Our annual equality report: What we did in 2022 to 2023

In 2022 to 2023, we identified the equality, diversity and inclusion data we wanted to capture to help us track themes about people with protected characteristics who are registered with us or going through our fitness to practise process.

Having this data will give us a better understanding of what the social care workforce in Wales looks like and we’ll use the data to support employers with workforce planning and delivery.

What our annual workforce data report shows

In April 2023, we published our annual workforce data report, which provides a snapshot of the social care workforce in Wales.

The report showed 84,134 people work in social care in Wales and that:

• 82 per cent are female and 18 per cent are male
• there's an even spread of age groups – local authorities have an older workforce, 52 per cent are aged 46 years or older
• 95 per cent are white – this is in line with the general population of Wales but shows less diversity than last year
• 0.7 per cent are of mixed ethnicity, this is considerably lower than in 2021 when 4 per cent said they were of mixed ethnicity.

Registering new groups of workers

As of April 2023, 19,871 adult care home workers were registered with us and must now work to the standards of behaviour as set out in the Code of Professional Practice.

We’re also registering a number of other small groups, such as advocacy managers and residential family centre managers and workers.

In 2022 to 2023, we published data reports about:

• social work students
• social workers
• adult care home managers
• domiciliary care managers
• domiciliary care workers
• residential child care managers
• residential child care workers.
  

Putting support services in place

In 2022 to 2023, we put well-being support in place for registered persons going through the fitness to practise process, as well as victim support for those involved in the fitness to practise process, such as witnesses and victims.

We promoted the support available by sharing information in leaflets and on our website.

Supporting Welsh Government’s Race Equality Action Plan

We’re committed to following Welsh Government’s Anti-racist Wales Action Plan, the LGBTQ+ Action Plan and the HIV Action plan at Social Care Wales. We’ll also support with putting the plans in place in the wider social care and early years and childcare sectors in Wales.

During 2022 to 2023, we began work to meet the actions outlined in the Anti-racist Wales Action Plan Anti-Racist Wales Action Plan (gov.wales) by:

• speaking to Welsh Government about how we can support more social care workers from ethnic minority backgrounds into leadership positions
• looking at how we can develop an introductory e-learning resource to support anti-racist social care practice in Wales
• looking at how we can trial a cultural competency structure within our organisation
• having discussions about how to create a ‘Race Equality Standard’ in social care with Welsh Government
• working on the Workforce Strategy Delivery Plan for 2023 to 2026.

In 2024, we’ll be launching Ymlaen, a new research, innovation and improvement strategy for social care. We planned a workshop to help make sure we capture themes around equality, diversity and inclusion in the strategy.

Supporting the digital skills and confidence of the workforce

In 2022 to 2023, we worked with Digital Communities Wales, now known as CWMPAS, to develop an e-learning resource to support and build digital confidence.

Your role and digital technology aims to help the social care and early years workforce better use digital technology to engage with and support people using care and support.

The bilingual course gives real-life examples and practical solutions to show how digital technology can improve a care setting. Anyone working in social care, early years and childcare can access the online course.

Seventy-five per cent of those who completed the e-learning module said they now felt more confident using technology in their day-to-day work and were more likely to use digital technology in the future.

Making sure our digital resources are accessible and meet our audiences’ needs

In 2022 to 2023, we set up a new digital team to develop a picture of who uses our services. This will help us make sure we put our audiences at the heart of our digital work and that our digital resources meet their needs.

We also made sure our e-learning resources met the accessibility regulations by having them tested by the Digital Accessibility Centre.

Developing our well-being offer

In 2022 to 2023, we developed Your well-being matters, a health and well-being framework for the workforce, which was published in June 2023. The framework aims to help social care, early years and childcare organisations create workplaces that support the well-being of the people who work for them.

We started work revising the codes of professional practice for social care workers and social care employers by preparing a plan for reviewing them. The plan will look at how we can strengthen equality, diversity and inclusion in social care in Wales and how this can be reflected in the revised codes.

In August 2022, we set up a new employer support service, which gives employers access to a range of services, support and resources.

Monitoring the health and well-being of the social care workforce

In May 2022, we commissioned Opinion Research Services to develop our first-ever survey of the registered social care workforce in Wales.

The survey will ask people who were registered with us what they think about things such as health and well-being, pay and conditions, training, their reasons for working in social care and what they like about working in the sector.

The survey, which was carried out in March to May 2023, will highlight differences in the experiences of those with protected characteristics.

Embedding equality, diversity and inclusion within our organisation

In 2022 to 2023:

• we held a staff conference that focused on staff well-being, equality, diversity and inclusion

• we worked with Welsh Government to plan trialling a cultural competency framework within our organisation to help us meet our actions outlined in the Anti-racist Wales Action Plan

• our corporate governance team worked with our Board to identify specific equality, diversity and inclusion training for the Board in 2023 to 2024

• we continued our knowledge exchange group between our Board and staff to help us inform our approach to equality, diversity and inclusion

• we set up a staff equality, diversity and inclusion group to support the organisation’s equality, diversity and inclusion agenda. This group has supported the initiatives, such as celebrating Pride month and developing meeting etiquette guidance to make sure our online meetings are inclusive. This work has meant that staff can take part in all our activities without feeling isolated or excluded.

Making sure our recruitment processes are inclusive

We do a number of things to help us make sure our recruitment activities are as inclusive as possible:

• we blind shortlist all the applications we receive. This means we remove all the information that could identify someone’s characteristics from our application forms, so that managers only see the candidates’ responses when shortlisting

• our recruitment policy states there must be a mix of genders on our recruitment panels. This is happening in most cases, but we’ll re-enforce this in the future candidates can let us know in their application form if they’re eligible for the guaranteed interview scheme. The scheme guarantees that candidates with a disability will receive an interview, if they meet the minimum shortlist criteria for the role

• we give candidates the opportunity to tell us if we need to make any adjustments to the recruitment process to support them if they have a disability

• we’ve been trialling a system of sharing interview questions with candidates in advance, and plan to roll this out as standard

• we’ve reviewed equality statistics to better support diverse recruitment in the future

• we’re looking at making changes to support diverse recruitment internally. This includes providing more information about reasonable adjustments and exploring the use of video applications.

Our Board recruitment

We’ll begin our Board recruitment process in 2023 to 2024 and we’ll support Welsh Government with this. We’ll promote opportunities to help us recruit a more diverse Board. This will focus specifically on attracting candidates from black, minority and ethnic backgrounds.

We'll also look at how we communicate our Board recruitment activities.

We’re committed to supporting and putting Welsh Government’s different equality plans in place, including:

• the Anti Racist Wales Action Plan (published 2022)
• the LGBTQ+ Action Plan (published 2023)
• the HIV Action Plan (published 2023).

On 9 June 2022, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) published a report, Experiences from health and social care: the treatment of lower paid ethnic minority workers. We’re also committed to actioning the report’s recommendations.

Working in Partnership

We recognise the importance of working with the sector, those with lived experiences and other partners to achieve our equality, diversity and inclusion objectives.

During 2022 to 2023, we continued to work with organisations such as Care Inspectorate Wales, ADSS Cymru, other professional regulators and Welsh Government. This helped us work towards achieving these objectives.

Allyship

We want to make sure our work supports Wales in being an anti-discriminatory nation. And we want to be a strong ally for communities in Wales.

We have an active internal equality, diversity and inclusion staff group, which informs our equality work. Our staff group met regularly during 2022 to 2023.

We’re also developing our allyship programme by making sure we mark important events throughout the year. During 2022 to 2023, we celebrated Black History Month, Pride Month and Neurodiversity week.

Our celebrations are staff-led with many staff sharing personal stories to help us better our understanding of equality, diversity and inclusion.

Achieving our equality objectives

We regularly report on our performance and seek feedback. This annual report reflects the steps we’ve taken to achieve our five equality objectives.

We realised we needed an equality, diversity and inclusion officer to help us achieve these objectives. We advertised and filled the role, and the successful candidate started in February 2023.

Equal pay

We carry out an equal pay review each year. We do this to see if there are any potential pay inequalities and to address any actions we need to act upon.

We check we’re not directly or indirectly discriminating against any employee or group of employees through our pay systems.

The audit covers the nine protected characteristics as identified by the Equalities Act 2010:

• sex
• age
• disability
• race
• gender reassignment
• pregnancy or maternity
• religion or belief
• sexual orientation
• marriage and civil partnership.

On 20 June 2022, our gender pay gap was 11.52 per cent, – a which is 5.12 per cent lower than in 2021 (16.64 per cent).

The current UK average is 15.4 per cent.

Our pay gap can be explained by an overrepresentation of women across the organisation and in the lower paid grades. Seventy-five per cent of women are represented in the lower quartile. We’ve seen an increase in men in the lower quartile this year, which could explain why the gap has reduced.  

We carry out an equality and diversity survey about our staff each year. We ask staff to update their diversity information each June before our annual equality pay audit.

Our staff diversity

We monitor the protected characteristics of everyone on our Register of Social Care Workers. We:

• gather information about the Welsh language skills of the people registered with us

• publish data profiles each year using information provided by applicants registering and renewing their registration with us.

You can find more information about this on our website.

We want to make sure equality is central in our procurement processes. We make sure all suppliers know they must respect our commitment to stop unlawful discrimination, promote equality of opportunity and be transparent.

We show our commitment to sustainable development in our procurement processes and activities. We do this during the procurement planning phase by:

• developing a criteria that considers short- and long-term economic, environmental and social impact

• specifying the information we want from possible suppliers so we can apply those criteria fairly

• working with suppliers to identify more sustainable ways of meeting needs

• welcoming innovative solutions from suppliers, including small and medium enterprises.

We published our Environmental, Sustainability and Governance in Procurement Strategy in September 2022 and have developed an action plan to help us put it into place.

We recognise our responsibilities under the Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011 and our leadership role in supporting Welsh Government’s More than just words five-year plan 2022-2027.

Our Welsh Language Scheme (Welsh Language Act 1993) and the Welsh language standards set out how we’ll treat the English and Welsh languages on an equality basis. The Welsh language is not a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010. But, our approach and values make sure our work and policy decisions reflect the importance of the Welsh language for people who use care and support, and their families and carers.

We publish social care data on the National Social Care Data Portal for Wales. We gather this from local authorities and other organisations. We recently re-launched the portal to make it easier to use and to develop it in-line with the needs of people who work in social care in Wales.

We’d like the portal to become the first port of call for anyone seeking data and insight about social care in Wales. We’ll continue to develop the portal by adding new data and finding new and creative ways of presenting it for our different audiences.

If you have any feedback about this annual report or want to inform our work to achieve our strategic equality plan and our equality objectives, get in touch with us: edi@socialcare.wales