The actor Christopher Eccleston recently decried the lack of working-class people taking up acting in the UK.
Speaking to The Times, he laid out a challenge that feels all too familiar to some of us working in higher education:
Class is the last area that we can’t talk about in this country. I think we need to say we’ve got enough public-school, private-school, Oxbridge actors. We’ve got more than enough. I’d like to hear more regional accents.
Eccleston might have been talking about the stage, but he could just as easily have been describing the higher education sector – a space still heavily dominated by exclusive private and grammar school educations, Oxbridge networks, and polished, middle-class vowels.
In recent years, university EDI and widening participation teams have raced to diversify institutions, embracing outreach targets and contextual admissions to recruit students from marginalised backgrounds. Such initiatives have seen great success in some areas, with institutions rightly championing progress on gender, race, and LGBTQ+ inclusion through highly visible frameworks such as Athena Swan and the Race Equality Charter.
Yet when the conversation shifts to social class, many institutions lose vigour and fall silent. Class remains the barrier universities seem too embarrassed to name.
Furthermore, while universities have made inroads in recruiting a more diverse student body, the same cannot be said for academic staff, who are often demographically similar and tend to come from comfortably middle-class backgrounds. As working-class academics (WCAs), we see firsthand that academia remains a monoculture of the elite, and breaking through and being seen can be exhausting.
Defining “working-class”
One of the biggest hurdles to tackling systemic class barriers in our universities is our sheer difficulty in defining what it actually means to be working-class, or even middle-class. In the UK, we have historically leaned on occupation as the ultimate indicator of class. However, academia has long been a definitively middle-class vocation – it is, after all, the literal “ivory tower.”
The problem is that when we WCAs manage to secure careers in academia, we do not simply shed our working-class identity as we walk through the door. We carry it with us. Because of this, relying on occupation-based definitions of class is not just insufficient; it actively prevents essential conversations from happening.
A better definition of class comes from a broader consideration of the social, cultural, and economic resources that shape an individual’s success as well as the invisible barriers they face. Specifically, the cultural capital inherited from our family backgrounds provides a much more accurate lens for understanding class-based inequalities within higher education. Therefore, the WCAs we are talking about are those who come from families with limited economic resources – typically associated with low-skilled or manual labour – and who continue to navigate distinct social and cultural barriers throughout their careers.
The data speaks for itself
When examining how working-class people compare to their middle-class colleagues in career outcomes, the figures paint a damning picture. Back in 2016, UK Labour Force Survey (LFS) data showed that only 15 per cent of researchers and scientists identify as working class. Worse still, those who do make it face a substantial “class pay gap” – earning, on average, £7,350 less than their middle-class peers. It’s not just the sciences, either; data from the Office for National Statistics shows that fewer than one in 10 working-class people go on to work in the arts and culture sector. Furthermore, when looking strictly at the academic workforce, LFS survey data for 2014 to 2022 indicates that the percentage of working-class academics across all further and higher education institutions has hovered between just 8.3 and 14.9 per cent.
The issue isn’t just about getting through the door; it is also about how WCAs feel once inside. For the small number of us who make it here, the culture can feel isolating and career-hindering. In 2022, the University and College Union published a major report on the experiences of working-class staff in post-16 education. A staggering 61 per cent of respondents from working-class backgrounds reported that their class had hindered their career progression, while almost a third claimed to have faced disadvantages or discrimination because of their accent. Even more surprising was the “denial gap” among non-working-class staff, who were significantly more likely to disagree that these systemic barriers even exist.
Academic casualisation is also significantly more likely to impact WCAs and prevent working-class talent from occupying the most senior positions. Teresa Crew says it best in her book Higher Education and Working-Class Academics: Precarity and Diversity in Academia: that because WCAs lack an economic safety net – affectionately known as the “Bank of Mum and Dad” to some – we struggle to endure years of successive fractional and fixed-term postdoc contracts. As a result, we are more likely to settle for lower-tier positions – or drop out of academia altogether.
Many of these positions are teaching-focused roles that are not only stigmatised when compared to research-focused positions, but also in which a glass ceiling is enforced, preventing upward career mobility for WCAs. This is because, as Julie Hulme and Rose Gann point out, institutions fail to properly reward pedagogical scholarship and view teaching-activities merely as “business as usual”.
Taken together, this means that very few WCAs make it into academia, and for those of us who manage to break through, we are relegated to lower-paid, lower-valued precarious positions with fewer opportunities to progress. Worse still, our middle-class colleagues are less likely to acknowledge the issue, making a solution feel out of sight and the topic of “class” feel like a dirty word.
Beyond the statistics: a personal reality
For those of us living and breathing this reality, the data simply confirms what we already know. Despite the valuable inroads made by EDI teams to diversify our campuses, working-class academics remain a marginalised, largely ignored group. For many of us, constantly having to keep our heads above the parapet just to be seen and considered is exhausting.
We are fortunate in our own department to have compassionate colleagues and an EDI infrastructure that encourages us to confront these class barriers head-on. However, the trope of the “working-class hero” is a tired one. Not everyone wants to be heroic. We shouldn’t have to endlessly rage against the system just to get a fair slice of the pie. Nor should we have to compete with other marginalised groups to make sure class-based issues are front and centre. We believe there is enough room in academia for everyone, if only institutions would broaden their gaze and tackle their blind spots.
When WCAs speak to middle-class colleagues about our class disadvantages, those colleagues often become avoidant or defensive, trying to explain away their middle-class privileges by playing them down or denying them altogether.
A common experience is colleagues trying to “big up” their working-class roots in ways that feel patronising. It is not uncommon for a middle-class academic to signal solidarity by claiming their grandfather was a postman, or by pointing out that their financial safety net isn’t quite as vast as someone else’s. We have come to term this discomfort with confronting one’s class privilege as “middle-class fragility”. We believe it is one of the most significant barriers preventing essential conversations about social class from moving forward.
It should not be the responsibility of WCAs to absolve middle-class colleagues of their privileges or to shield them from confronting those realities. To advance the conversation, we need the support of everyone, and that begins with something as simple as acknowledging middle-class privilege and the relative lack of opportunities for WCAs. Talking about social class can be embarrassing for all parties, and the stakes are even higher for WCAs who hold intersectional identities. These are tough conversations, we get it – but they need to happen.
Time to talk about the C-word
If the higher education sector is genuinely committed to equality, it can no longer afford to be shy about social class. This begins by eliminating a glaring institutional blind spot: universities must start tracking the socio-economic backgrounds of their staff, just as they do for other characteristics.
Next, institutions must confront the structural traps of academic casualisation that inordinately affect WCAs. This can be done by significantly reducing temporary and fractional contracts in favour of permanent, stable employment. It also requires institutions to properly value education-focused careers and appropriately reward pedagogical scholarship, ensuring these roles are no longer a working-class glass ceiling.
Finally, we must push for a cultural and legal shift. In practice, this means universities applying pressure on the government to designate social class as a protected characteristic. This move is already supported by organisations such as the British Psychological Society and the Trades Union Congress; adding the collective weight of the higher education sector would undoubtedly move the dial. If universities truly want to retain and nurture working-class talent, it is long past time to unashamedly have these conversations.
