Britain’s public broadcaster wants its workforce to reflect the population it serves. By 2028 at the latest, BBC hope A quarter of the workforce – currently 20,300 people – will come from “lower socioeconomic backgrounds”.
What does it mean? Brother place Class signers are as keen as sniffing police dogs to locate loosely packed marijuana. Highlights, drinking habits and clothes are among the gifts. A subset of UK TV shows represent lower-income Britons as teenage mothers, unscrupulous dads and thirties grandmothers.
The BBC’s approach is more systematic. It focuses on education – state school or paying tuition – eligibility for free school meals and parental occupation. The latter benchmarkused by the Social Mobility Commission, will be the key metric for the new quota.
These are all imperfect metrics. Middle-class Britons pay a lot of money for homes in the area’s good schools. One Recent surveys, by the law firm Simpson Millar, puts that premium at 50% more than the national average. Additional costs may include exam preparation tutors, extracurricular Mandarin classes, and holidays spent traveling through Florentine galleries.
Career, too, can be a slippery concept. The butchers, bakers, and lampstanders appear to be working class. But today, creators include discerning artisans with artistic degrees and opulent touches. Builders who leave school at 16 often earn more than instructors with PhDs.
The data from the BBC itself illustrates the ambiguity of such measures. According to the BBC’s latest annual report, only 7.6% of employees said they had received free school meals, while 11.5% went to private schools. A fifth person hailed from a “working-class” household. It’s no surprise that the BBC is not a microcosm of England, where the respective figures stand at 20.8%7% and 39%.
The BBC’s working class group shrank rapidly when filtered by leadership roles, of which 17.5% claimed paid education.
Broadcasters are not alone in promoting classroom diversity. KPMG want 29% of partners and directors will be from the working class by 2030, up from 23% and 20% today.
Politicians love to celebrate diversity. But almost a third of MPs were privately trained at the time Religiousism in 2019 in the UK report. The same applies to more than half of the senior judges, permanent secretaries of civil service and diplomats. Social mobility has operated to a similar extent since the second world war. Changing that should start from scratch.
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