Laura Morris, Business Development Manager at Speakers for Schools, shares her thoughts on how to cultivate and nurture talent, and facilitate industry growth.
At Speakers for Schools, we aim to inspire young people and help them find their ideal career path within the UK’s many exciting sectors. Chief amongst those are the creative industries, and our free inspirational talks and work experience opportunities allow state school pupils to discover a career they might never have considered before or thought achievable.
With the creative industries generating £126 billion in gross value added to the economy and employing 2.4 million people in 2022 alone, we must introduce young people to the many opportunities within them as early as possible. Especially considering the range of different skillsets that can be accommodated and championed, whether you’re technical, creative or organisational.
It’s been a challenging few years for the industry, from COVID through to the writer/director/actor strikes. Meanwhile, The Sutton Trust’s new research, A Class Act, uncovered the stark disparities in access to creative careers and the extent to which they remain elite professions. For example, younger adults from working-class backgrounds are 4 times less likely to work in the creative industries compared to their middle-class peers. Meanwhile, BAFTA-nominated actors are 5 times more likely than the public to have attended private schools (35% vs 7%).
Now is the time to consider how we cultivate and nurture talent, and facilitate industry growth. As technology continues evolving, the demand for specialised skills will only grow, creating new career paths and opportunities for those willing to invest the time and effort to master them. It is encouraging therefore that the Chancellor of the Exchequer recently confirmed an increased tax incentive for spending on visual effects (“VFX”) in the UK, which has been warmly welcomed by the UK’s VFX industry. It is paramount that young people from all backgrounds are now given the right insight to understand how they can capitalise on such developments.
We are deeply invested in ensuring the creative industries are accessible to all and Discover! Creative Careers Week (18 – 22 November) represented a key moment to focus on the sector, providing the next generation with the tools to navigate it. Here, we partnered with Discover Creative Careers and ScreenSkills to offer work experience programmes across various creative fields from 28 October – 22 November. These allowed young people to gain real-world skills, build their portfolio, network with top creative minds and explore a variety of career pathways. Our data from last year’s programme for the same creative careers week reveals that 93% of young people were interested in a job within the sector after their work experience placement (compared to just 50% beforehand). This demonstrates the impact such early interventions can have in forming a young person’s passion and ambition.
Collaboration between all those working in this space – including the 190 companies in post production, VFX, animation, TV & Film Studios and Productive Services that UK Screen Alliance and Animation UK represent – is fundamental to ensuring the industry thrives and to addressing future skills gaps. For example, our partnership with film education charity Into Film showcased careers in the screen industries through virtual talks with industry experts; from actors, directors and producers to experts in post-production sound, picture editing and green filmmaking. We’ve similarly hosted many other in-person and virtual talks with aspirational role-models across the creative sectors, which are available to watch for free on our website.
The Government’s Autumn Budget allocated £3 million of funding to expand the Creative Careers Programme. Such initiatives are essential in providing insight into different career routes and tackling urgent skills gap in industries that are essential to the UK economy. We look forward to hearing more about the Government’s other key proposed policies that help young people find the right career for them; from recruiting more careers advisors in secondary schools to delivering two weeks’ worth of quality work experience for every young person (both of which are also central organisational missions of ours). Whether it be the creative sector or tech, we want to level the playing field for all young people and ensure everyone can enter the industry of their choosing.
We encourage employers working across the creative industries to get in touch and learn how they can get involved in our programme. Laura Morris and Melody Clarke are our Business Development Managers working across the sector, and you can contact them directly at laura.morris@speakersforschools.org / melody.clarke@speakersforschools.org.
