Cumbria County Council: Equality and Diversity

Cumbria County Council engaged Equality Works to undertake an extensive Equality and Diversity programme which provided training across all levels, from Members to front line staff; encompassed issues from bullying and harassment to Equality Impact Assessment and corporate strategy; assisted in the progression from Level 1 to Level 3 of the Equality Standard for Local Government (ESLG) and successfully challenged perceptions of Equality and Diversity in an area where they had not traditionally been high on the agenda.

The Equality and Diversity programme is in the fourth year of delivery and Equality Works have trained in excess of 1700 delegates to date. Our work at Cumbria has been developed to include training and consultancy on Equality Impact Assessment, an investigation into bullying and harassment and general support to develop the council’s approach to Equality and Diversity, including providing feedback on strategy and guidance. All of this has had the added benefit of helping the council move from Level 1 to Level 3 of ESLG.

In 2005, the council had done some work on equality but recognised that there was a need to ensure that this was seen as a key part of everyday practice and that all members of the council would benefit from learning and development in this area. The council was at that time at Level 1 of the ESLG and wanted the programme to support their progression through the standard.

In preparation for the training we undertook a detailed training needs analysis, which allowed us to ensure that specific issues could be addressed. This included issues such as rural isolation and poverty, promoting equalities for travelling communities and ensuring that race equality is properly taken into account in a large geographical area with relatively small proportions of Black and Minority Ethnic residents.

Equalities training has been delivered across all levels, including Members, senior managers, managers and staff. Training duration is half a day for Members and one day for all other groups. All courses include the following elements:

• Examples of good practice appropriate to the role and level of the group;
• Information on the six equality strands, plus issues related to poverty and rurality;
• Information on the equalities legislation plus case law where appropriate;
• Information on the Equality Standard;
• Activities on challenging discrimination; and
• Opportunities to identify personal action points or plans.

As part of the council’s work on the standard, we were also asked to provide one-day EqIA training for managers from both internal and external functions including finance and procurement, business planning and performance, consultation and involvement, transport, human resources and social services. Following the training, managers were invited to submit their draft assessments in order to receive feedback and support before submitting their final assessments. In addition to written feedback we provided coaching to a number of managers which focused on working with them to interpret the available evidence whilst helping them to action plan in order to improve future data collection.

Equality Works recorded the key elements of good practice, learning points and areas for development from the assessments we reviewed. This was fed back to the council to assist in further developing the impact assessment process and support provided to managers.

In October 2008, the council were informed that they had successfully achieved Level 3 of the Equality Standard.

The programme we have delivered has contributed to increased levels of knowledge and understanding in the council. This has allowed us to work with the council’s Equality Officer to develop the training to increasing levels of sophistication and to reflect the council’s movement through the ESLG. For example, the manager’s course now includes activities on setting equality objectives and targets as required by Level 3 of the standard; this was not an activity which we would have been in a position to include in the first two years of the programme.

Managers now routinely use impact assessment as a tool for reviewing the impact of services and policies and have developed a suite of equality objectives and targets. The Chief Executive of the council has also provided very good feedback on the programme, noting the positive change in organisational culture.

As a result of our work with Cumbria County Council we have also been commissioned by other local authorities within the region, including South Lakeland District Council and Allerdale Borough Council.