In his McTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh TV festival in 2024, the playwright James Graham called class “everyone’s least favourite diversity and representation category”. A socioeconomic duty on public bodies was included in 2010’s Equality Act, but has never been enacted. Now Class Ceiling, a review from Manchester University, co-chaired by the former chief prosecutor Nazir Afzal, is calling for change. It wants class to be made a legally “protected characteristic” like race and sex (and several others), to address the class crisis in the arts – not just in the north-west but across the UK.
The report tells a depressingly familiar story. A 2022 study showed that the proportion of working-class actors, musicians and writers has halved since the 1970s; another in 2024 found that fewer than one in 10 arts workers in the UK had working-class roots. Top-selling musicians are six times more likely than other people to have attended private schools, and Bafta-nominated actors five times more likely to have done so. The same is true behind the scenes: last year Guardian analysis found that 30% of artistic directors and creative leaders were privately educated.
