This higher education (HE) and industry collaboration tackles a dual need through meeting the UK film industry’s screenwriting skills gap by enabling those with mental ill-health and/or disabilities to join the industry. The UK film industry is booming. New Sky Studios in Elstree alone will create 3,000 jobs. Inward investment in the industry is £3 billion with the domestic industry matching this figure. The industry is struggling to find employees who have the necessary skills in screenwriting. This project analyses this opportunity by expanding the knowledge of mental health and disability in HE and the film industry advancing screenwriting quality and employment. Those with disabilities are the most discriminated against group in the industry; almost nine out of 10 in the industry have poor mental health. The reasons for this are addressed with solutions implemented through critical and creative outputs meeting this urgent two-fold need for equality and skills.
In 2021, Dr Giuliana Tiripelli was commissioned by the Committee on Culture, Science, Education (CCSE) and Media of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), to write a report on “The role of the media in times of crisis”. The report was debated at the plenary of PACE held in May 2021, and the corresponding resolution was adopted in January 2022 (CCSE rapporteur, Ms Annicka Engblom, Sweden, EPP/CD). PACE, which means “peace” in Italian, is made up of parliamentarians from the 47 member states of the Council of Europe (CoE).
The CoE has an important balancing international role, which spans beyond EU countries, “to promote human rights, democracy and the rule of law” (https://www.gov.uk/world/organisations/uk-delegation-to-the-council-of-europe) across the wider pan-European region.
PACE “monitors the way member states honour their commitments and … obligations as members of the Council of Europe”, and itsnine committees “prepare the reports and follow the state of human rights, democracy and rule of law in the member states in their area of focus” (https://www.coe.int/en/web/no-hate-campaign/parliamentary-assembly1, https://www.coe.int/en/web/yerevan/the-coe/structure-of-coe#:~:text=The%20Council%20of%20Europe%20operates,and%20the%20Conference%20of%20INGOs).
The expert report by Dr Tiripelli for the PACE Committee on Culture, Science, Education and Media used previous re-search, case studies, and exchanges with experts. The report, soon to be made public, was an essential source for elaborating the final policy document Resolution 2419 approved on the 25th of January 2022. Tiripelli’s report is an essential source for PACE Resolution 2419 (2022). Its main points and recommendations are reflected in the resolution, and in particular the invitation to members States to:
support journalism that expands the knowledge of the public on both the technical and the social aspects of emergencies, and their resolution;
put in place policies to disperse the concentration of opinion power by social media and take countervailing measures to prevent that powerful digital businesses become centres of political power;
support community media engagement and seek to involve citizens more deeply in public debates, for exam-ple by involving students in educational communication with the community before and during a crisis;
support focused training for journalism that covers the social sciences, as well as the hard sciences, to en-hance journalists’ ability to report on scientific work and impact on the public;
support trainings and research centres focused on the sociological study of journalism and on constructive journalism approaches;
support journalistic coverage of both local and global contextualisation and narratives, and discouraging nationalistic frames in the media;
support documentary production and podcasting of knowledge that can make science, emergency services, and institutional work visible in the form of approachable media cultural outputs.