Our plan sets out our commitment to specific actions which will help us achieve progress towards greater equality, diversity and inclusion in our work.
Action points
Our colleagues
We will:
• Make our recruitment process more inclusive, by reviewing our policies, practices, and overall approach.
• Take specific action to make our leadership more diverse and representative of the communities we serve, whilst ensuring we have diverse role models in every part of the charity.
• Continue to provide advancement opportunities aimed at underrepresented groups, including through our Emerging Leaders Programme.
• Publish our second ethnicity pay gap report, our first disability pay gap report, and prepare our first LGBT+ pay gap report. This is in addition to our annual gender pay gap report. In future years we will publish a single diversity pay gap report, along with a workforce diversity analysis.
• Interrogate our people data regularly to identify barriers to diversity and address them.
Our culture
We will:
• Increase the size and capacity of our Equality, Diversity & Inclusion team, whilst revising its role and focus so that it can better meet the needs of the whole charity.
• Review, revise and enhance the capacity of our four colleague networks (Race Equality, LGBT+, Disability & Women) so they are better able to provide support.
• Take action to ensure cases of bullying, harassment & discrimination are investigated and managed to the highest professional standards, whilst working to prevent this behaviour arising.
• Provide active and visible leadership that embodies and role-models our values.
• Develop shared behaviours so that all colleagues have a responsibility to create an inclusive environment.
• Do more to celebrate diversity and difference through our communications.
• Organise internal engagement events to celebrate equality diversity and inclusion across the charity.
Our communities
We will:
• Improve our knowledge about the challenges facing children, young people and families from Black, Asian and minority/minoritised communities, and the changes needed to improve their access to services and outcomes.
• Collect and record data in a way that is as inclusive as possible and helps children, families and colleagues to be seen, heard and respected.
• Take steps to ensure that our services are culturally competent and able to respond effectively to children, young people and families from different backgrounds and with different protected characteristics.
• Review our Equality Impact Assessment process to ensure that our future decision making is EDI informed.
• Provide opportunities for a diverse group of children and young people to make their voices heard.
Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Workstreams
These themes will provide an overall framework for our work in this area and help us understand the impact of our wider activities.
1. Gathering, sharing and using high quality and relevant data about equality, diversity and inclusion, to provide a robust baseline of, and then to continuously improve our EDI performance.
2. Ensuring compliance with legal and ethical obligations.
3. Attracting, recruiting and retaining a wide diversity of applicants who are representative of the communities we support and society at large.
4. Onboarding new colleagues and volunteers, and supporting existing colleagues and volunteers, in ways which are sensitive and responsive to disability, ethnicity, gender identity and sexual identity.
5. Using knowledge management best practices, to provide everyone with up-to-date and accessible employment and management policies, processes and guidance.
6. Prioritising opportunities for continuous learning, development and progression on all aspects of equality, diversity and inclusion, for all our colleagues and volunteers.
7. Preventing, investigating, managing and resolving to the highest professional standards all cases of bullying, harassment and discrimination
