Equality and Diversity

Committed to Diversity

When the Learning and Skills Council was established, we were given a statutory duty to promote equality of opportunity. But to us, good equality and diversity practice means more than putting the relevant legislation into practice. We recognise that we have a much wider social responsibility and we aim to be an exemplar employer with regards to equality and diversity. In April 2007 we launched our Single Equality Scheme demonstrating not only our commitment to promoting equality and diversity, but the scheme also shows how this commitment is clearly related to our strategic priorities and targets, and incorporated into our business cycle.

The scheme fulfils our statutory duties; and provides the opportunity to go beyond compliance ensuring our policies and practises are fully inclusive and eliminate discrimination. 

Our approach to recruitment and selection is forward thinking and rigorous. We actively encourage applications from all sections of the communities we serve and do our utmost to ensure all our employees are treated fairly, regardless of gender, age, sexual orientation, race, ethnic origin, marital status or religion. We take into account that people have different needs and we do our utmost to meet them by, for example, offering flexible hours, flexible working patterns, making adjustments during the recruitment process or at work for people with a disability, and giving time off for religious observances. 

Everyone who joins us is provided with the development and learning opportunities they need to make a full contribution to our work. Join us and you can be sure we’ll do all we can to ensure your performance is measured and rewarded fairly and consistently, and that you are treated with dignity and respect.

To prevent or stop unfairness, we monitor and review the impact of our policies on our employees, as well as those who join and leave the organisation. To make sure all our employees understand how to treat each other fairly, everyone who works with us participates in equality and diversity awareness training. 

In November 2006 we were successful in retaining the “Two Ticks” positive about disability award.  We take a proactive approach to being positive about disability and a number of innovative steps are being taken to ensure that disabled people are able to fulfil key roles within the organisation.  Examples of adjustments which have taken place are; Specialist seating, 19” TFT monitors, verbal indication in lifts and hearing loops in many of our meeting rooms. 

As a national organisation we also subscribe to three benchmarking surveys, Opportunity Now for gender, Race for Opportunity for ethnicity and Employers Forum on Disability (EFD) for disability.  We recently scored an overall score of 72% in the 2007 EFD survey giving us a silver award and, 83% in the 2006 Opportunity Now survey giving us a gold award. Following these results we are now committing to embed the recommendations made by EFD into our HR action plans. 

We have also recently signed up to the Mindful Employer charter, demonstrating our commitment to being positive about mental health in the workplace.  By signing the charter we are making a commitment to embed the positive principles of Mindful Employer into our core values and culture and we welcome applications from applicants with mental health difficulties.