Big Creative Academy (BCA) is an educational provider for young students, aged 16-19, from underrepresented and disadvantaged backgrounds. The academy provides a range of different programmes designed to carve out routes into the creative sector for students with an appetite for music, performing arts, media, fashion and art & design. We interviewed Victoria Spence, Director of Careers at BCA, to learn more about the motivations that drive EDI efforts at the Ofsted Outstanding college.
We explore the initiatives being delivered across London, including in Walthamstow, which is amongst the city’s top 10 most deprived boroughs. Victoria explains how and why diversity is a “golden thread” that runs through everything BCA does and why she believes imagination and creativity are what make the world a better place.
What are your motivations for addressing diversity and inclusion within your organisation?
Big Creative Academy exists to provide a talent pipeline into the Creative Industries and we're a college that specialises in the creative sector. We run courses for 16-19-year-olds in media, art, drama, fashion and similar subjects. We want to highlight how important it is for education providers to support these young people and provide pathways into the industry for underrepresented demographics.
Part of our mission is to diversify the Creative Industries because we know the sector would benefit greatly from having a more diverse workforce. We're based in Walthamstow, East London and the students we have at the college are largely from diverse and disadvantaged backgrounds because those are the demographics of the area.
We continue to find that there is huge demand from young people who want to get into the Creative Industries. We've seen this through questionnaires, university studies and surveys, so there is lots of evidence to say that creative is the top industry choice for young people aged 14-18.
However, we still have huge skills gaps within the sector. That's what we, as a college, are trying to address. We're trying to make sure that young people are gaining access to study the creative arts and the subjects we teach so they can go into the industries and really make a difference. Our students are industry-ready when they finish their courses here.
How are those motivations embedded in your strategy as an education provider?
EDI is like a golden thread that runs through so many of the different activities within the college. I think it's really important to make sure that everything is accessible and to ensure that the curriculum has EDI at its centre because this is key in making sure our courses are attractive to people from diverse and disadvantaged backgrounds.
Lots of the briefs are EDI-targeted, for example, and we have our fantastic student services department that really focuses on EDI, including set pieces throughout the academic year. We have Culture Day, LGBTQ+ Day and a dedicated collaborative project that all students work on within Black History Month — just to name a few examples of the things we do.
We also have real diversity within our workforce — 65% of our workforce is from diverse communities, which isn’t the case in very many places. That's really important to us as a starting point because we want to have credibility with our young people and to provide role models.
The staff we have are largely industry practitioners as well, so they have worked in the Creative Industries. There's no specific positive discrimination in terms of our recruitment practices but we are certainly mindful as to who our students will build rapport with when we're employing teaching staff and other members of staff within the college. It means there's also a real appetite to work with young people from those diverse and disadvantaged communities.
What do you believe are the risks of not addressing EDI either within the creative education system or the wider industry?
There would be a huge lack of imagination and a lack of creativity and you need both for the sector to thrive. That's what makes the world a better place. Young people from diverse and disadvantaged backgrounds have some of the most amazing stories to tell — they're the people who have struggled the most, which often makes them some of the most powerful and authentic storytellers. If creative businesses don't grab hold of that, the sector will become more and more stifled.
From a creative education angle, if we don't have colleges like BCA, there will just be more of the same and fewer young people exploring alternative routes to traditional education. You'll have students going into courses they don't want to do and therefore aren't passionate about. There's also the business aspect of it, which is that if creative businesses don't diversify their workforce, then the sector won't grow.
How do you judge the success of your EDI efforts?
Probably not the same as other colleges. For us, success is all about people going on to do what they want to do and what they're passionate about. I'm always really impressed with students who really follow what they want to do and if university is the right next step for them, great! However, quite a lot of our students just want to work. Those are the students that we really need to help to get into employment.
We're really proud of the statistic that 70% of our young people do go into the Creative Industries after they finish their courses with us, whether it's higher education, apprenticeships or employment — quite a lot of them set up their own businesses as well. So, our success measures are really just making sure young people are able to do what they want to do.
We recently had a student reunion, which was lovely. We had about 200 of our students attend and it was really nice to see them all again and listen to their stories. So, for example, we have one of our music production students who is now doing the audio engineering on Frozen the Musical. He basically got the job because he just asked about it and this is an example of how great our young people are. He's currently the only Black person on Frozen.
Another one of our students, Joshua-Alexander Williams, recently won the Best Supporting Male Actor in a Play Award at the 2024 Black British Theatre Awards for his role as Mercutio in Jamie Lloyd's production of Romeo and Juliet.
There are so many stories.
What are some of the limitations, challenges or barriers you've experienced in delivering your EDI activity?
There's a lot of goodwill in the Creative Industries but it is the case that we have the push to go to industry but industry doesn't necessarily have the push to come to us. There's also the chasms that young people fall down along their journey into the Creative Industries — I wish those disconnects didn't exist. This could be as a result of parents' opinions but it can also be that the industry itself is putting people off because there are still so many barriers.
There are lots of small barriers we need to work through but we really need to get over the biggest one: arts in the curriculum. I was disappointed about the government's approach to the arts in the recent curriculum review — they promoted the arts like they said they would but in enrichment, not actually in the curriculum.
For me, that is a bit of a sidestep, especially when we've got the potential for the Creative Industries to be this amazing power for the UK and the industry itself is growing massively. Why can't we put it in place at the start of young people's careers, where there is huge demand for it?
I think there is definitely a focus within the Creative Industries to look at graduates and I firmly believe that you do not need to have a degree to be a runner on a TV set. What you do need is somebody enthusiastic who has the right attitude and you can have that as an 18-year-old as much as you can a 21-year-old. I would love to have the sector look more to further education rather than higher education, because you can reach students at a younger age and really mould them.
To learn more about what the Big Creative Academy is doing to pave the way for diverse young talent in the UK through EDI-driven education, go to www.bigcreative.education.
