In 2014, the NHS Equality and Diversity Council took action to ensure employees from Black and minoritised ethnic backgrounds have equal access to career opportunities and receive fair treatment in the workplace. This resulted in the development of the NHS WRES, implemented in 2015.
In 2018 the 不良研究所 Board held a roundtable event, inviting colleagues from across the sector to talk about how they were developing a diverse workforce. Following this, 不良研究所 commissioned a scoping review on developing a WRES for Social Care which was funded by NHS England.
The ‘Scoping Review on developing race equality in social care and social work: Sustaining action on workforce race equality in challenging times’ by Karen Linde and Roger Kline, was published in 2019 and made nine key recommendations:
- Consideration of designing and piloting a standardised voluntary format for local providers to use for collecting and analysing workforce data that builds on the good work of NMDS-SC (now known as ASC-WDS) and existing local collection of data (e.g. on shortlisting). This could provide high-quality intelligence on issues found to assist benchmarking and identification of good practice.
- Support the establishment of a sector survey for staff wellbeing addressing issues such as experiences of workplace bullying. Supporting evidence, briefings and sharing good practice.
- Develop a series of short briefing papers on topic areas highlighted as gaps in knowledge by the sector, e.g. the race equality ‘business case’, evidenced based interventions, positive action in recruitment, the equality duties of local government when procuring services.
- Develop a methodology for the identification of sector good practice and make available a simple web-based resource for good practice case studies.
- Produce guidance and support resources on achieving workforce race equality for team managers and professional leaders.
- Raise the profile and intention of the CQC three Key Lines of Inquiry in the Well Led domain alongside the Equally Outstanding report linking this to good practice.
- Recruitment of a small number of pilot sites for testing data, professional, leadership and development interventions which would also explore how a shared cross sectoral approach to workforce race equality might be best.
- Some social care staff remain employed by local government employers who will have an existing system for collecting, collating, and analysing data by ethnicity in accordance with their Public Sector Equality Duty. This could be an opportunity for local councils to demonstrate good practice on race equality amongst their social care staff should be further explored, perhaps with ADASS and LGA.
- Establish a community of practice with key national organisations, regulators to foster a solution focused and system-wide approach to embedding workforce race equality.
Developing the SC-WRES
In 2021, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), with the Department for Education (DfE) as partners, set up a project team in the Office of the Chief Social Worker to respond to the scoping review to develop a WRES for social care.
The project team focused on two of the nine recommendations:
- Designing and piloting a standardised voluntary format for local providers to use for collecting and analysing workforce data.
- Recruitment of pilot sites for testing data, professional, leadership and development interventions.
In early 2021, the Joint Chief Social Workers for Adults and Children's services invited local authorities in England to take part in the test phase of the SC-WRES, starting in April 2021.
- The test stage ran from April 2021 to April 2022 with 18 local authorities.
- Phase 1 (2023-24) - 不良研究所 took on sole responsibility for SC-WRES and delivered phase 1 of the improvement programme. 23 local authorities joined phase 1, 13 of whom had been involved in the test phase.
- Phase 2 (2024- 25) - Skill for Care has continued to run the SC-WRES continuous improvement programme. 83 local authorities registered for phase 2 and 76 local authorities submitted data.