House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee inquiry “A creative future”
Inquiry questions
Which areas of the creative industries face the greatest potential for disruption and change in the next 5–10 years, and what impact could this have?
The Screen sector is growing at an unprecedented rate following Covid 19 with Film and High-End TV (HETV) production in the UK alone forecast to grow by 29% by 2025, requiring c.18,000 more workers to meet demand. This does not include genres such as factual, entertainment, children’s, or sectors such as animation or games. All are globally competitive genres within the screen industries, which have faced and will face technological and business model disruption. This presents opportunities and risks. Some subsectors are portable and can easily move elsewhere in the world, meaning we should not be complacent about growth or indeed our place in this ecosystem.
We have a history of creativity and entrepreneurialism in this landscape. The opportunities are innovation, growth, productivity, jobs, and of course soft power for UK plc. The risks are rooted in policies that strangle the potential of our domestic production ecosystem, working against the sector’s natural trends.
Skills and talent development are a key part of supporting the screen sector’s growth. Education, skills, and talent development policies that have not been led and shaped by industry or aligned to sector specific labour market strategies and plans, can only inhibit growth.
Anything that doesn't add to our understanding of the skills landscape, or provide solutions, slows progression and risks failing to keep pace with an incredibly fast-moving sector.
The current crucial pressure points are in some entry and mid-tier roles which require years of experience. Some areas include:
What changes are expected in the way creative/cultural content is produced; the way audiences are engaged (for example through digital or immersive experiences); and the way business models operate?
The screen sector has already changed significantly in recent years with the use of digital workflows, growth of streaming services, scale and ambition of storytelling, adaptation of technologies from Games such as real time engines in production whilst Games interactivity, internet access and HD TV are also converging into a ‘metaverse’, with a 3D version of the internet constantly evolving. The growth of platforms such as Tiktok, the way audiences engage with, consume, interact, and create content, means CreaTech is here to stay and in-demand by wider sectors including health and automotive.
The way in which revenue collection takes place in production is also changing: the monetising of production via block chain, Non Fungible Tokens, and crypto currency is expected to lead to a more democratised revenue collection model, so we need people with the skills and expertise to understand and manage this going forwards.
We forecast a continuation of these trends, as well as an increased requirement for screen to be supporting the live and recorded streaming of live events including music and theatre to connect, tell stories and help culture reach further.
The growth of Subscription Video on Demand (SVoD) and content commissioned and produced in the UK has caused a boom, but equally there is now a focus on protecting and supporting British content and IP in the market.
What skills will be required to meet these emerging opportunities and challenges?
CreaTech, business and entrepreneurial skills are needed more than ever, plus resilience and adaptability. We have an opportunity to define creative education, so it is not limited in scope and/or promoting out of date competencies. We must urgently reshape education both at school and in further and higher education if we are to support and supply talent into the screen sector’s fast changing landscape, alongside the upskilling of existing professionals in the sector who need to stay abreast of new technologies.
There are also immediate needs to meet current demand. We know there is a shortage of mid-level and senior roles within all genres, these in-demand roles take years of experience to master and too many inexperienced people are stepping up too soon with inadequate experience due to demand for these roles currently outstripping availability.
Research also highlights the need for wider transferrable skills including leadership, organisational skills, team working, business administration, ability to address unconscious bias, general health and safety, people management, public speaking and pitching, financial and budget management skills, greater commercial awareness, and an ability to consider audience engagement in content development.
What actions are needed from the Government and local authorities to ensure there is an appropriate talent pipeline equipped with these skills?
The most important action the government can take is to listen to industry and support industry when it articulates what it needs, whether this pertains to policy changes, the speed of those changes, or investment. Public money needs to be used to respond to more specific needs in a joined-up approach. Coming together to invest in industry led interventions will ensure greater value for money and a results driven approach that benefits the UK.
We either have uninformed policies or a flip flopping of skills policies, which is detrimental to growth and productivity. We need to learn from sectors that have a unified approach and are hence doing much better, such as in Science. Skills training routes within the current skills system do not work for the screen sector due to the fluid, portable and fast-paced time-limited nature of production (making apprenticeships in their current form a challenging route), confidentiality clauses and industry regulations preventing those under 18 working on production (making the offer of industry placements for T Levels and work experience for Traineeships largely unviable). Higher Education courses fail to train individuals for the skills that our sector needs: film studies or TV broadcasting courses do not relate to the occupations we actually need to train people for, and in some cases overshoot i.e. training at level 3 and level 4 within further education is often sufficient to support candidates to progress into roles within the sector.
What the sector needs is better support to train in-house and on-the-job, formally, consistently and to a high standard in line with the reality of the way screen production and post-production play out. Our fast-paced and transient environments cannot be simulated within standard study environments/routes.
The Government needs to listen to the needs of the sector and flex funding and training approaches to make it possible for entry level candidates, career changers, and in-sector mid-career professionals to train via professional development routes led by the industry, not via one-size-fits-all programme structures set by Government.
There is a pan-industry approach to training and skills development which can also help address inclusion within the industry. This joined-up approach could be supported by the Government (including local Government) working hand in hand with industry to maximise investment to ensure a mid-to long-term solution is found to addressing crew development by standardizing training and placements within the industry.
We do need the breadth of roles within the screen sector to be better promoted and understood at a much younger age, particularly if we are to secure a sufficient supply of talent into the industry in the coming years to fill new growth alongside ensuring existing talent can be supported to progress into roles where people are retiring from the sector. We need schools, careers provision, youth groups, family centres, job centres, and other key stakeholders to know about screen occupations (not just being a film director or TV producer) and to promote these on an equal footing to other sectors that seem to gain more attention, such as those linked to STEM, health and education. The unique differences in operating cultures, types, range of, and trends in employment opportunities in the Creative Industries should also be better understood and promoted within careers guidance.
How can this be sufficiently flexible to take account of the pace of change in the sector?
Government needs to support the sector to design its own training initiatives and progression routes, and for these to be adopted on a best practice basis to avoid the constant reinventing of the wheel by training providers, with skills funding being directed accordingly. For many roles in the sector there isn’t a need for pre-requisite qualifications (exceptions apply such as in accountancy, some technical roles e.g. electrical and those that require health and safety, HR and legal), just a need for appropriate training which includes leadership competencies in required fields, which we’d welcome the Government’s support with. The screen sector is important to the UK’s economy and identity, and is on a course of significant growth, so support for it must change if demand is to be met.
What actions are needed from industry to support the talent pipeline development?
There are three key needs:
a) an overarching vision and strategy for growth with a clear sense of our role in the global landscape, with an aligned workforce and labour market strategy
b) investing in the professionalization of skills and training to build the talent pipeline
c) build and support an inclusive workforce via cultural and behavioral change - informal hiring, via word-of-mouth, is often a product of the speed at which productions need to crew up, given the way the business model works. Within this business model there are ways we can support access, inclusion, and progression. Whilst success requires a uniform and whole industry approach, and will take time, the hundreds of industry practitioners we engage and work with are very keen to support and make this a working reality.
What actions are needed from organisations in the creative industries to prepare for and accommodate the requirements of the future workforce?
For the screen sector this will require the industry to come together to address common goals, which it has done very effectively in the past, be it adopting digital, creating Freeview, the rollout of high-definition TV, and as it did for the missed opportunity that was Project Kangaroo. Our sector – particularly TV and Games - has a history of being creatively and technologically entrepreneurial, so our future skills and associated development plan, needs to flow from this thinking and work. In the interim, organisations can support industry by helping ensure early and mid-to-long-term workforce challenges are addressed by organising and standardising what are industry led and wide structured training schemes.
What role do innovation and research & development play in addressing the future challenges facing the creative industries?
See above. Future gazing, research, seeing and understanding trend data, the fast-changing ecosystem, asking the right questions, understanding our advantages and limitations and a willingness to be radical. Research and innovation could help us identify how we can grow sustainably, what policies we need in our education and skills systems, how to enable a joined up creative vision for the UK, and the optimal shape of departments within different types of organizations to aid productivity.
What actions are needed from the Government, funding bodies and sector organisations to support innovation, and research & development?
As a Sector Skills Body that is entirely led by industry, we answer this question in relation to both the need for a vision and future strategy as outlined above, a much-needed workforce and labour market strategy and plan so we focus smartly on ‘next skills’ whilst currently delivering to immediate and much needed workforce development needs. To ensure we are building on what has been achieved to date, we need Government to flex the way it supports and co-designs training and skills initiatives, empowering industry to be at the heart of designing and delivering such initiatives, with dedicated support for skills bodies that hold close working relationships with their industries and have a strong track record of supplying new and skilled talent through tried and tested approaches.
How effective are the Government’s existing strategies at supporting the creative industries to meet the challenges and opportunities ahead?
The Government’s skills initiatives haven’t been effective in supporting the screen sector. More than ever we need to strengthen the unified and strategic approach taken by industry to avoid dilution and simplify the current confusion caused by historic fragmentation in training. Industry invests in training its (mainly) freelance workforce and will need to continue doing so, but in support of industry commitment we need to avoid inefficient use of public skills funding.
What lessons can the UK’s creative industries learn from other countries, and other sectors?
The UK’s screen sector is world leading. If there are examples of skills systems that flex approaches based on industry needs and ways of working and that successfully operate on a co-investment basis with Government, this would serve as valuable learning.
We would encourage DCMS to look at India, Singapore, and South Korea for VFX growth and Canada for across-the-board growth as they (like the UK) have lots of US $ going to them. We’d also point to New Zealand for localised growth that’s supported by government interventions.
August 2022
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