Our Diversity Commitments and Staff Data

The Old Vic is moved and inspired by global calls for wide scale change to the centuries of inequality and oppression faced by Black people.

The work that was underway before our closure cannot be put on pause in the current crisis. We will move forward apace with our commitments, drawing on the culture of openness, collaboration, compassion, healing and respect we have worked hard to instil more broadly at The Old Vic. 

Our immediate commitments are:

1. To more robustly collate and interrogate data across the whole organisation including creative teams.
2. To appoint diversity specialists to support us in our work.
3. To hold open forum sessions with our people and creative colleagues to hear directly from them about how we work together to create positive change.
4. To work with our people to explore ways of giving equal access to The Old Vic, be that on stage, back of house or in the audience.  
5. To shape and implement a thoughtful, meaningful and robust equality and diversity strategy.
6. To reaffirm that we have zero tolerance of harassment and bullying for any reason, and continue to enshrine this in our culture through training and support structures.
7. To redouble our efforts to further diversify our workforce and Board, supporting career progression and training schemes where relevant.

Some of these actions will have immediate effect while others will take longer to accomplish, so we will hold ourselves accountable for maintaining this focus in the long term. In setting out these commitments, we also want to acknowledge that we do not have all the answers and we will continue to educate ourselves and listen to others.

The publishing of this data is the first step. We acknowledge that we need to do more to improve our processes for collecting and reviewing data in order to inform our actions and hold ourselves accountable in meeting our commitments. Rather than present assumptions, we present data below for those staff who have chosen to share their information with us during 2019–2020. For context, we currently have a permanent workforce of 85, a casual workforce of 100, a senior management team of 15 and an Old Vic Theatre Trust Board of 13 (including our Lambeth Baylis Trustee, which is an observer position).

Our next step is to continue to interrogate the data, to improve how we collect it in relation to both staff and creatives and to explore with our people and with the wider theatre industry where the solutions lie through our open forum sessions.

As stated in our commitments, the compiling of data is an evolving process as we explore new ways of collecting information. The below information will continue to change as we broaden our methods and respond to feedback. 

It is worth noting that our equality monitoring surveys are optional and therefore this data does not represent the entire Old Vic workforce. 45% of permanent staff, back of house zero hours workers, Box Office and Duty Managers completed the survey and 65% of Front of House zero hours workers completed the survey.