Workforce Race Equality Standard 2022-23 - Autumn Update

The Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES) is being delivered to ensure employees from a minority ethnic background have equal access to career opportunities and receive fair treatment in the workplace. It is focused on employees in the social care sector and is sponsored by the Executive Directors for Adult Social Services and Children's Services respectively, James Bullion and Sara Tough.

In January 2021, we joined a pilot of the initiative, alongside other local authorities, which has been led by the Department of Health and Social Care.

To create our first action plan for 2022-23, we collaborated with our advisory and employee networks, leads across Adult Social Services and Children's Services, HR, and our Equalities Team.

Autumn 2022 Update

Here is an overview of the updates since we launched our action plan in June 2022:

• A policy focusing on tackling racism and discrimination experienced by employees and communities is in development
• A working group made up of HR, Unison and the Black and Asian Employee Network is considering the benefits and challenges of signing Unison's Anti-Racism Charter
• Face-to-face anti-racism training in Children's Services and Adult Social Services is in development
• Adult Social Services are recruiting for a Practice Consultant in the NIPE (Norfolk Institute for Practice Excellence) team - and have appointed a Business Support Officer - both dedicated to supporting international colleagues
• All advisory and employee network chairs have been invited to engage with and consult on the Strategic Review in regular meetings
• Opportunities supporting the learning and development of minority ethnic colleagues in health and social care have been promoted and are being undertaken by colleagues. These include NHS Leadership Development workshops open to all pay scales, as well as opportunities for mentoring and group learning for senior ethnic minority colleagues.
• Opportunities for all health and social care colleagues to join Compassionate and Inclusive Leadership workshops have been made available by the East of England NHS Leadership Academy
• Anti-racist resources by Research in Practice were shared via the learning and development email bulletin
• All advisory and employee network chairs have been invited to engage with and consult on the NCC-wide Wellbeing Strategy currently in development
• Our online incident reporting system, OSHENS, has been updated to ensure that we know where an incident may have been influenced by protected characteristics in order to take appropriate action and be able to produce data on these incidents for analysis

Download the autumn update in full (PDF) [176KB]

To see the 2022-23 Action Plan and to find out more, visit the Workforce Race Equality Standard pages.