Really excellent leader by Lisa Campbell on diversity in this week’s Broadcast.
She rightly points out that the creative industries, and in particular TV, remain very much the preserve of the white middle class and that typical creatives come from the most affluent 25% of families in the UK.
Her final sentence says it all: “Diversity can generate new ideas, keep programmes relevant and attract broader audiences. If your conscience doesn’t get you, perhaps business sense will.”
Here in the north we’ve been working with employers who can categorically state this to be true. For the past four years employers such as ITV, BBC, Lime Pictures and a host of smaller companies have been actively supporting our Media Foundation Placement Scheme taking trainees from a range of diverse backgrounds into their workplaces on placements for up to a year. These trainees are mostly behind-the-scenes talent (production, technical and business areas) and with 80% hit rate of employment after the scheme, employers love it.
Some businesses might engage initially because it’s the “right thing to do” but most don’t take long to find out that MFPS presents a new route to finding talent that wouldn’t normally come their way. As one of the trainees pointed out to me last year:
“No-one in my family has ever worked in or had anything to do with the TV industry. I had no networks to fall back on or even a way in to finding any work experience”.
I had the absolute pleasure recently of being invited to a screening event where this year’s group showed films they had made in teams. They were all stunning and I was so proud of each and every one of them and of what we, in partnership with our leading employers and partners such as the
Cultural Diversity Network North, had created.
The good news is we’re now recruiting for another
six month scheme. There’s still time for more employers to get involved – if you haven’t tried it, now’s your chance. In these money starved days, perhaps it’s time to think hard about how being innovative in recruitment can cut your bottom line in the long run.
The bad news is that this is our last scheme under current funding. But with a new diversity pilot scheme recently announced by the Government, we hope there’s plenty more to come and we can continue to prove it definitely “ takes all sorts”.
