Equality Training

When the Equality Act 2010 was rushed through the dying days of a government to provide a re-boot to what was by then several decades of work on eliminating discrimination and delivering equality, there was a cautious optimism that the re-boot might galvanise what had, in the minds of some, become a moribund area of work in the public sector.

Indeed, so moribund had work on equality become in Scotland prior to the 2010 Act that the now defunct Commission for Racial Equality [CRE] had written formally to all NHS Boards in Scotland in 2007 querying their progress in meeting the employment requirements of the then legislation on race equality and asking for specific evidence of compliance with the legislation. The draft legislation which provided the Equality Act 2010 slowed the momentum of the work of the CRE and the follow-up scrutiny of the NHS in Scotland was shelved in the coming months as the CRE was merged with other Commissions to form the Equality and Human Rights Commission [EHRC].

Equality, Here Now has, since 2012, conducted substantial amounts of research into the public sectors efforts to meet the terms of the Equality Act 2010 and eliminate discrimination. Some 8 years on from the Act, progress in eliminating discrimination is proceeding at such a breathtakingly ponderous pace that it is entirely reasonable to conclude that some people now working in Scotland’s public sector will live out their working life, retire from work and die before the discrimination they experience at work has been eliminated.

In an effort to identify why the pace of change in securing the elimination of discrimination was - and remains - as slow as it is, this research looks at one of the essential capacities any organisation requires if it is to deliver the scale and scope of change the Equality Act 2010 demands. If an organisation is to meet the core requirements of the Equality Act 2010 then it requires to have a workforce which understands the reasoning behind the Act, understands the concepts of discrimination, accepts that there has been an institutionalisation of discrimination in society, acknowledges individual culpability in this, and is empowered and enthused by the organisation to be part of the change needed to eliminate discrimination.

To achieve and acquire a capacity for eliminating discrimination, any organisation needs to invest heavily in its workforce by getting the right people on the bus and provide a training programme which informs, empowers and enthuses the workforce as individuals and as a collective to take on and deliver the elimination of discrimination in the culture, practices and functions of the organisation.

Early in 2018, Equality Here, Now undertook research into how well the NHS in Scotland was training the workforce to help rid the NHS of discrimination. The conclusion of that research found :

Training staff to inform, engage and empower them to deliver what the employer asks of them, individually and collectively, is fundamental to success in any workplace. To help the public sector achieve its general equality duty of eliminating discrimination, the content of equality training, the manner of delivery of the equality training and the construct of a quality circle of permanent improvement between equality training received and equality impact achieved, are all crucial to whether the status quo of privilege and inequalities persists or whether discrimination is eliminated.

From the responses to the questions asked on equality training in NHS Scotland and analysed in this research report, it is clear that there is a very real lack of common purpose across NHS Scotland in what equality training is for and thus how well equipped NHS staff are to help eliminate discrimination. There is little or no quality assurance of the content of equality training delivered across NHS Scotland, with it being clear there is a widespread lack of understanding of how to quality assure.

The delivery of equality training is almost entirely by the completion of on-line modules. Just 2 Health Boards deliver in face-to-face sessions, claiming it to be ‘vastly superior’ to on-line training. Perhaps most importantly, it has not been possible to unearth evidence of Health Boards routinely evaluating whether the considerable amount of resources invested in training NHS staff in equality is helping Health Boards eliminate discrimination or simply maintaining the status quo. One of Scotland’s smaller Health Boards, NHS Dumfries & Galloway, grasped the nettle of evaluation, explaining :

Equality training should eventually lead to a workforce which has a greater understanding of equality and diversity in relation to both staff and patients ….. but is something within which success is difficult to measure as it requires change to our culture which happens over a long period of time.

To put it simply, the chief executive of NHS Scotland has no way of knowing whether the equality training of over 163,000 staff is helping eliminate discrimination as an employer and as a service provider or acting as a drag on the pace of change towards that goal.

A small number of strategic interventions led by the chief executive of NHS Scotland could remedy this failure at the heart of NHS Scotland’s work on eliminating discrimination.