Written by Jaldeep Katwala, Director of the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity.
BCU’s BBC partnership could change the make-up of British media in the future.
Birmingham City University has just entered a 10-year partnership with the BBC. It is validating 12 new degrees developed with the corporation: documentary production; future media, content creation and production; radio and podcasting; sports media and journalism; television and radio production; and broadcast engineering, each at undergraduate and postgraduate level.
The partnership is centred in one of the youngest and most diverse cities in Europe, at a time when the BBC is shifting serious money and production into the West Midlands.
That combination is rare. Handled well, it could change not just how many people enter British media, but who.
I welcome it. It is the right thing to do, in the right city, at precisely the right moment.
Network television spend in the West Midlands is rising from £24m to £40m a year. A new BBC Midlands headquarters is going up at the Tea Factory in Digbeth. The corporation’s own modelling puts £282m of additional value into the region by 2031. And the 2021 census found that 51.4% of Birmingham’s people are from Black, Asian or minority ethnic backgrounds, and one in five is disabled.
When Sir Lenny Henry interviewed me for this role, he told me something I have held on to since. The job is not to lower the bar. It is to open the door, and then to give talented people the opportunity to rise and shine. Birmingham has never been short of talent. It has been short of entry doors and lifts to the upper floors.
Over the summer I asked in these pages who benefits from the BBC’s growth, its scrutiny and its savings. That question now applies to my own university too. The Sir Lenny Henry Centre will go on holding the industry to account on diversity. If anything, the partnership gives that work more reason to exist: we now have a direct stake in the answer.
What success looks like in 2036
Birmingham talent does not have to leave Birmingham. Productions stop arriving with their London crews intact, because there is a crew base here deep enough to staff them. Documentary makers start their careers without moving south and working unpaid.
The first credit is within reach of far more people. The BBC’s own growth report found that people who get a first BBC credit average 15.8 credits across their careers. Those who never do average 5.2. That first credit is a gate, and these courses sit right in front of it. Get it right and the effect compounds for 30 years.
The partnership produces production talent, not just graduates. These degrees are weighted towards production, journalism and engineering. These are crew roles that rarely feature in arguments about who works in television, and where representation has lagged most. Success means engineers from Handsworth and Small Heath in the gallery.
Diverse entrants stay. Graduates will not walk into permanent staff jobs. They will start on fixed-term contracts and freelance work, where diverse talent has historically slipped out of the industry unnoticed. A 10-year partnership can be designed to hold on to them, through repeat placements, mentoring and tracking what happens after the first job.
We measure progression, not just recruitment. Our study Breaking found that 70% of racially minoritised journalists in national television newsrooms saw too little chance to progress. Getting people in is the start, not the finish.
What we both should publish
None of this is onerous. It rests on data both partners already hold, published so that anyone can see whether it worked.
Birmingham-level workforce and commissioning data. The BBC already publishes these figures for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. For Birmingham, they would show the difference between genuinely local recruitment and a Digbeth postcode of convenience.
Crew representativeness as well as crew localness. The BBC’s North East partnership already tracks the share of productions with majority regional crew. If localness can be measured, so can representativeness, as Channel 4 showed after our Black to Front research.
BCU’s own outcomes. We should publish graduate destinations, first credits and progression by background. If we ask it of the BBC, we must show it ourselves.
The point
Sir Lenny put it plainly in the Centre’s second annual lecture in May: “We are in a fight for the British media. Who tells our stories, who has the power to decide who those people are, and where those stories are heard.”
Over the next 10 years the question is not simply how many people we train. It is also who gets the opportunity to enter, who gets the first credit, who stays, who progresses and, ultimately, who gets to tell Britain’s stories. We are proud to be part of the answer, and by 2036, we need to show that it worked.