In honour of Jessica Kingsley Publisher’s upcoming book ‘The Bigger Book of Amazing Dyslexics’, we spoke to authors Kathy Forsyth and Kate Power about the incredible work that dyslexic people do across all the creative industries!

Welcome to the colourful world of dyslexia.

Looking to inspire our teenage dyslexics through secondary school and college, we spent three years interviewing amazing dyslexics about the jobs they do. It was an incredible and inspiring experience to meet over fifty happy and successful amazing dyslexics working in a wide range of jobs – from a top London surgeon to a Royal ballet choreographer, and a few famous faces too… The project resulted in a design-led book showing the amazing dyslexics pictured in their working environments alongside their interviews. The wonderful fashion designer Paul Smith supported the project and wrote the foreword to ‘The Bigger Picture Book of Amazing Dyslexics and The Jobs They Do’.

The thing that all these amazing dyslexics share is that they have found careers they love, they have explored subjects and pursuits that they are passionate about, and carved out niche careers for themselves, careers from football to writing for a living. The key is to identify what you are good at and enjoy, to find projects that energise you rather than drain you. Once you know what you’re amazing at, look at what you may struggle with, and find people to work with that can do what you can’t, and vice versa… collaboration is a dyslexic’s best friend!

We talked to our amazing dyslexics about their top tips, what gets them in a pickle and what makes them burst with pride. As a dyslexic is important to know your challenges and build your toolbox of coping strategies and technologies available that make life easier. It’s the ideas that are important, leave ‘spellcheck’ to check the spelling! Our first book ‘The Illustrated Guide to Dyslexia and Its Amazing People’ is an easy way to understand how dyslexia affects you, which provides some useful top tips.

At school, we only study around fifteen subjects, but there are thousands of jobs available using more than these topics. At school, you’re not tested on key skills like empathy or collaborating which are so valuable in the world of work. In this new digital age, new jobs emerge all the time, your perfect job may not have been created yet. Recent research commissioned shows that the things that many dyslexics are good at are needed for the future job market. There’s never been a better time to be dyslexic!

It’s time to change the negative perception of dyslexia and to embrace the skill set and divergent thinking of dyslexics. “Your time has come,” says educational psychologist Katherine Sharkey.

Dyslexia is a different way of learning and thinking and affects everybody differently, it can be mild or severe. About 1 in 10 people are dyslexic, and it’s commonplace in the creative industries where thinking differently is embraced. Sebastian Conran, son of design guru Sir Terrance Conran noted: “In the design industry it’s actually a stigma if you’re not dyslexic.” Lots of entrepreneurs are proudly dyslexic too.

We also interviewed experts in the field of dyslexia, like Professor John Stein FMedSci. Professor & Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford who has said he “wouldn’t want to cure dyslexia; it comes with too many good things.”

Dyslexic strengths are more recognised with companies looking for big picture thinkers. Matt Boyd runs Exceptional Individuals, an employment agency for dyslexics (and other neurodivergent thinkers), it provides support and educates employers about how great minds think different.

Marketing Director at Direct Line Mark Evans believes that “dyslexia is the next big thing in the talent conversation.”

Read more in ‘The Bigger Picture Book of Amazing Dyslexics and The Jobs They Do’ publication date May 2020. You can pre-order your copy here.

Khaleda Rahman has come so far since her internship with Creative Access in 2013. She has worked across the world in offices in London, New York and Sydney, but one thing she has noticed consistently is the diversity problem in journalism. Khaleda shares some of her own experiences with us…

Walking into an unfamiliar newsroom for the first time is daunting for any new journalist, I’m sure—but it’s even more so when you realise you’re one of very few people of colour there.

As a freshly qualified journalist, I secured an internship with a local London newspaper through Creative Access. I’m incredibly thankful that I was able to learn the ropes at a small weekly newspaper so when I made the leap to the nationals and found myself walking into newsroom after newsroom where I was in the minority in the years that followed, I was a much more confident journalist.

Over the past six or so years, I’ve worked at the Birmingham Mail and the Scottish Daily Mail while on the MailOnline graduate scheme and then went to work in MailOnline’s offices in London, New York and Sydney. After a stint as a foreign news reporter back in London, I decided to go freelance and move to Los Angeles. I’m now based back in the U.K. as a reporter for Newsweek.

I’ve been lucky enough to live and work in some of the greatest cities in the world and work on some of the biggest news stories in recent years—the 2016 presidential election, ISIS and “Megxit” to name just a few.

But one thing I’ve noticed everywhere I’ve worked is the lack of diversity. It’s not just an issue in UK newsrooms, but also in the US and Australia.

Don’t just take my word for it—there are plenty of statistics that speak for themselves. According to the National Council for the Training of Journalists, 94 percent of journalists in the UK are white and it is 87 percent in the US. Research in the US also found that employees in newsrooms are more likely to be white and male than anywhere else in the country. In Australia, newsrooms are overwhelmingly white and a recent study found that more than a third of hard news stories reflect negatively on minority communities.

That lack of ethnic diversity is most glaring when stories related to race have made headlines, whether it’s about politics or terrorism. It’s clear there’s a problem when mainstream news outlets misidentify prominent people of color or someone like the BBC’s Naga Munchetty is unfairly penalised for voicing her experience of racism when speaking about racist comments made by Donald Trump. And of course, there’s the specific kind of coverage of the Duchess of Sussex that some have claimed is fuelled by racism, while others insist has nothing to do with her skin colour.

In my years in journalism, I’ve had an editor suggest I would have an easier time securing job interviews if I Anglicised my name on my CV. I’ve had another confuse me for the only other brown woman in the office. I’ve seen the surprise on the faces of colleagues when I’ve told them I’m Muslim. And sometimes, I’ve had to strongly push back on headlines that I feel are unnecessarily inflammatory or biased.

But when it comes to these kinds of things, it can be challenging to have your voice heard. Speak too loud and you’ll be accused of “playing the race card.” Say nothing and it keeps happening. Sometimes you might feel it’s better to pick your battles as you always have a job to be getting on.

The onus shouldn’t be on the few people of color in newsrooms to educate their colleagues, especially if they’re in more junior positions.

Of course, more people of color should be recruited into newsrooms but tokenism in the workplace won’t make a big enough difference. They should also be recruited into more senior roles and changes should be made at the top.

Newsrooms should reflect the communities and demographics they represent, and it’s disheartening to say that almost a decade after I started on my path to become a journalist, there’s still a long way to go.

Journalists from diverse backgrounds can add so much value to newsrooms today and ensure reporting is more accurate and comprehensive. While it can be a tough road at times, the job is also an incredibly rewarding one. Over the past few years, I’ve had the chance to pursue some of the stories I feel most passionate about, including revealing the identity of a jihadi bride from Scotland, speaking to a Saudi teenager who fled the kingdom and barricaded herself in a hotel in Bangkok Airport and interview a man who survived the mosque shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand.

There are plenty of stories like these that need to be told and we are the ones who should tell them.

You can follow Khaleda on Twitter at @Khaleda

From Parks & Rec to professional publication, our former Creative Access intern at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Mariam Khan, writes about her career journey to date and what led her to releasing her debut book ‘It’s Not About The Burqa’…

After leaving University, I knew I wanted to be involved in publishing but I didn’t have any connections in that field despite being incredibly involved in the young adult fiction community. I was getting to know people who worked in that industry but unsure as to how to make those people into connections or those connections into anything related to a role in publishing. Blindly sending my CV and cover letter out wasn’t working.

I landed a role at the Royal Shakespeare Company through Creative Access and I was more than willing to give it a try. That was my step into working world as a graduate. It was one of the steepest learning curves for me. The lack of diversity in the places I worked after I left University was shocking. There weren’t many people like me working in the spaces I was occupying. But each month there was the Creative Access masterclasses in London, where often people from Black, Asian and ethnically-diverse backgrounds placed across the creative industries talked about their experiences and journeys. Seeing is believing and seeing those people in their respective roles helped me realise that there were spaces being created for people like me, even if it was people like me creating them.

I was making strides into publishing even whilst I worked outside of publishing. As my internship came to an end at the RSC, I decided that moving to London and getting a job in publishing was the way forward. I interned without pay for a few months, slept on friends sofas and beds. It worked out in the end cause I got a job in publishing.

Working in publishing was on of the reasons I was able to say out loud ‘I want to write a book that represents the diversity Muslim Women identity’. I wanted to deconstruct the narrative around Muslim women built by media and culture and make something on our own terms. I wanted to make Muslim women speaking for themselves the norm. In the process I thought about how I’d come to be in the place I was.

I didn’t want to publish a book about Muslim Women all by myself; I wanted to create a shared platform where as many Muslim Women as possible could speak up about their experiences and be heard and in creating It’s Not About The Burqa, I think I’m doing that.

Mariam Khan is a British writer and activist, the editor of It’s Not About the Burqa, an anthology of essays by Muslim women published by Picador. She currently lives in Birmingham and works in education.

Twitter: helloiammariam

Instagram: helloiammariam

You can purchase It’s Not About the Burqa here.

A few weeks ago, Creative Access CEO, Josie Dobrin attended an Unconscious Bias Workshop at the Publishers Association. In this blog piece, Josie talks about how stereotypes are formed…

We are all products of our upbringing. Our friends, families, education and religion are all important elements in defining who we are. As are our age, where we grew up and the things we see on advertising billboards, watch on TV and read in books, magazines and on the internet.

All these factors play a part in determining the decisions that we make. They also affect how we interact and communicate with people.

There is a growing body of research which demonstrate that unconscious, or hidden, bias explain a great deal of our behaviour. This phenomenon is a relatively new one; the point at which neuroscience meets equality and diversity.

This means that the majority of your brain is wired to produce automatic and rapid responses. We all have them and no matter how liberal and progressive we believe ourselves to be, our behaviour will be affected by the way we’ve been brought up and the environment in which we live.

If you really want a window into you innermost mind, you can complete (for free) a Harvard Implicit Association Test which may well elicit some surprising results. The idea is to measure the attitudes and beliefs that you may be unwilling, or unable, to report. For example, you may think that women and men should be equally proficient at science, but your automatic associations could show that you (like many others) associate men with science more than women.

There has been extensive research into how unconscious bias affects the workplace. A recent McKinsey report showed that companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry median.

In the creative industries this is even more important because the content created – advertising campaigns, plays, TV shows, books etc – need to appeal to the widest audiences possible in order for the sector to thrive.

But what can we actually do about this? Removing personal data from application forms and CVs, such as name, gender and education can help. The Rooth report back in 2008 randomly assigned candidates with identical skills an Arab-Muslim or Swedish-sounding name. It was found that applications with a Swedish-sounding name received fifty percent more call-backs for a job interview.

We also need to encourage our brains to not always listen to the messages with which we’ve been raised. Using counter-stereotypical images as stimuli can have a big impact on this. Every member of the Creative Access team was set the challenge of finding two images which challenged common stereotypes. This has been an inspiring exercise for us all so we wanted to share them with you. Enjoy…