Aardman Equality, Diversity & Inclusion update, August 2024

Aardman is committed to being open and transparent about the work we are doing to improve representation throughout our workforce and to increase the level of on-screen diversity in our productions. This is the eighth in a series of regular updates documenting our progress. Please see links to our previous updates below.

Progress made in the previous six months (March – August 2024):

The bullet points below are the actions we committed to in our previous update. The notes in bold are what we achieved against each in this time period.

• Celebrating World Autism Acceptance Week, International Women’s Day and Pride – amongst other things. We celebrated Neurodiversity Celebration Week and World Autism Acceptance Week by sharing resources and opening an anonymous form for neurodiverse employees to share their experiences. This feedback was used to inform our Neurodiversity Toolkit, please see the bullet point below for more on this. We also arranged and hosted a talk with an employee who was happy to share their journey with OCD with colleagues. We celebrated International Women’s Day by fundraising for Womankind Bristol, an organisation that supports women in the Bristol area with professional counselling, group psychotherapy, befriending and a helpline service. We collected £379 that month and the pot will be open all year, with Womankind being our chosen charity for the year and the total amount raised match-funded by Aardman. We celebrated Pride by running our now annual t-shirt design competition with all proceeds going to Bristol Pride. We also ran two puppet making workshops in advance of Pride, to collectively create puppets which went on to feature in the Bristol Pride parade. Around 25 staff members from Aardman attended the parade and we advertised our support and presence around the building in advance with posters and internal comms with inclusive messaging.
  
  
• Creating a Neurodiversity Toolkit for managers. This Toolkit has now been created and will be rolled out across the business in the coming six months, supported by further internal talks on neurodiversity.
  
  
• Relaunching our successful mentoring scheme with a new cohort of mentors and mentees. We began the process to relaunch our very successful mentoring scheme (38 pairs of people were matched across the business and worked together for six months), but have had to pause this due to capacity. Information about alternative opportunities, such as the Women in Film and TV Mentoring Scheme, has been shared.
  
  
• Having a focus on parents and carers, looking into ways we can better support them at work. Our HR Team has looked at our processes regarding people returning to work after parental leave. We've set up a Working Parents group on Teams to share tips, support etc. and are seeking other methods to help this transition. Members of the team attended a training course called ‘Are you really family friendly?’ from Bump 2 Baby & Beyond and we've shared a link to the course for anyone in the Teams group to watch.  We have now received certification, have use of the logo and will be listed on the new Family Friendly Employers page once it is up and running.
  
  
• Continuing our outreach to schools, with the aim of running two workshops per term. In this period, we ran four outreach events: a workshop with City Academy Bristol; a workshop with Knowle DGE Academy; a careers event with BBC Bring the Drama at The Bottle Yard Studios; and a workshop with community group Leaders Unlocked. This is in addition to the two events for high school students we put on in partnership with OTR (Off The Record, a mental health social movement by and for young people aged 11-25 living in Bristol and South Gloucestershire) – please see more on these below.
  
  
• Continuing our partnership with Into Film, the UK’s leading charity for film in education. Animate with Aardman is now freely available in all UK schools via Into Film and has reached approximately 18,500 students since its launch in November 2023, but we will continue to find ways to share it with new audiences. We have developed our partnership with Into Film by planning a collaborative event to take place at the Into Film Festival in November 2024.
  
  
• Reviewing our internships programme to find ways to make it even more beneficial to participants. As and when opportunities arise, we are continuing to review our processes and advertise across a diverse range of sites from Creative Access to Babbasa (a Bristol-based social enterprise that supports young people aged 16-25 with their professional aspirations). Furthermore, we have increased the budget pot for the bursaries that we fund at the Aardman Academy, helping to ensure that our courses are accessible to all.
  
  
• Reinforcing our partnership with MyGWork to reach a wider pool of talent, specifically from the LGBTQ+ community, including through increased participation in MyGWork training and webinars and increasing our communications on the MyGWork platform. We have set up a monthly check-in with MyGWork to ensure we’re continuing to make this partnership as successful as possible and are committed to putting more content on the MyGWork platform. As examples, we will be uploading content about our activity for Bristol Pride and ‘A Day in the Life’ pieces.
  
  
• Working with OTR (Off The Record, a mental health social movement by and for young people aged 11-25 living in Bristol and South Gloucestershire) and the Freedom project (OTR’s gender and sexuality social action project) to deliver two workshops and support OTR’s 13 to 18-year-old group. As referenced above, we delivered these two workshops in May and August. We also supported OTR by donating the money we raised from the sale of our Bristol Pride t-shirts to the charity.
  
  
• Honouring the Age-friendly Employer Pledge which Aardman committed to recently, including by identifying a senior sponsor for age-inclusion, ensuring that age is specifically mentioned in our EDI policies, and taking action to improve the recruitment, retention & development of workers over 50. We have appointed a senior sponsor for age inclusion: Paula Newport, Director of People, Exec Board. We also hosted an anti-ageism event in April to share information about this form of discrimination.

In addition, we did the following:

• We furthered our anti-racism awareness and activity over the past six months by rolling out anti-racism training for our Executive Board and senior leadership team.
  
  
• We published our Transitioning at Work policy on our Intranet in April.
  
  
• Pauline Mallam, our Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Manager, delivered a workshop on the BFI Diversity Standards for the Development team at Aardman.
  
  
• Finally, we were proud to be shortlisted for the Diverse & Inclusive Company Culture Award at the UnderOne Diversity and Inclusion Awards.

Priorities for the coming six months (September 2024 – February 2025):

In the coming six months we will:

• Create and publish an Anti-Racism Action Plan to sit alongside our Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Charter. We wanted to roll-out anti-racism training across the business before developing the plan, so that we were starting from a good level of knowledge and awareness and could create a plan that is meaningful, informed and specific. Our Anti-Racism Action Plan will be published in the next six months and rolled out across the business through SharePoint updates, resources etc.
  
  
• Roll out our new Neurodiversity Toolkit.
  
  
• Celebrate Black History Month in October.
  
  
• Support The Pachamama Project, a Bristol-based charity which sews sustainable, reusable period products to help end period poverty for refugees.
  
  
• Award more bursaries for places at the Aardman Academy, having increased the budget pot for Aardman-funded bursaries from £11k to £13k to ensure that our courses are accessible to all.
  
  
• Become an accredited Inclusive Employer.
  
  
• Deliver a workshop in an SEN school.

If you would like to know more about the above, or are a partner who would like to support one of our initiatives, please contact Eva Poliszczuk, our Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Project Lead, on eva.poliszczuk@aardman.com.