Nobody on my estate grew up to be a photographer.
You could be a hairdresser. You could work in a shop, or a factory, or a care home if you were caring, or the council if you were lucky. Being paid to make pictures, or to decide what a brand should look and sound like, wasn't on the list. It wasn't that anyone told me I couldn't. Nobody I knew had ever done it, so it simply didn't exist.
I'm working class born and raised. I got my degrees as a grown woman, while running two businesses, a single mum, paying the mortgage and the bills, and navigating the grief of my fiancé passing, and I started photographing people for a living in 2008 with no idea what I was doing and no one to ring and ask. I still sometimes walk into a meeting and wait for someone to notice I'm not supposed to be there. Should I be here? The fight to maintain a business in the “arts” is f**king brutal if you don’t have the right connections.
It's 2026 now. We've had Billy Elliot, we've had grime, and plenty of the country's biggest creators started out filming in their bedrooms. You'd think the doors would be wide open by now.
So I couldn't help but wonder…
Are working-class people still shut out of the creative industries? Or are we just watching ourselves on screen, in stories made by somebody else?
The numbers, and they're not pretty
Roughly a third of people working across the UK come from working-class backgrounds. In the creative industries, according to the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, it's 16%. Over half the creative workforce, 52%, comes from privileged backgrounds, compared with 37% of jobs overall. If you grew up middle class, you're more than twice as likely to land a creative job than if you didn't.
It gets worse the closer you get to the glamorous end. In music, performance and the visual arts, working-class people make up 12% of the workforce. In publishing it's 13%, and in film it's 16%. A 2024 report cited in the Glass Ceiling review put the working-class share of TV and radio workers at 8%. And one study found the working-class share of actors, musicians and writers has halved since the 1970s.
Then there's the private school thing. About 7% of people in the UK go to a fee-paying school. The Sutton Trust found that 35% of Bafta-nominated actors went to one, and 43% of Britain's best-selling classical musicians.
And it's worse again if you're a woman. Privileged men are almost five times more likely to work in a creative job than working-class women. So if you're a working-class woman who makes things for a living, congratulations, you are basically a unicorn. Please do not let anyone put you on a mug.
Meet Hattie, whose dad knows someone
Hattie is 22. She's doing an unpaid internship at a production company in London, which is fine, because she lives in her godmother's spare room in Islington and her parents pay her phone bill. She got the internship because her dad played golf with someone. She's lovely. She's also exactly why the numbers look the way they do.
None of it is Hattie's fault. But the creative industries are built for her. A huge amount of the work is freelance, which means no sick pay and no idea what you're earning next month. A lot of the first jobs are unpaid or barely paid. And most of them are in London, where a room costs more than my first car.
If you haven't got what January's Glass Ceiling review of the Greater Manchester arts scene called the “bank of mum and dad,” you can't afford to work for nothing while you build a portfolio. You take the job that pays the rent instead, and the creative career becomes something you'll do “one day.”
That review, led by Nazir Afzal, surveyed 300 working-class people already working in the arts. Only 44% said they earned enough to make a living. Just 22% had known anyone in the arts while they were growing up. And 51% said they'd been bullied, harassed or treated with bias because of their class.
That last one stays with me. Half of them. Because it doesn't stop when you get in the door. It's the comment about your accent in a meeting. It's not knowing you were supposed to have “sent something over” to a bloke you met at a party you weren't invited to.
It starts long before the internship
The door starts closing at school.
This summer's exam results showed the arts making up 10% of A-level entries, the lowest share on record and down by a third since 2010, according to the Campaign for the Arts. Drama's share has fallen 58% since then. Music had the fewest A-level entries ever recorded, just 5,106 in the whole country. At GCSE, the arts' share has almost halved since 2010.
Private schools still have the theatres and the art rooms with actual kilns in them. In a lot of state schools, the arts are the first thing to go when the budget gets tight. Research from Cambridge found that a family's economic background affects whether a pupil picks an arts subject at all, and that the effect is stronger for girls.
The Sutton Trust found the same pattern at university. At Cambridge and Bath, 4% of creative students are from working-class backgrounds. At the Royal Academy of Music, 60% went to private school. Some conservatoires still charge for auditions, which means you pay for the privilege of being told no.
I didn't know any of this at 16. I just knew art was what you did if you were “not academic,” and that it wasn't a real job.
I was, apparently, not academic. That girl now holds a Masters degree, and a PhD is on the table if somebody will kindly fund it. If I could go back, I wouldn't bother telling her she'd be clever. I'd tell her the people sorting the kids into piles hadn't got a clue what they were looking at.
We're on the telly, though
Here's the strange bit. Working-class life is all over our screens. Gritty Northern dramas and estates shot in flat grey light with a sad piano underneath. We are a very popular subject.
We just don't get to hold the camera very often. If 8% of TV and radio workers are working class, then most of the stories about us are being written, cast, lit and edited by people who've only ever visited. And you can tell. The kitchens are always too tidy or too filthy. Everyone is either a saint or a villain. Nobody is ever just knackered after a twelve-hour shift and laughing at something daft on their phone.
In the Greater Manchester review, only 18% of working-class arts workers said working-class lives and culture were widely represented in the work they were making. That's the people in the industry saying it.
It's the male gaze problem all over again, with a different lens. When you only ever see yourself through someone else's eyes, you start to believe their version. You start to think your life is the sad piano bit.
Is the internet the side door?
There are two interesting exceptions in all this research, and I don't think they're a coincidence.
The first is pop. Only 8% of Britain's top-selling pop stars went to private school, which is close to the national average. The second is crafts, where about a third of the workforce is working class, the only creative sector that comes anywhere near the rest of the economy.
What do they have in common? You can just start. Nobody has to let you into pop music. You need a voice and a bedroom. Nobody has to give you permission to make a pot or carve a print and sell it. The gatekeepers matter a lot less when there isn't really a gate.
That's what the internet was supposed to do for everyone else, and in a way it has. I'm living proof. I didn't get my start because somebody's dad played golf with somebody. I got it with a camera and a lot of nerve. These days, up to 1.3 million young people in the UK say they want to earn a living from making content, and none of them needs a godmother in Islington to post a video.
But I'd be lying if I said the side door was wide open. Most creators earn very little, there are pay gaps by race and gender, and you still need time to make things, which is the one thing that costs most when you're skint. The algorithm has its own snobbery too. Have a look at which accents and which kitchens go viral, and which ones get called “relatable” in a slightly patronising way.
So, is it still the same in 2026?
Mostly, yes. And in some ways it's going backwards.
The working-class share of creative jobs has barely moved in years. The arts are draining out of state schools. Less than 1% of new apprenticeship starts are in the creative sector, which the Glass Ceiling review's co-author Avis Gilmore called “a scandal,” and I'd use a stronger word. The review's top recommendation is to make social class a protected characteristic in law, the way sex and race already are. I think they're right, and I think it'll take years.
Here's my opinion. Working-class talent is everywhere. What's missing is working-class time and money. Every one of us knows a girl from school who could draw better than anyone, and who's now doing the payroll at a builders' merchants because somebody had to pay the gas bill.
And it matters beyond our own careers. The pictures, films, adverts and songs we all live inside are how a country tells itself who it is. If almost all of them are made by Hattie, then the country ends up seeing itself through Hattie's eyes. She'll get our kitchens wrong. She'll put a sad piano on our lives.
I'm still here, mind. I still occasionally wait to be found out in meetings. But I've stopped apologising for the accent.
Sources
Creative PEC: Getting in and getting on, class in the creative industries (Heather Carey)
Arts Professional: people from privileged backgrounds twice as likely to hold creative jobs
Advanced Television: Creative Access class ceiling research, 2024
The Guardian, via inkl: Sutton Trust on working-class young people blocked from creative careers
Left Foot Forward: the Glass Ceiling review of the Greater Manchester arts sector, January 2026
