“It can be daunting if you think the culture isn’t welcoming. You aren’t going to put yourself out there because your instinct is to protect yourself from rejection,” said Clenton Farquharson, a leading figure in the social care sector. As a black man who is disabled, his prominence in the sector is unusual.
Farquharson chairs Think Local Act Personal, a national partnership of more than 50 organisations committed to transforming care through personalisation and community-based support. He is one of a growing number of voices calling on social care leaders to address the sector’s diversity deficit.
It’s not that black, Asian and minority ethnic (BME) people are under-represented in the workforce – they constitute an estimated 17%, rising to 59% (pdf) in London – but they are few and far between at senior levels.
“We’ve not broken the barrier,” said Farquharson. “Everyone knows about it, and there have been lots of programmes and initiatives, but we just haven’t seen the progress. In the end I think it’s attitudinal and behavioural.”
The challenge was the subject of a recent roundtable discussion convened by Skills for Care, which runs its own programme to help promote leadership diversity, Moving Up (BAME). Under the scheme – which is currently recruiting its next cohort – aspiring leaders in the public, private or voluntary sectors are supported to gain the skills and confidence to advance their careers.
Asabi Wright, leader of a social work practice group in Southwark, south London, took part in the programme. During the discussion she said the key benefit had been to give her confidence to make changes in her role, to which she had just been promoted, and to envisage further developing her career in future.
“I see very few [BME] people going higher up,” said Wright. “They may get to head of service, but in terms of assistant directors and directors, it’s male and it’s white.”
Wright stressed, however, that confidence-building was only part of the answer. Employing organisations have to change, too. “It’s like a social worker removing a child,” she said. “Sometimes you have to do it to safeguard them, but if that household hasn’t changed when you put them back, they won’t thrive.”
Edith Akenkide, a senior social worker at Essex Partnership University NHS foundation trust and chair of a BME networking group in the health service, is currently on the NHS Leadership Academy’s Ready Now programme for BME professionals.
Confidence-building is key, she agreed. But once you feel ready to apply for senior jobs, the challenge is not so much getting shortlisted for interview as being selected by appointment panels that tend to reflect the culture of the organisation – both in their attitudes and their make-up.
The responsibility to increase diversity “has to come from board level down”, Akenkide said. “If you haven’t got the board on board, so to speak, there is no point. It’s just talk.”
Munira Thobani, a board member at Skills for Care who is an executive coach and organisational development consultant, said she started working as a race equality adviser for Newham council, east London, in 1987. Thirty years on, many of the same career obstacles remain for BME professionals.
“People who need to take leadership around this issue are not taking it,” Thobani said. “Consciousness is so important. White people who make the decisions need to have it as part of their everyday thinking.”
Much of the onus for re-shaping attitudes and practice lays with national organisations and umbrella groups within the social care sector, the speakers agreed.
Aisling Duffy is chief executive of Certitude, a learning disability and mental health charity, and sits on the board of the Voluntary Organisations Disability Group. She said the board was 100% white. Vic Rayner, executive director of the National Care Forum (NCF), representing not-for-profit care providers, admitted the same of her board.
Mark Harvey, principal social worker (PSW) at Hertfordshire county council and co-chair of the PSW network for adults, said he and others had been moved to tweet about the overwhelming whiteness of the annual NCAS social care conference last autumn.
“We got a lot of stick and challenge back,” said Harvey. “But we do have to have these really difficult conversations with directors and others. Social work is a profession that prides itself on its values base, and bends over backwards to protect the rights of citizens, yet shies away from engaging on this.”
Nadra Ahmed, executive chair of the National Care Association, which represents smaller for-profit care providers, said role models were very important. She was the sole BME individual on the association’s board when she first joined, becoming chair in 2001, but now it is only 50% white. More Asian care home operators in particular were coming forward to play a prominent role.
Yet Ahmed cautioned against expecting smaller providers to be able to take the same steps as larger ones, such as ensuring diverse appointment panels. “My focus is somebody with a 12-bed home,” she said. “If you make it too difficult, it won’t happen. It’s got to be a natural transition.”
Duffy said that three of the seven-strong senior management team at Certitude were BME, as were three of its main board members. The charity once had a subsidiary service for African-Caribbean people, which has since integrated into the main organisation, and she suspected that it had left a lasting impression.
“The culture created off the back of that seems to have carried on,” Duffy said. “I don’t know exactly what we do, apart from stand back and allow people to grow and develop on their own terms.”
Rayner – who joined NCF last year from the housing sector, which has a strong diversity network – said she felt social care had much work to do to catch up with other sectors. One influence might be through regulation: could the Care Quality Commission, she wondered, incorporate diversity checks when inspecting services?
Sharon Allen, Skills for Care’s chief executive, said that while NHS agencies were required to report against a workforce race equality standard, social care organisations were not. It was incumbent on them, and especially their national representative bodies, to take the initiative on measures that would ensure a better representation of BME groups in the top management and governance tiers.
The social care sector was rightly proud of having taken a lead on promoting person-centred care and support, Allen said. “Equality and diversity is just as important an issue. It’s really two sides of the same coin.”
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