Two years after the establishment of the Skills Task Force following the 2022 BFI Skills Review, investment in UK skills and training has risen sharply. And the British Film Commission (BFC) continues to prioritise its support in this area.
“Our role when it comes to skills and training is to ensure that the relevant partners are signposted and connected to productions that should be engaging with them,” notes Gareth Kirkman, the BFC’s UK business and industry development manager. “We are in a very strong position right now. There are so many initiatives to up-skill for new entrants, mid-level [workers] and senior level as well.”
That, he says, is crucial to the health of the industry as a whole. “Our priority is to ensure the amazing work done by our UK skills and training infrastructure is communicated to the US clients. It’s a win, win situation really – the studios and steamers want strong crews, and our training providers want their pools of talent to be given great opportunities to work on exciting productions. Our clients always repeat that the crew base is what brings [productions] to the UK and what keeps them coming back. We need to protect that reputation and improve on it.”
Indeed, the UK industry’s commitment to skills training continues apace. Last year, the British Film Institute (BFI) announced that it had set aside £9.6m of lottery funding for skills development and training over the next three years. In July 2024, it also published a crew mapping and forecasting study which will help identify skills gaps and needs. Additionally, the recently-elected Labour Government is creating new body Skills England, which is expected to create greater flexibility around apprenticeship training (from which film and TV should benefit).
The challenge now is to build on what has been achieved. “Everyone cares and really wants to get this right,” says Laura Mansfield, managing director of industry training body ScreenSkills. “There’s a real opportunity for us to simplify the landscape around training, skills development — and to create clearer pathways, easier access and easier accessibility.”
“We don’t think the issue is a lack of financial resourcing in the system,” says Sara Whybrew, BFI’s director of skills and workforce development. “It is about making sure now that money is going into the right interventions, and training people for the occupations they need to be trained for.”
To that end, the BFI established six skills clusters which have received £8.1m between them over three years: Screen Yorkshire (North of England); Film London (London, Hertfordshire, Surrey, and Buckinghamshire); Screen Scotland (Scotland); Create Central (West Midlands); Northern Ireland Screen (Northern Ireland); and Resource Productions (Berkshire). A seventh cluster was added in April 2024 to cover Wales. The idea here is to build local crew bases and create routes to industry across the UK. In addition to UK-wide initiatives, each national and regional screen agency (Creative Wales, Filming In England, Film London, Northern Ireland Screen and Screen Scotland) focuses on their own dedicated skills work in their respective areas, including auditing their crew resources and establishing where skills gaps remain in their local area.
Wide-ranging talent
One priority is ensuring that entrants into the industry are being given the tools to build long-term careers; something that goes well beyond learning how to do a specific job on a single project. To that end, US studios and streamers are having engaged with the UK training infrastructure to ensure a healthy pipeline of talent.
“All of our major US clients appreciate the significance of developing this UK crew base, and each have made commitments and investment to this in various ways — whether launch their own initiatives or developing programmes in partnership with key infrastructure here,” notes Kirkman.
Examples include Warner Bros. Discovery’s CrewHQ, a dedicated on-site training centre at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden launched in November 2023 that offers routes to industry for people of all backgrounds. NBC Universal and Sky Studios’ Future Talent Programme is based at Sky Studios Elstree, and is geared towards helping young people eland their first industry jobs. Bad Wolf (which is majority owned by Sony Pictures Television) is a key partner of Screen Alliance Wales, based at Wolf Studios Wales, which offers training and other opportunities for young crew members.
These training providers and initiatives are also continuing to branch further out from the usual sources, to ensure that people from underrepresented backgrounds can forge a professional path into an industry that might previously have seemed unreachable.
“The UK is fortunate to have an abundance of individuals and organisations with a focus on tackling specific areas of representation,” says Kirkman. “Whether that’s studios working with local schools to reach untapped talent in racially diverse areas, or pan-industry initiatives to make production spaces more suitable for deaf, disabled and neurodivergent crews. Overall, there is a collective effort going on to make our training infrastructure more inclusive and accessible than ever”.
Valuable experience
At the same time as helping newcomers, agencies are also always looking to improve the skills of those who’ve already cut their teeth. “We know some of our major issues are in mid to senior workers,” Whybrew observes. “We need to ensure there is a better balance to support both new entry and professional development of those [already] in the workforce.”
What is also becoming far more commonplace is transferring skills into film and TV from other sectors. Ruby Avards was becoming disillusioned with her traditional accounting job, and enrolled on the Production Guild Of Great Britain’s (PGGB) Assistant Production Accountant Training Scheme (APATS). She is now a fully fledged production accountant; one area in which there has long been a severe skills shortage.
“The biggest challenge for me as a Production Accountant was feeling like I was spinning 10 plates, wearing stilettos and standing on one leg, all the time smiling and making sure everyone had what they needed,”she reflects “This is why courses like APATS are so important. They give solid foundations and skills to assistants so as they rise through the ranks they know what they know and also more importantly know what they don’t know.”
The Assistant Production Accountant Training Scheme, re-branded as NAPATS as it is now run by PGGB with Netflix support, provides the opportunity for trainees to work on Netflix productions.
“The key point about our training is that we present industry-ready programmes and they are delivered by the best in the biz,” says Becky Maynard, head of talent development at PGGB. She notes that PGGB trainers include figures like producer Steve Clarke-Hall and location manager Harriet Lawrence, who have worked at the highest level of the business for many years.
“We are constantly looking ahead,” Maynard adds of PGGB training programmes. “The great thing about our community of approximately 1000 members is that we can work collaboratively with them so we are understanding needs on an individual and industry-wide basis.”
Another skills challenge is to retain people in the workforce and ensure expertise built up over many years is not lost. “It’s all very well to bring people in but then you have to help them continue to progress their careers,” Mansfield emphasises.
Earlier this year, the BFI announced its Good Work Programme for Screen, intended to better understand what a perfect day in production might look like, balancing working hours, well-being and production budgets. “Similarly, the BFC has a continuing partnership with production mental health specialists Solas Mind. To date, BFC have funded 300 one-to-one counselling sessions for crews working on inward investment productions in the UK.”
While much progress has been made in skills training over the last few years, no-one is taking their foot of the gas when it comes to ensuring UK crews are the best in the world. “There is always work to be done of course,” says Kirkman, “but our job at the BFC is made much easier when there is such a wealth of inspiring training activity happening in the UK.”
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