They spoke after a Guardian survey of the 50 organisations that receive the most Arts Council England funding revealed a disproportionate number of leadership roles were occupied by people who were educated privately and those who went to the universities of Oxford or Cambridge.
Artists, directors and actors have raised the alarm about what they describe as a rigged system preventing working-class talent thriving in their industries after analysis showed almost a third of major arts leaders were educated privately.
Happy Valley’s showrunner, Sally Wainwright, said: “When I was a kid, I remember my dad saying to me: ‘People like us don’t become writers.’ He was a headteacher and a senior lecturer at a polytechnic, but he still thought that people like us didn’t make money out of writing.”.
“I think the real problem is that working-class people look at the arts and think this isn’t something that people like me do,” said Knight.
Figures from across arts and culture told the Guardian that perceptions of the sector as inaccessible to working-class people and the rising cost of being an artist were discouraging a generation from trying to establish themselves in creative industries.
