‘Awareness, access, opportunity’: Creative industries urged to engage working class talent
While on the face of it the creative industries are largely considered to be progressive and welcoming, in truth many organisations are failing to take inclusion seriously.
This inaction is being compounded by systemic barriers that start as far back as school. In November, the Sutton Trust published stark findings revealing how a lack of socio-economic diversity within further education is restricting access to creative careers.
The research found more than 50% of students studying a creative degree at Oxford, Cambridge, King’s College London and the University of Bath are from upper-middle class backgrounds. Furthermore, there are four times as many younger adults (aged 35 and below) from middle class origins than working class backgrounds working in the creative industries.
These statistics came as no surprise to Stu Outhwaite-Noel. Founder of Creature London and now chief creative officer at newly established agency Modern Citizens, Outhwaite-Noel has been passionate about levelling the playing field for underrepresented talent for decades.
From class ceilings and persistent pay gaps to a depressing lack of representation, he believes the situation is getting worse rather than better.
It makes business sense to bring these different brains and different lives within our industry.
“Sadly, in the last few years – at least from where I’m standing in the advertising industry – it would appear the lack of working-class talent coming through or entering into the industry is decreasing,” he notes.
There is an assumption, Outhwaite-Noel points out, that the ad industry is progressive and liberal, so all agencies need to do is put creative work out into the world that speaks to underrepresented communities and job done.
“The truth is that’s not enough. When it comes to adopting things like the Living Wage. When it comes to looking at the work environment or paths for progression within our agencies, or dead simple things like how you make time for people for whom these are alien cultures, ways of working and language. Just simple things like that, we’re not good,” he states.
“Ultimately what that leads to is people – who haven’t been educated in ad colleges as to the way to behave, turn up, dress, speak – feeling othered.”
For Outhwaite-Noel, awareness, access and opportunity are the three fundamental elements that help anyone break into the creative industries. Growing up in a small market town in Northumberland, he only discovered advertising was a career option because somebody, who happened to have been taught by the same art teacher, showcased a series of ads during a talk with his class. One was an Eric Cantona campaign for Nike.
“It was suddenly like my eureka moment as a 16-year-old where I realised that there was industry which would embrace ideas, in which you could be kind of OK at drawing and OK at writing, but ultimately if you had good ideas then people would bring those to life for you,” he explains.
View article in Marketing Week
