Creative Futures are Here
In this edition of Education Update, local creative industries advocate and training provider SIAN CONWAY-WOOD asks ‘Who is the creative economy for?’
181st Street Students: Left to right: Lewis Jones, Olivia Goodwin, Fleur Hazell-Jarvis, Jake Green, Dr Andrew Lumsden-Groom (managing partner at 181st Street), (Front): Sian Conway-Wood (senior managing partner at 181st Street).
Following the recent report by Alan Milburn warning that a million young people in the UK have been written out of the employment market, new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has promised to rebuild technical education, creating hands-on skills from the age of 14, with work experience opportunities and routes into real careers.
However, one line in his statement should give residents in Hastings pause for further thought. When the government listed the industries these new provisions will serve, it placed the creative industries “in our cities.” Coastal areas apparently get manufacturing and clean energy. That sentence tells a generation of creative young people on this coast the same thing the industry has always told them: the work is somewhere else, and to reach it you must leave.
The creative industries have quietly run on exclusion for decades. The research is unambiguous. The landmark ‘Panic!’ study in 2018 (see link below) found unpaid work “endemic” with nearly nine in ten creative workers having worked for free, and half of under-30s having completed an unpaid internship. This compares very unfavourably with the experience of older workers. The Sutton Trust has shown that the privately educated are heavily over-represented across the sector, and working-class young people the least likely to get in at all.
The door has always been wide open to those who arrive with money, contacts, and a London postcode. Hastings by comparison is the third most deprived local authority district in England, and yet this is one of the most creative towns in the country – a place of artists, musicians, makers and independents, with a cultural life that punches far above a town of our size and income. That creativity is real, and it is ours. What we have never had is the ladder that turns it into a living.
Earlier this year, Hastings submitted a bid to be UK Town of Culture on a platform of social mobility and opportunity for young people. We did not make the shortlist. Despite this disappointment, many suggest we should not be using our creative and organisational energies chasing further titles, suggesting that culture as spectacle – the gallery, the festival, the badge – has never been what would most benefit the area. Rather we need our own young people to be able to build creative careers here and keep the value of them here.
I have spent my career in the creative industries, and I relocated my advertising agency from London’s Chancery Lane to Hastings. At the start of this year we made a significant financial investment to renovate three empty units in St Andrews Mews into a dedicated creative studio, purpose-built to train the next generation of creative professionals. We are a delivery partner for East Sussex College’s T Levels in marketing and business. T Levels are a recently implemented technical qualification in the UK – a two-year course taken instead of A levels and worth the same as three of them. The course is built around a substantial 315-hour industry placement, so students spend real time working in the field they’re training for. We have hosted four 16- to 19-year-old Business T Level students for 150 hours each so far, where they have done real work on live campaigns for national and international brands, in a studio we built for the purpose.
Our training could allow them to access roles such as media executive, content producer, social media manager, account executive, brand strategist or marketing data analyst. Jobs like these are entry roles in a marketing career that runs from roughly £19,200 at eighteen to £40,000-plus for a manager within about five years. The realistic local alternative for a school leaver here (hospitality or retail) pays £17,300 to £22,000 and stays broadly flat. Hastings’ median full-time wage is £26,396, the lowest in East Sussex and 14% below the national average.
Marketing is the exportable part of the creative economy – it can be sold anywhere and delivered from anywhere. As an agency, 85% of our income comes from America, Europe and other areas of the UK. So it arrives in Hastings as new money rather than local money changing hands. Studies indicate that every £1 we earn generates about £2.31 of local economic activity, against £1.30 to £1.60 for a typical service business.
The university route into these jobs now carries around £47,700 of student debt. Those who undertake T levels here are debt-free and do not have to leave town or find money for rent somewhere even more expensive. Several months in, they are producing work I would put ahead of many graduates, and I say this as someone who lectures on MBA programmes at some of the country’s leading business schools.
It is a small pilot so far, but it offers a compelling alternative to the model that has locked working-class, state-educated young people out of this industry for a generation. It is proof that the barrier was never the talent. The talent is here, in abundance. The barrier was always access. Which is why the Prime Minister’s omission matters so much. This is the moment the country may at last be rebuilding those ladders. To build them only in major cities and tell seaside towns they can have turbines but not creativity would be to repeat the exclusion that has for decades limited access to our national industries.
Hastings does not need permission to be creative, but the people rebuilding Britain’s economy need to understand that a coastal town can grow a thriving creative economy of its own – not just export its brightest young people to build everyone else’s. If Mr Burnham’s devolutionary instincts are to be proven, new investment should make sure that coastal towns like Hastings and St Leonards are supported as part of our national cultural story.
Panic! Social Class, Taste and Inequalities in the Creative Industries was released by Create London and Arts Emergency, see createlondon.org/event/panic-paper
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