Diversity

Art Fund has awarded £1m in grants for museums and galleries to improve inclusion in the workforce.

The funding comprises £800,000, split between 21 museums and galleries, in the latest round of its Reimagine Grants programme.

The charity says it was particularly interested in applications that responded to the findings and recommendations of its 2022 report on diversity in the curatorial workplace and that are aiming to make their organisations more inclusive.

Contemporary Visual Arts Network has been awarded the maximum £50,000 for a project in partnership with the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art that will offer a two-year professional development programme supporting artists and arts professionals from marginalised communities.

Other funded projects include volunteering opportunities and employment pathways for disabled and neurodivergent people at Buckinghamshire’s National Paralympic Heritage Centre and an action learning project developing new ways of working with underrepresented communities at Oriel Myrddin Gallery in Carmarthenshire.

A total of £7.3m has been awarded in Reimagine Grants since the first round in August 2020.

Art Fund’s £1m grant package also includes a ringfenced £200,000 to be awarded through Museum Development UK (MDUK) to support smaller museums retain and train staff.

MDUK will distribute the funds through a combination of grants and programmes, while investing £100,000 of their own through match funding.

The award giving will have an emphasis on curatorial posts and members of the workforce who work directly with collections including learning, engagement and conservation.

The UK music licensing company PPL says latest staffing data shows it is an "industry forerunner" when it comes to diversity in the workplace.

The voluntarily released gender and ethnicity data for 2023 reveals that mean pay gaps – the average difference in pay – have decreased between April 2022 and April 2023.

The mean gender pay gap decreased to 5.4% in favour of men, from 11.7% in 2022, while the proportion of non-white staff has increased by 3% and now makes up 30% of staff.

The company said its senior team including executive directors and heads of department is 51% female.

Kate Reilly, Chief Membership and People Officer at PPL, said the company was "very proud of the work we’re doing to contribute to a fairer, more diverse industry".

She added: “Striving to become an ever more equitable and inclusive company is not only the right thing to do, but it is also good for business. PPL is stronger for better reflecting our membership and society at large.

"Over the coming years, we will further develop our diversity throughout all levels of the organisation."

Freelance creative workers living in the North of the UK are suffering from three significant pay gaps, a new poll has found.

Recruitment agency Major Players polled 450 digital, marketing, product and creative workers in the Midlands, North East, North, West Yorkshire & the Humber and Scotland, and found pay gaps relating to gender, ethnicity and identity.

The poll found the pay skew in favour of men working within freelance roles in the north was “considerably higher” than the UK average, at 15.9%.

An ethnicity pay gap was also found on creative assignments, with Asian, Black, Mixed, Arabic or Other background freelancers earning an average of 7.1% less than their counterparts.

The poll also revealed LGBT+ freelancers in the north earned on average 7% less than the average UK day rates. This gap was also considerably higher than the UK average LGBT+ pay gap of 1.4%. 

The statistics underscore just one aspect of the challenges faced by minority freelancers, George Greenaway-Poole, Major Player’s Group Marketing Director wrote on LinkedIn.

“I saw a recent statistic which said that more than 35% of the LGBTQIA+ community hide their sexuality at work in fear of negativity or discrimination,” he said.

He added that for those who were ‘out’, repeatedly sharing aspects of their identities can be “emotionally draining”.

He suggested that businesses could help alleviate the pressures on LGBT+ workers by asking people for their pronouns, using inclusive language and gender-neutral terms and including visual cues in work settings, such as hanging rainbow flags.

Revolution Performing Arts (RPA) has announced a partnership with specialist tuition service Hunt Scholars to create alternative provision for children with varied needs.

The two organisations will work together to support young people with non-traditional educational needs or those who may have found that school is not for them.

Revolution@HuntScholars will run initially from North Swindon, accepting referrals from local schools and support organisations and working with home-educating families, who are invited to make contact directly.

“We plan to offer a bespoke package to children who for many reasons have been unable to flourish in the school system,” said RPA’s founder Fi Da Silva-Adams.

“Academic education works best when a person feels part of a community of shared values, feels their skills and contributions are important and that their experiences are validated. We wanted to create a safe space with the right environment for resilience to develop and self-esteem to grow.”

Sessions will be tailored to help young people integrate into the wider community, as well as to reinforce skills across the curriculum, “linking them back to education in a way which feels relevant and attainable for them”, she added.

Ellie Hunt, a qualified teacher who runs Hunt Scholars, described RPA’s work as “naturally exuberant and joyful”.

“It is a place where children feel accepted, not ‘othered’, so that they can have the confidence to be themselves,” she said.

Other local providers primarily use sport to support young people with differing needs, she said, “so the time is right for an art-based package”. 

“We will use drama to develop emotional literacy such as understanding what body language may look like. Dance can help children who need movement breaks because they can’t sit still for long. By trying circus skills a child might master balancing a peacock feather on their finger and take that confidence forward into a maths lesson.”