Dawn Bowden MS, Deputy Minister for Arts and Sport, and Chief Whip
I am updating Members about the approach for the delivery of a Creative Skills Body, one of our Programme for Government commitments.
At the launch of Creative Wales, skills and talent support was identified as a key priority for our creative sectors. Since January 2020, Creative Wales’ skills and talent team has worked hard to make connections between stakeholders, industry, education and training providers to deliver benefits to the screen sector and maximise limited resources.
Creative Wales has worked in partnership with unions, training providers, further education and higher education, broadcasters, government, industry and with UK-wide body ScreenSkills to support skills projects and encourage a joined-up approach and avoid duplication. A total of 12 projects have been supported, including the new national film and television school hub in Wales, NFTS Cymru.
Productions which receive funding from Creative Wales must commit to providing trainee opportunities in the form of paid placements. These are tracked and monitored to help ensure future careers pathways for all trainees. More than 120 trainees have benefitted from paid placements on Creative Wales-supported productions in the past two years.
Creative Wales has worked with Skills Higher Education and Lifelong Learning to prioritise the redevelopment of the Creative Media apprenticeship framework and establish a new apprenticeship training agency pilot in the screen sector in South Wales – Criw. This has proved to be very successful and we will roll out a similar model in North Wales and in other creative sectors.
Creative Wales is also working closely with our education department to ensure all supported skills initiatives fit with the new curriculum.
The next step will be to expand its work into supporting the skills and talent needs of the other creative sectors, digital, music, publishing and emerging sectors.
I have therefore decided that the new creative skills body will be delivered internally through Creative Wales – a structure that has already proven that it works, with a ratified skills group and an enhanced Creative Wales skills and talent function. We will strengthen the skills group structure, which already has very strong stakeholder membership, to introduce a core steering group to guide its work and report back to the Creative Wales non-executive board.
This will help us deliver this Programme for Government commitment within six months while building on the skills work already being delivered by Creative Wales. It will ensure future resourcing to be focused on supporting creative skills and talent initiatives in Wales, rather than being spent on the costs of setting up of a new organisation.
This approach will also ensure future creative skills activity is aligned to Programme for Government commitments to deliver the Young Persons Guarantee, giving everyone under 25 the offer of work, education, training, or self-employment and create 125,000 all-age apprenticeships.