The time to diversify children’s services is now
Jo Davidson
Tuesday, March 1, 2022
It’s summer 2020 and I am co-facilitating a workshop for The Staff College exploring diversity in leadership with a group of energetic future leaders in children’s services.
Not for the first time, I have noticed how few white leaders are there. It’s almost as though diversity work is just for people who are minoritised.
I am pondering this, when a young leader calls me out: “As a white person, you can decide whether or not to prioritise anti-racism. As a black person I can’t, because I face racism every day. I can’t just leave it behind when I go home, like you can.”
It was a painful truth, even for those of us who consider ourselves allies and can point to change we’ve helped to create. It’s all too easy to treat diversity and inclusion as another priority to be done, or something to be delegated to someone else, rather than as a way of being, thinking, acting. Is that true of you? Be honest with yourself.
Yes, some things have changed. Following that workshop, The Staff College published Leading in Colour: The Fierce Urgency of Now, which focuses on the action leaders, particularly white leaders, can take. Workforce Race Equality Standards are being piloted by 18 councils. There are glimmers of change in the diversity of leaders being supported to step forward for more senior positions. Yet, it’s fragile change and prone to the whims of shifting priorities. The only way we will see tangible, lasting change, is if each of us has an inclusive mindset. Changing the environment to suit people, not changing the people to suit the environment.
Leaders have immense power and influence to make positive change in their own practice and that of people they work with. Over the past decade, we have seen more female children’s services leaders but the ethnicity of those at the top remains predominately white. The thing is, we keep chipping away at different segments of diversity, rather than embracing diversity and inclusion generally.
For today’s leaders it’s not a question about whether you need to make changes in the diversity of the leaders you support, sponsor, promote and mentor – it’s a moral, economic and societal duty. How can we fulfil our duties to the communities we serve if we only employ and promote certain segments of our communities; if we only develop and promote people who look like us, think like us, have our life experiences?
We must stop thinking it’s someone else’s responsibility. Stop blaming council members for appointments decisions – officers appoint the vast majority of leaders after all. The media has a part to play by finding alternatives to the same white, abled voices featured.
Let’s continue critically changing our development, recruitment and support arrangements; let’s embrace making cultural change to ensure that everyone feels able to be their authentic selves; let’s do this day in, day out for lasting positive change, not just because it’s risen up the priority list again.