A new swarming advocacy
The independent collective for creativities, cultures, and human flourishing.
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About
The Hive Assembly is an independent collective exploring the many ways creativities enrich lives, strengthen communities, and shape our shared future.
We bring together evidence, lived experience, and diverse perspectives to support thoughtful public conversations about arts education, participation in cultures, and creative lives.
We believe flourishing cultures depend not only on people who experience the arts, but on people who make them.
These commitments shape our current work. Read the Seeing Red report →02
Principles
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Current work
A report examining participation in Queensland senior arts education.
Read the Seeing Red report04
What this is
This website does not simply report findings from outside itself. It is an apparatus through which new relationships with data become possible.
The Hive Assembly and Seeing Red are thinking tools. They invite audiences to explore public educational data, curriculum documents and lived experiences with curiosity rather than certainty.
Nothing in the numerical analysis has been fabricated. Like every analysis, this work offers one particular way of seeing. Every dataset is selected, every comparison framed and every visualisation designed. This project makes those choices visible.
Every numerical claim in Seeing Red should be traceable to a named QCAA or QTAC public source and a stated calculation. Published values, fitted estimates and continuation scenarios are labelled separately.
The report links to its source files and explains how the measures were assembled. Anonymous student voices provide lived context. They are not used as representative evidence or in statistical calculations.
This project deliberately privileges quantifiable public data while recognising that numbers cannot account for the full complexity of educational life.
The focus on General Arts subjects is a methodological choice. The anonymisation of student voices is another. The emphasis on enrolments, subject offerings and scaling is another still. Different questions would produce different analyses from the same sources.
The data becomes meaningful through interaction. As audiences compare maps, question graphs, revisit assumptions and follow new lines of inquiry, both the interpretation and the interpreter can change.
The website therefore participates in the inquiry. Across Queensland, each encounter can configure a new relationship among the evidence, the tool and its audience.
As students make increasingly informed choices about their learning, what aspects of the curriculum deserve renewed attention?
Are the Arts organised, individually and collectively, in ways that unintentionally contribute to their own marginalisation? What assumptions about creative learning have become so familiar that they are rarely questioned?
If different questions were asked of the same evidence, what different futures for Arts education might become imaginable?