Huge decline of working class people in the arts reflects fall in wider society

Christopher Eccleston, who grew up in a working-class family in Salford, said in 2015: ‘I had a sense acting wasn’t for me because I’m not educated.’ Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

The proportion of working-class actors, musicians and writers has shrunk by half since the 1970s, new research shows.

Analysis of Office for National Statistics data found that 16.4% of creative workers born between 1953 and 1962 had a working-class background, but that had fallen to just 7.9% for those born four decades later.