPAC First Nations program — which intersects with education at multiple points — is created, produced and managed by a team of First Nations creatives, supporting new works in development and training and upskilling new artists and arts workers through full-scale stage works, festivals, and community events. The education dimension of QPAC’s First Nations work is thus not a one-way transmission from institution to student, but a broader ecosystem of creation, training, and community that students can encounter at various entry points.

DIGITAL STAGE AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF ACCESS.

Queensland is vast. The state’s population is distributed across a geography that dwarfs most European countries, and the question of access to cultural institutions that are physically concentrated in Brisbane is one that any serious public arts organisation must confront. QPAC has confronted it through Digital Stage, an online platform established in 2020 with a specific mandate to extend the reach of the Centre’s programs to Queenslanders who cannot attend in person.

Acknowledging that not everyone can attend performances in person at QPAC, in 2020 the Centre established Digital Stage, an online platform providing access to live and on-demand performances, behind-the-scenes content, and exclusive interviews from leading arts organisations. More than a streaming platform, Digital Stage forms a foundational part of QPAC’s infrastructure, enabling the Centre to capture performances in Brisbane and to work with local communities to deliver arts experiences everywhere.

Schools resources include behind-the-scenes videos and education notes which offer a variety of activities designed for classroom use before and after the show. The digital resources accompanying performances are carefully constructed to scaffold the learning before and after an encounter with live work. A teacher in Longreach or Cloncurry can, in principle, prepare their class for a theatrical experience, deliver the experience digitally, and then extend the learning through structured post-show activities — all without the logistical complexity of a Brisbane excursion.

The reach of this work extends in unexpected directions. Concerts, workshops and professional development are delivered by Camerata — Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra — in schools, early learning centres and aged-care communities across Charleville, Roma and Chinchilla. This detail is worth dwelling on. The performing arts education work of QPAC is not confined to metropolitan school groups; it reaches communities that conventional cultural mapping would position at the periphery, but that QPAC’s outreach model treats as equally legitimate participants in the state’s cultural life.

One of the 2025 season’s performances was filmed by a multi-camera team and made available free of charge for a 48-hour period via Digital Stage. QPAC collaborated with communities around Queensland to host special screening events at more than 17 locations from Ipswich to Mount Isa. This model — using the digital infrastructure to create simultaneously distributed live experiences — represents a genuine innovation in public arts access, and one with direct relevance to Queensland’s schools and regional communities.

DISTANCE EDUCATION AND THE PERFORMING ARTS.

Queensland has a long and distinctive tradition of distance education, shaped by the state’s geography and the reality that many of its children live hundreds of kilometres from the nearest school building. QPAC’s Creative Learning Program explicitly acknowledges this constituency. As part of QPAC’s Creative Learning Program, students from Longreach School of Distance Education will bring their energy and talent to the Playhouse stage in a school musical production. This is a meaningful inversion of the usual dynamic: rather than QPAC delivering content to remote students, it creates conditions for those students to perform on QPAC’s own stages — to inhabit the institution, not merely receive it.

The significance of this kind of experience for a child growing up in remote Queensland should not be underestimated. To stand on the Playhouse stage — the stage where professional productions regularly run — is to receive a message about one’s own potential and belonging that no digital resource can fully replicate. The performing arts, at their most educational, are not only about transmitting knowledge but about enabling a particular kind of self-recognition: the experience of taking the stage, literally and figuratively.

As the state’s performing arts centre, QPAC’s programming, public engagement and mission must be relevant and accessible for all Queenslanders, not just those based in Brisbane who can attend QPAC in-person. Its long-standing public engagement program seeks out opportunities to partner with external community organisations, establish community-based participatory experiences and identify regional outreach possibilities. This statement of institutional principle is not aspirational window-dressing — it is the governing logic behind programs like the distance education performances, the Camerata regional residencies, the Digital Stage community screenings, and the Care for a Class initiative that subsidises attendance for schools that could not otherwise afford it.

TECH CONNECT QUEENSLAND: TRAINING THE WORKFORCE BEHIND THE STAGE.

Education in the performing arts does not concern only those who will become performers. The industry runs on a workforce of lighting designers, sound engineers, staging crew, production managers, and technical directors — skilled practitioners whose expertise is invisible to most audiences but essential to every production. Queensland, like many parts of Australia, faces a genuine structural shortage of this workforce.

In a one-of-a-kind partnership between QPAC, Stage Queensland and Arts Centre Melbourne, and with funding from Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation, Tech Connect Queensland began in 2022 to address technical skills shortages across the state and establish a sustainable training and employment pipeline for future live performance technicians in Queensland. Following an exodus of theatre workers from the Australian industry post-COVID, the Federal Government acknowledged the critical shortage of Lighting and Sound Technicians in its 2023 Skills Priority List, with national peak body Live Performance Australia advocating the desperate need to build capacity and capability in the sector.

The one-year traineeship program utilises a Vocational Education and Training model, giving participants the rare opportunity of nationally accredited training in a working theatre while completing a Certificate III in Live Production and Technical Services. The detail about training in a working theatre is significant. The competencies involved — flying systems, complex lighting rigs, multiple radio microphone management, production safety — are not adequately transferable from a classroom to a stage. They are contextual, embodied, acquired through supervised practice in conditions that actually resemble the professional environment.

Since its inception, the groundbreaking program has seen 38 trainees learn and work across 15 venues, with 100% employee retention one year after graduation; 26 technical supervisors received their qualifications; and two regional partners — Empire Theatre and Redland Performing Arts Centre — gained qualified trainers and assessors. The 100% retention figure is remarkable in any vocational education context. It speaks to the quality of the program’s matching between training and employment, and to the genuine demand for skilled practitioners that exists across Queensland’s performance venues.

In October 2025, QPAC announced that the award-winning Tech Connect Queensland program would double its intake and expand its regional outreach from 2026 to 2028, supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation, The Ian Potter Foundation and Griffith University. This expansion signals that the program has demonstrated sufficient impact to justify significant reinvestment — and that QPAC understands its educational responsibility to extend beyond the student audience to the student practitioner.

Through Tech Connect Queensland, a statewide training program led by QPAC, the Centre is addressing the dire shortage of skilled theatre technicians and staging crew, whilst also providing the essential training to ensure the entire performing arts ecosystem thrives into the future. This framing of Tech Connect as ecosystem work is instructive. The performing arts are not sustained by artistic vision alone; they are sustained by a supply of competent, experienced technical staff distributed across the state’s venues. Educating that workforce is, in the most fundamental sense, education in the performing arts.

HIGHER EDUCATION PARTNERSHIPS AND THE PATH INTO INDUSTRY.

The education continuum that QPAC has built does not stop at secondary school. The Centre has developed significant institutional partnerships with Queensland’s universities that create pathways from school programs through to professional formation.

Partnerships with educational institutions, such as the five-plus-five-year memorandum of understanding with Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University signed in 2022, provide students access to professional rehearsal spaces and industry training opportunities, fostering artist development. This kind of formal institutional arrangement — a memorandum of understanding that commits resources, spaces, and expertise across a decade — is the architecture of genuine educational investment. It is not a one-off collaboration but a sustained structural relationship.

The Queensland Academy of Excellence in Musical Theatre offers a unique learning environment, with students studying in purpose-built South Bank studios at QPAC. We are creating something new to give students unrivalled access to the world of professional performance, combining education, training and a production season. This partnership between Griffith University and QPAC collapses the usual distance between educational institution and professional venue — students are not studying about the performing arts from a remove but studying within the Centre itself, surrounded by the infrastructure and activity of a working state performing arts organisation.

QPAC’s industry panels introduce students to people who work in the creative industries — the artists, producers and technical experts who make theatre, music, film and live performance for a living. Panellists speak about how they got started, what their work looks like on a day-to-day basis, and the many different pathways into creative careers, from onstage roles to backstage and behind-the-scenes work. These encounters matter because one of the consistent barriers to entry into creative careers is the opacity of those careers to those who have not grown up with proximity to them. When a young person in Ipswich or Townsville can see a career in live performance modelled concretely by practitioners willing to speak honestly about how they got there, the horizon of what is imaginable expands.

A CIVIC FOUNDATION FOR THE LONG HAUL.

There is a temptation, in any survey of institutional programs, to treat the specific initiatives as the substance of the account — to list festivals and workshops and traineeships and call that an analysis. But the deeper story here is about what QPAC’s education work reveals about the institution’s conception of its own public role.

The benefits for children engaging with the arts from their earliest years are well established and profound. The science of early childhood development points to the remarkably positive impact that participation in arts and culture, collaborative play and creativity can have on a child’s life outcomes. QPAC has made this evidence base a governing principle, not just a rhetorical justification. It shapes programming, informs access initiatives, and determines the allocation of institutional energy and philanthropic investment.

The program of performances, projects and partnerships connects, builds capacity and creates context for audiences, arts and communities across Queensland. This program expands the values and impact of work on stage, extending the life, reach and scope of the diverse array of productions at the Centre. This is the key institutional logic: education work does not exist separately from performance work but extends and amplifies it. The learning resources that accompany a production, the workshop delivered by a production’s director, the digital access provided to a school in far western Queensland — these are not satellites of the main program but part of an integrated conception of what a performing arts centre in a democratic, geographically diverse society is for.

The challenges ahead are real. Queensland’s state is larger than many nations. Its school system serves communities of extraordinary diversity — from inner-city Brisbane to remote islands, from wealthy coastal suburbs to communities whose relationship with cultural institutions has been shaped by histories of exclusion and marginalisation. No program, however well-designed, dissolves these inequalities by itself. But the commitment to keep extending the reach, to keep building the infrastructure, to keep training the people who make the work possible — this is what a genuinely civic cultural institution looks like in practice.

As Brisbane moves towards 2032, the question of what cultural legacy that moment will leave for Queensland’s young people is one worth asking carefully. The performing arts infrastructure that QPAC has been building — the early childhood festivals, the school programs, the regional outreach, the technical training pipelines, the university partnerships — constitutes a long-term investment in the cultural capacity of an entire state. It is infrastructure in the deepest sense: not the buildings, though those matter, but the knowledge, relationships, habits of attention, and professional pathways that sustain a performing arts ecosystem across generations.

That permanence deserves a permanent civic address. The namespace qpac.queensland is the onchain identifier through which the Queensland Performing Arts Centre’s institutional record — its programs, its partnerships, its decades of education work — can be anchored to Queensland’s digital public infrastructure in a form as durable as the institution itself. Just as Out of the Box has built, over more than three decades, a living record of what it means to bring the performing arts into the earliest years of a Queensland childhood, the civic layer of this identity work asks: what does it mean to document, preserve, and acknowledge an institution not just in memory but in structure? The education programs of QPAC are not ephemeral. They are, in the most precise sense of the word, foundational.