TRAINING


THE SKILLS GAP


Production is booming in the UK, but the elephant in the room is the looming skills shortage. Pippa Considine reports on efforts to bridge the training gap


TV. Recent shoots in Britain include the new Indiana Jones, series 5 of The Crown and Mission: Impossible. But will shooting in the UK soon become its own mission impossible? Recent industry estimates, based on a future spend of £6bn a year, reckon we’ll need as many as 30,000 more skilled workers in just a few years. Seetha Kumar, CEO of the industry


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ScreenSkills agency describes “a massive boom, partly fuelled by tax credits, partly stop-start because of the pandemic, partly a sudden boom in building stages.” Add to this, “significant changes in terms of the scale and ambition of shows,” and demand for skills development has rocketed. We need more of it, more streamlining and, of course, more money to fund it. “People want training,” says Donna Taberer,


media consultant and BBC Head of Talent, speaking in a private capacity. “Talent and freelancers are hungry for it and good training is out there. “ Lorraine Heggessey, chairman of the


Grierson Trust, says “we do need to rapidly address the training side, so that we have the staff to work on the productions that are being commissioned.” The Trust has its own DocLab training scheme, alongside assistant editor and production management schemes, where it partners with ScreenSkills and is backed by Netflix. “I don’t think there’s a shortage of will, it’s somehow getting a coherence around all the offerings,” says Heggessey. “It is vital for everyone who works in


television to address and support the next generation of talent with training and skills development,” says Jane Milllichip, chief content officer Sky Studios. “It cannot be the sole remit of one organisation or one broadcaster.” 2021 has seen the milestone launch of the Unscripted TV Skills Fund, with producers and


22 televisual.com Winter 2021


he UK is a magnet for production. The first quarter of 2021 saw a record spend of £878 million in film and high-end


skills: mind the gap


broadcasters/ SVODs paying a levy on factual productions. Channel 4 and the BBC have started it off with a pot of funding and it’s set to bring in around £3m a year by 2024, the same kind of money as its sister initiative, the High End TV Skills Fund. Both are administered through ScreenSkills, which also leads the delivery of the BFI’s National lottery funded Future Film Skills strategy. “The scripted fund no doubt really helped the boom in drama and comedy,” says Taberer,


who has led the prestigious ScreenSkills year- long series producer scheme, which has had 100 participants over five years. “The new unscripted fund is a great positive, we can start to think of training strategically.” The BFI, together with ScreenSkills


and other industry agencies, is currently undertaking a major strategic skills review on behalf of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport which aims to develop long- term solutions to tackle the skills needs of the


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