Spiked summer school to redress journalism’s class bias

An online current affairs magazine has set up a journalism summer school solely for state school students, in a bid to counter the private school bias for jobs in the media.

Spiked said it was running the journalism summer school for 16- to 18-year-old Londoners from state schools, who might not normally have the opportunities to get into journalism.

The initiative, sponsored by the City of London, comes at a time when research shows that half of leading journalists went to private schools. According to a survey released by the Sutton Trust in June, 54 per cent of national newspaper editors, columnists and broadcasters went to school in the private sector.

Spiked writer and programme coordinator Josie Appleton said: "Politics being what it is, journalism has never been as important as it is now, and it is a way in which young people can make their voice heard, but there is a bias on the kind of people who get onto the comment pages — so we're trying to counter that."

Spiked editor Mick Hume added: "We hope the summer school will give these state school sixth-formers a taste for proper journalism, and prove more useful than an A-level media studies course."

Speakers at the week-long event, which concluded this Friday [18 August], included former Sunday Times special correspondent Phillip Knightley, Times comment editor Daniel Finkelstein and Heat news editor Hannah Perry.