What the BBC is doing for social mobility
I’ve been at the RTS Conference this week, and was really glad to take part in a session on social mobility today. The best industry conferences shape what’s on our collective to-do-list and this is rightly at the top.
Class or socio-economic background can get forgotten when we’re considering diversity. As the organisers of the session said it’s the aspect of diversity you can’t see.
At the BBC, for the first time this year, we’ve started collecting data on this. We asked three questions, and here are the answers:
83% of our workforce attended a state school;
Almost half of our employees (48%) come from a family in which neither parent had a degree;
61% of employees come from families in which the main earner had a higher managerial and professional job.
Tim Hincks (our session’s chair) had a show of hands, and those results seemed typical of the audience at the RTS too. I put my hand up to went to private school, and would have done to parents with a degree and from a profession (in my case, teacher and accountant).
Having data is the first step in diagnosing the situation and working out what to do. Sharon White said yesterday that [she wanted all broadcasters to collect this information] — that’s great, as we’ll be able to compare how we’re all doing, and look at setting targets.
Anne Mensah from Sky made the excellent point that this is a key creative challenge — the BBC is better at attracting ABC1 audiences; given that we’re funded by everyone, we want to find authentic ways of making programmes that appeal to everyone, and where everyone can see themselves portrayed.
I’m particularly proud of how BBC Children’s does this — anyone who has watched CBBC or CBeebies couldn’t fail to appreciate how diverse our content is.
Nor is it in the margins of the schedule — it’s Our Family covering families across the country that may have step parents, single parents, mixed heritages, or multiple faiths,Apple Tree House about a multi-cultural estate in Bromley-By-Bow, or The Dumping Groundabout kids in care.
To portray everyone, our workforce also has to be representative. We’re doing lots to recruit widely:
We’ll have 400 apprentices by 2018; widening opportunities for non-graduates at entry level means we are recruiting from more socially diverse backgrounds;
At entry level, we employ a range of different methods to give candidates from all backgrounds the chance to demonstrate their potential.
We take names and degrees out of applications for internships and traineeships.
We only ask candidates to tell us about qualifications which are relevant to the job.
We advertise all our roles in places that are proven to increase our candidate pools diversity.
We partner with a diversity specialist to ensure our Careers site is fully accessible.
We’ve banned unpaid internships
It feels like we’re doing lot at the entry level — we’re now thinking about how we can support retention and promotion.
The BBC does play another important role — supporting social mobility in society. We exist to bring the best to everyone — whether it’s a festival like the Proms, our Tomorrow’s World season, or how Bitesize helps teenagers pass exams.
As our Chairman David Clementi said earlier at the RTS, this is an area we’re thinking about — could we do more for literacy for pre-schoolers or for adults retraining. Watch this space…
