Our aim is to make sure that equality, diversity and inclusion run through everything we do as an employer.
As such, and in light of the discussion around race and global Black Lives Matter movement that led to protests this summer, we’re focusing work in four areas to ensure this happens.
- Internal: looking at how diverse and inclusive we are internally, in terms of our staff, our policies and procedures, and the specific work we undertake – ensuring each have a strong focus on equality, diversity and inclusion from the start.
- Governance code review: the Code for Sports Governance is a key piece of work for us and one of the most successful we’ve ever done in terms of improving how organisations in our sectors are run. It’s an ideal way to progress further ways in which our sector can change its approach to equality, diversity and inclusion.
- Race in Sport review: we’re developing two detailed, independent, pieces of work in collaboration with the other home country sports councils and UK Sport. The first involves bringing together existing data on race and ethnicity in sport to identify gaps and make recommendations, while the second involves creating an opportunity to hear lived experiences of racial inequalities and racism in sport by offering people a safe space to tell their stories.
- Our new strategy: in order to take the other three areas of focus further, we’re using the principles emerging from our ‘Shaping our Future’ document, to take a holistic view of the sector and how it works and interlinks with others, to understand more about the complex causes of structural inequality. We’ll then take ownership of delivering a range of responses that create sustained systematic change.
We hope this will lead us to achieving our four broad ambitions of:
- closing the race gap in levels of participation in sport and physical activity for specific Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) groups that are behind national participation levels – similar to the focus we’ve had on closing the gender gap in recent years
- supporting the identification and development of talented athletes from diverse backgrounds, including BAME
- transforming both the executive and non-executive leadership and workforce within sport and physical activity, to make it representative of the population
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ensuring that, by 2026, our own organisation is representative of the population and the people it serves, at all levels within the organisation, by setting a new target to double the proportion of BAME background staff in Sport England over the next five years. This means a minimum of 20% of staff to come from a BAME background by halfway through our new 10-year strategy, which we’ll launch in early 2021. Although historically we've had had low staff turnover, we believe this is a realistic and ambitious target and we are committed to meeting it.
Accreditations
We’re proud to have successfully been accredited Stage 2 for Investors in Diversity and Stage 3 for Leaders in Diversity. In addition, we’re also a Stonewall Diversity Champion, a Mindful Employer and a Disability Confident Employer.
You can read more about our employer accreditations and see our latest vacancies on our careers page.
Below, you can download our latest Equal Pay Audit and Gender Pay Gap reports, as well as our Equality Policy and Diversity Action Plan.
