How does our Children and Young People's Plan promote equality?
This is a summary of the equality impact assessment we carried out as part of our Children and Young People’s Plan. The full assessment can be accessed in the right hand column.
What is an Equality Impact Assessment?
This is a process that we use to check that our work does not discriminate and that, where possible, we promote equality. The assessment focuses on six equality strands. These are:
- race
- gender
- disability
- age
- sexual orientation
- religion or belief.
For our Children and Young People's Plan we also considered the impact of our work on disadvantaged children and young people. We asked how far it helped disadvantaged children or young people become more included in their communities.
How we carried out our assessment
As we developed each of our ten improvement priorities, we thought about how our planned action for each would impact on equality. Our Plan is also about developing more integrated working to provide co-ordinated, early intervention work to children, young people and families. We considered how this would impact on equality.
Key findings from our assessment
1. Intentional activity aimed at reducing inequality
Our Plan has a strong emphasis on reducing inequalities, and focuses work around vulnerable groups. This includes work targeted in particular localities or with vulnerable groups of children and young people.
This table shows the main impact of our Plan on each of the six equality strands
| Race | Some improvement priorities address this. For example, we know that boys from some black or minority ethnic backgrounds are less likely to do well at school. We are targeting support for these groups. There is also work to reduce race-related bullying. |
| Gender | Some improvement priorities include action intended to reduce gender-related inequality. For example, targeted work in schools to increase boys’ attainment and work to help more sixteen to eighteen year old young mothers into work or learning. |
| Disability and special educational needs | Many of our improvement priorities address this. For example, education services target support work to increase school attainment and attendance and our work with vulnerable children considers the impact of disabilities. For some other improvement priorities, we may need to monitor the impact on disabled children and young people. |
| Age | Our services are aimed at specific age groups, and this is appropriate. We need to ensure that new partnership work is targeted at the most appropriate age group. Early intervention work may focus on younger age groups to prevent problems later. |
Sexual orientation Religion or Belief | We do not yet have in place arrangements to systematically monitor sexual orientation or religious belief. In some areas of work, we have started to think about issues related to these. For example, we know that bullying may be related to sexual orientation, religion or belief. |
Our Children and Young People’s Plan prioritises the needs of children, young people and families most at risk of poor outcomes overall, putting the needs of those facing the most disadvantage at its heart. The ten improvement priorities and our integrated working developments are about working with families to overcome the complex and inter-related causes of poverty and disadvantage, including health inequalities. The Plan identifies action to overcome disadvantage and ways that we will monitor this.
2. Possible unintentional discrimination
It is likely that some children, young people and families find it harder to access our services. We may not consider the needs of particular groups in how we plan and deliver our services. However, we are not yet systematically monitoring this. For example, we monitor disability in education services, but not in some other areas of our work. None of our improvement priority areas include monitoring of sexual orientation or religion or belief. We have not yet fully developed monitoring arangements for integrated working such as in Joint Access Teams (JATs).
Conclusions
There is some good practice, especially work with disadvantaged children, young people and communities. We monitor the impact of race, gender and disability but this is not consistent across all our improvement priorities. We do not monitor the impact of sexual orientation or religion or belief. We have not yet developed systematic monitoring for the impact of working in an integrated way.
Action Plan
As part of the review process for the 2009-2011 Children and Young People’s Plan, we will:
- set up better systems for monitoring the impact of our work on equality across all of our ten improvement priorities. This may include thinking about whether we can monitor sexual orientation and religion or belief
- consider the impact of integrated working arrangements on equality. They are intended to promote inclusion and reduce inequalities, but we need to consider developing systems to monitor their impact on specific groups
- consider the implications for equality when reviewing our targets and performance measures as part of the annual review of our Plan in March 2010.
