As an employer, we actively seek to ensure that our workforce reflects the communities we serve, recognising that this makes us better able to understand their needs and priorities.
We can only do this by ensuring that the people who work for us are the best they can be irrespective of age, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, disability, marital status, religion or belief.
What matters to us is that we have talented, enthusiastic and experienced professionals working with us who can help deliver our strategic outcomes.
You don't have to be sporty to work at Sport England. We value the ideas and contributions from everybody and welcome and support difference.
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’ve developed 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. The #TellYourStory campaign and existing data audit are now complete and a full report and set of recommendations are expected by the end of May 2020.
- Our new strategy: in order to take the other three areas of focus further, in Uniting the Movement we’ve used the principles that emerged from consultation period 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’re now taking 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 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, including those from Black, Asian, minority ethnic and other diverse backgrounds.
- 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 Black, Asian and minority ethnic background staff in Sport England over the next five years. This means a minimum of 20% of staff to come from a Black, Asian or minority ethnic background by halfway through our 10-year strategy Uniting the Movement. 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.
Review into transgender inclusion in domestic sport in the UK
During 2020, the Sports Councils Equality Group (SCEG) commissioned a Review into Transgender Inclusion in Domestic Sport in the UK.
Subsequently a wide-ranging consultation has taken place.
For more information on the review and the expected next steps, click below.
