EDI at Settle: a year of learning and change
Settle’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion working group is led by Jen Long, our Senior Operations Manager, and our EDI Officer, Alice Turner.
The EDI working group focus on direction and implementation of the strategy, alongside the involvement of the whole team across our different areas of work.
Jen took some time to reflect on achievements and challenges over the last year and shares our organisational priorities for 2025/26.
In 2024/25:
- We have increased the representation of ethnic minority groups in our staff team by 15%
- We increased the diversity and representation of lived experience on our Board
- We introduced guaranteed interviews for care-experienced applicants
- We included young people from our programme in strategy development and recruitment (including for our new CEO)
- We improved our systems and processes for collecting diversity data, so that we can better understand the needs of the young people we work with and subsequently make improvements to our programme.
We’re really pleased with the progress we’ve made this year. As well as taking action, we spent time in reflection and discussion to help us build a culture of inclusion and belonging. We delivered unconscious bias training to the whole team with Social Matters where we confronted our own unconscious biases and set ourselves actions to take forward in our professional and personal lives. Some examples of the team’s actions are below.
‘Recognise assumptions when they happen and make the effort to move past them rather than being stuck in the embarrassment of thinking the ‘wrong thing’
‘Be more active in contributing to conversation starters about various privileges’
‘Most characteristics are invisible. Listen first. Speak later.’
It was great to have Social Matters join us as we are long-time listeners of their podcast. This often gets recommended in our Content Club where we reflect on key societal issues.
Other recommendations from the last year’s Content Club include Ashley John Baptiste’s memoir Looked After; the Social Work Successes podcast; the Social Worker and the Mentor podcast and the Outrage and Optimism podcast.
We delivered Trans Inclusion at Work training with Diversifying Group which improved our understanding of the barriers to inclusion facing Trans people in the workplace and across society.
In relation to our frontline work, the Settle Coaches took part in training on faith sensitive support to improve the support we provide to the young people on the Settle Programme.
In February, the whole team took part in Race Equality Week’s Five Day Challenge where we explored the topics of code switching, intersectionality, recognising privilege and inclusive language. Below is a reflection from a member of the team:
‘I think we all need to adapt ourselves in the workplace to ensure we are relating to others in an optimal way. A commitment to learning more about other cultures and how to be inclusive means we can take on some of the load that minority groups bear when adapting to a professional group environment. Ideally we would all be making equal effort to contribute to creating an inclusive society instead of expecting people from minority cultural or other backgrounds to "conform" to the dominant culture.’
Of course, we also faced some challenges in trying to achieve all our objectives:
- We had a decreased response rate to our diversity monitoring with young people. This is something we’ve already discussed with the frontline delivery team, and we are exploring what steps we can put in place to increase this for this coming year.
- Although we increased our representation of ethnic minority groups this year, we are still under the target we set for our 2022-25 strategy. This highlights that there is further work to do to increase the representation of minoritised groups and care-experienced people in our staff team over our next three-year strategic plan.
The EDI working group have taken all these learnings and finalised our strategy for 2025/26 which aims to build on our successes and push us even further. Our objectives this year will focus on:
- Making faster progress towards our targets for representation
- Finding an external coaching provider for the working group to help us to reflect and make our work more meaningful. We hope that, by utilising coaching, we can leverage the commitment of the working group to take the organisation’s EDI work even further.
- Improving our diversity monitoring data collection from programme participants, exploring the barriers for young people to complete the form and making sure we use the data in a meaningful way to improve the service.
- Continuing to create a sense of belonging for Settle staff through another belonging workshop.
- Creating a work experience placement for a young person with care experience
- Reviewing the inclusivity of our working practices and culture for those with disabilities and neurodiversity
- Assessing the accessibility of our working environment for those with physical disabilities or mobility issues
- Exploring opportunities to share more about our EDI work externally
Looking ahead, I’m most excited about coaching for our working group, as it will give us the space to reflect alongside the more action-focused work we’ll be doing.