Social class: PR’s last taboo?

The value of professional growth has been brought to life this week as part of the CIPR’s involvement in Learning at Work Week, including daily thought-leadership posts here on Influence. The Institute has also shone a spotlight on the benefits of continued learning with resources and webinars for PR practitioners and those interested in joining the industry. In the final part of this week’s takeover, journalist Christian Koch examines the barriers to social mobility within public relations, looks at how the CIPR is giving a boost to those who need help with their development and meets communications professionals who are determined to change the status quo.

The recent CIPR 75th anniversary issue of Influence featured interviews with a panoply of pioneering publicists who have helped shape the UK’s PR industry in the last 50 years. 

And if there’s a common thread linking the likes of Lynne Franks, Alan Edwards, Jackie Cooper and Mark Borkowski, it’s that none of them attended university. They entered the industry from backgrounds as inauspicious as living in a squat (Edwards), working in a pork pie factory (Borkowski), secretarial work (Franks) and school (Cooper, who once told PRWeek, “I didn’t fit in at school and couldn’t wait to leave. I was working in PR at the age of 18”). 

Could the same be said of the PR industry today? Is it still a meritocratic place where savvy school-leavers and secretaries can climb to the top through talent, determination and hard work alone? 

Last year’s Levelling Up Public Relations report, produced by Sheffield Hallam University and Nottingham-based communications consultancy BakerBaird, and funded through the CIPR’s Research Fund, would indicate not. It found nearly 86% of respondents had attended university, with more than a quarter feeling their background or social class has an impact upon career progression. 

However, for those PR professionals from socially disadvantaged backgrounds, a sense of ‘imposter syndrome’ can chip away at confidence. 

“Some of the PRs I’ve spoken to have said they lack confidence mixing with London-based PRs who are privately educated, middle-aged and middle-class,” says Elizabeth Bridgen, principal lecturer in public relations at Sheffield Hallam University, and who worked on the Levelling Up Public Relations report. “They felt they were seen as ‘different.’ If you don’t have the right social/financial capital, it can hold you back.”

Barriers to promotion

Those from working-class backgrounds can also have their career progression thwarted because they’re unaware of the subtle hacks needed to gain promotion and navigate office culture, such as asking for pay rises. “Some PRs told me they didn’t realise they were allowed to claim back travel costs for expenses,” says Bridgen. 

It’s not the only way in which some junior PRs are put at an immediate financial disadvantage. 

“Other people told me they couldn’t afford to apply for some PR roles, because the job entailed them dressing in a certain way,” adds Bridgen. “Even if the dress code for attending functions is ‘smart casual,’ it’s still expensive… All these incremental things – which are very much tied to social class – can hold people back.”

In many ways, this mirrors what is happening in the rest of the UK: according to a report published last September by economic thinktank Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), social mobility is at its worst in over 50 years. The study found those children born into poorer households or from a minority ethnic background were finding it more difficult to move up into higher income brackets. The IFS also found that parental earnings are a much stronger predictor for the salaries people born from the 1970s could expect, than previous generations.

The UK’s social mobility crisis is expected to be a key battleground in the next general election too, especially given Boris Johnson’s levelling-up agenda was credited with securing the Conservatives a landslide victory in 2019. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer has made social mobility one of his five missions, talking about his desire to “shatter the class ceiling” and promising to help those people who “have heard a nagging voice inside, saying, ‘no, this isn’t for you. You don’t belong here’.”

Starmer – and Labour – could be waiting a long time. Discrimination against accents is still a problem in many British workplaces according to a report published by Queen Mary University London in 2022. It found a quarter of adults surveyed said their accents had been mocked or criticised at work, with received pronunciation (aka ‘BBC English’) regarded as the most prestigious (African-Caribbean, Indian, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham accents all came bottom). 

It's an issue in PR too. Bridgen speaks of some professionals who told her they feared “being on judged for their accent, which leads to confidence issues and impacts on promotion”. 

Stuart Baird, director at BakerBaird and a CIPR fellow, has noted a trend where “people have developed a homogenous, generic London southeast accent” to assimilate with their colleagues and clients. “The diversity of our regions, people speaking with accents from Belfast, Glasgow or Cardiff, is one of the huge strengths of our country, but we seem to have got locked into this homogenous phase.”

Middle-class clones

This chimes with the theories of Lee Elliot Major, professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter, who recently argued there’s a widespread attitude in education requiring children to become “middle-class clones” to thrive. It can also be glimpsed in the world of PR. 

“Somebody long ago decided what it means to be a PR, whether it’s the Home Counties, redbrick-educated ‘PR girl’ – think Sophie Wessex – or the white-guy creative director with his mockney accent, white T-shirt and bad beard,” comms consultant Elizabeth Bananuka recently told Influence. “PR has traditionally hired in this self-image.”

There also appears to be a widespread lack of awareness of PR as a career among many young people. The Levelling Up Public Relations report found that most respondents (52%) were unfamiliar with public relations until they started working, while another 29% only became au fait with PR at university. Baird recently spoke at one school, where one pupil assumed the word ‘comms’ meant ‘Communist’ (the others had no idea what PR entailed). 

“It’s about embedding knowledge of PR from the get-go, getting upstream and informing kids from an early age – possibly while they’re doing GCSEs and maybe the first year of sixth-form college,” says Baird. 

Even for those people wanting to work in the industry, PR is still perceived to be a largely Londoncentric profession. Levelling Up Public Relations found over two-thirds (68%) of students studying public relations degree courses said they thought they’d need to work in London or another large metropolitan city for their career. 

“There’s a pull of gravity towards places like London, but this is just as much about lifestyle as career opportunities,” says Baird. “There’s no sense this is going to change dramatically.”

Unpaid internships

The spectre of unpaid internships hardly helps matters. In London – where many top PR firms are based – unpaid work experience can cost interns at least £1,019 a month in rent and travel expenses, according to the Sutton Trust. The CIPR advocates all PR interns should be paid at least the living wage, while the EU is currently working on drafting legislation that would ban most unpaid internships across the bloc. Still, in the UK, unpaid placements are still seen as an acceptable way to get on the first rung of the PR ladder – even if they largely benefit those who can rely upon the bank of mum-and-dad.

“You can’t do an unpaid internship if you’re having to work in a part-time job, pay your rent or university fees,” says Bridgen. “Even paid internships aren’t the answer: students may lose their part-time jobs because they can’t take a fortnight off to do the placement.”

Recent debate about ‘nepo babies’ on the press and social media may make many young people feel the industry is run on an invisible network of family and educational leg-ups. Nepotism is more likely to flourish in PR because the industry remains relatively unregulated, says Kevin Taylor, founder and managing director of Robertson Taylor PR and non-executive chairman of Jargon PR. 

“PR is a unique profession in that anybody can rent office space, put stickers on the door and say they’re a PR consultancy,” he says. “You can’t do that as an accountant or lawyer. Therefore, getting a job or work experience because of who-your-dad-might-know is probably greater in PR than other professions, which are more reliant upon gaining qualifications.”

However, some sectors of PR are seemingly more inclusive than others. Bridgen notes that recruitment into PR jobs in the UK’s £1bn adult entertainment industry “tends to be more open, diverse and accepting of people from different educational backgrounds. Their progression tends to be faster because they are involved with public affairs such as lobbying or working with policymakers and parliament on legislation, much earlier in their careers. They get a much a broader experience early on”.

Business sense

Those PR firms in other sectors who don’t embrace social mobility could lose out on business. “I’m a university-educated, white, heterosexual male and right now, many of my clients look like me,” says Baird. “But this is changing… People/consumers might stop engaging with a company’s PR if they feel your ideas don’t reflect the broader social base that the United Kingdom has become.”

Baird cites the example of one recruit hired by BakerBaird from Mansfield, one of the most deprived areas in the UK. “She bought a fresh perspective and challenged us to think differently,” he says. “Our client base tends to be universities, NHS, local government and legal. Yet, she made us think about diversifying this client base, as well as how we deliver our services, and what potential clients might need.”

Says Bridgen, “If you don’t have diversity of thought within your organisation, you won’t be able to understand how consumers perceive your communications campaigns. For example, in health communications, you can’t expect everybody to understand certain language or access things in the same way you do. If you’re telling everybody to work from home during Covid and to ‘use your laptop,’ it excludes those people for whom home isn’t a safe place, or people in rural areas with poor connectivity.”

As Taylor says, “One of the skills PRs have in their arsenal is the ability to speak truth to power. The broader our view of the outside world, and the more places were recruiting from, the better our advice will be. So, unless we broaden out from recruiting the same people, we won’t be able to reflect society and relay that to our clients.”

And ultimately, it could even lead to business being taken away. “If an organisation feels their PR company doesn’t understand them or the audience they’re trying to reach, they might do their own PR in-house – something which would horrify many PRs,” she adds.

Iprovision funding

The CIPR is rising to the challenge. During its diamond year, the organisation launched the 75 Fund, with a £75,000 kitty aimed at helping people from financially and socially disadvantaged backgrounds build a career in PR. Run by Iprovision (the charity for CIPR members and their dependents), it helped 60 people access CIPR membership, training courses, books, publications and other resources.

Assistance didn’t stop when the birthday celebrations ended. Iprovision’s trustees have created an annual education fund of £10,000 to replace the 75 Fund. CIPR members (including students) who are unable to self-fund their professional development can apply to Iprovision for support with training or education costs, books, online resources and more.

“We felt an educational fund remit would help those facing poverty and hardships the most,” says Taylor, who is also chair of Iprovision. “It’ll help those people who don’t have the funds to get the qualifications and work experience they need to get a job in PR. They’ll also have access to the CIPR network and can attend regional meetings, which may have been previously unavailable to them… [As an industry] we’re missing out on some bright young things; the fund should give them confidence to match their passion by getting a qualification.”

Another initiative doing some great work is Socially Mobile, the not-for-profit PR school run by Sarah and Stephen Waddington, which runs a free 10-week course to help those practitioners from a lower socio-economic background (and other under-represented groups) progress to management roles. 

Apprenticeships could also offer a solution. In sectors such as law, banking, tech and accountancy, apprenticeships are seen as credible alternatives to academic education. PR firms such as Hope&Glory, Edelman and Wildfire have launched apprenticeship schemes in recent years, while Baird notes the apprenticeship programme at the Government Communication Service (GCS) is “absolutely phenomenal. It covered everything from content creation to setting KPIs. I really wish I had something like that when I started my career. It took me approximately 12 years to learn what the GCS apprentices learned in 12 months.”

For any PR firm unsure about where to get started on social mobility, Baird recommends observing what firms have done in other industries. He points to law firm Browne Jacobson, which topped the Social Mobility Index in 2022 (and came second to PwC last year) due to initiatives such as school outreach work, a mentoring scheme for young Black lawyers and a work experience programme for 16-18-year-olds – all aimed at transforming what is traditionally seen as an elitist profession.

And mentoring is vital, says Baird. “It’s one of the most rewarding aspects of working in PR; seeing somebody flourish that you’ve been with since the beginning is one of the top highlights of my career without a shadow of a doubt.” 

As for the future, he urges “PR companies to invest in young people from diverse backgrounds… From a personal, ethical, and business perspective, it’s just the right thing to do.”

Read the full Levelling up the public relations profession report by Stuart Baird and learn about the lived experiences of practitioners from lower socio-economic backgrounds in the Fish out of Water report by Caitlin Plunket-Reilly, also supported by the CIPR PR Research Fund.

Christian Koch is an award-winning journalist and editor who has written for the Sunday Times, Guardian, Evening Standard, Metro, Director, Cosmopolitan, ShortList and Stylist.