Architecture, topmost elite profession in UK| Social Mobility in Creative Economy | SURFACES REPORTER Architecture News Update

Architecture has found to be the top elite profession in the United Kingdom as per a report by the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, UK. SURFACES REPORTER (SR) tells.

The report titled as ' Social Mobility in the Creative Economy' was written by Heather Carey, Dave O'Brien and Olivia Gable as part of a three-year programme led by the Policy and Evidence Centre (PEC) exploring class in the creative industries.

Classed as 'Privileged'

According to the report almost 73% of the workforce of the architecture industry is cited as 'privileged'. The architectural careers encompass architects, town planning officers and technicians etc who are ranked number one among the 25 most elite occupations in the country.

"Creative occupations such as architects; journalists and editors; musicians; artists; and producers and directors are, in fact, as dominated by the privileged as doctors, dentists, lawyers and judges. They are even more elite than management consultants and stockbrokers," the report states.

According to the report class -based exclusion is very prominent in creative fields as in 2020 those from privileged backgrounds were twice as likely to be employed in the creative industries as those from working-class backgrounds (9.8 per cent and 4.9 per cent respectively.)

Privilege, according to the report, is defined as people who had at least one parent who worked in a "higher or lower managerial, administrative or professional occupation" when they were 14 years old as referenced from the  National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC), which clusters various occupations together into eight groups. The report considers those who belong to groups I or II, which includes doctors, CEOs and lawyers, to be privileged.

Not much for the Working Class

In the year 2020, only one out of four people working in the creative sectors were belonged to the lower socio-economic backgrounds. The scenario has been there since 2014 which suggests that creative industries need to employ almost 250,000 more working-class people to become as socio-economically diverse as the rest of the economy.

"To put this figure in perspective, this deficit is greater in scale than the size of the creative workforce in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland combined," the report states.

The statistics are taken from Labour Force Survey from July to September 2020 that is carried out quarterly by the Office for National Statistics to record the UK population's employment circumstances.

Source: Dezeen

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