Hachette UK's All Together Network tackles diversity in publishing

As co-chairs of the All Together Network (ATN) at Hachette UK, our mission is to promote the recruitment, retention and development of people from low socio-economic status (SES) and regional backgrounds at the company, whilst also highlighting the work of our authors and illustrators from these backgrounds in an industry that remains very middle-class and London-centric. 

In 2018, the Panic! It’s an Arts Emergency report found that just 12.6% of staff in publishing had working-class origins. Partly inspired by this and the sense that there was little discussion of the experience of working-class staff in the industry, Jonathan Paterson, Katie Ellis-Brown and Kadie McGinley from HUK set up the ATN to, in Jonathan’s words, ‘break the stranglehold that London and upper middle-class people have on the industry’. The appetite for such a network was huge, and over 60 members of staff joined the network within a week of its launch. 

In January 2021, we took over as co-chairs just as HUK was preparing to open five new national offices in Edinburgh, Newcastle, Manchester, Sheffield and Bristol. As two people who grew up in the North of England without any connections to the creative industries in London, and two of the first people to sign up to join HUK’s new national offices and be appointed Office Leads (in Manchester and Newcastle), we knew we had an incredible opportunity to galvanise staff and people in the industry around this game-changing opportunity. 

 

CEO, David Shelley’s visit to Manchester for the National Offices Day organised by ATN

 

Together with our brilliant committee, we held an ATN National Offices Day for 800+ staff to showcase our new offices, the people in them and the creative industries in the cities, and it greatly increased the awareness of, and interest in, our regional hubs.

It’s essential that the ATN builds strong industry relationships with people like Natasha Carthew, who works tirelessly to highlight the work of working-class writers. The ATN co-sponsored the Working Class Writers’ Festival 21, and held three events where both the panellists and audiences felt their experiences and perspectives were being heard for the first time.

This year, the ATN and Richard Kitson (HUK’s deputy CEO and our network sponsor) have been involved in the creation of an industry-first MA Publishing programme at Northumbria University in partnership with New Writing North. The ATN is managing the students’ placements and we can’t wait to show them the opportunities that are available to them outside London. 

We’re also excited to be restarting HUK’s schools outreach programme post-Covid, with a focus on areas around our new national offices identified as social mobility ‘coldspots’. 

One of our proudest achievements was organising HUK’s National Offices Day. The event was a huge success but the words of our keynote speaker that day, Claire Malcolm MBE (the CEO of New Writing North), stuck with us - ‘there is not a lack of talent, but a lack of opportunity’ - and we cannot afford to be complacent. 

The statistic that 19% of publishing staff are privately educated, compared to 7% of the UK population, is often cited, but perhaps most shockingly of all, the 2021 PEC report found that, if the creative industries were as socio-economically diverse as the rest of the economy, there’d be over 250,000 more working-class people in the sector. 

Publishing must play its role in improving this statistic, with equal opportunities for everyone regardless of social background or location, as well as liveable wages and work environments and cultures that allow people from these backgrounds to feel they genuinely belong and are heard. It matters enormously to us that the ATN is part of this long overdue and much-needed change in the industry.

 

Emma Layfield & Sarah Fortune*

 

*The All Together Network at Hachette UK currently has new co-chairs.