The intended learning outcomes were to improve Prince’s Trust staff skills and confidence in talking to young people about providing diversity information, with the goal of increasing completion of demographic information on start and completion paperwork. This will enable more thorough and robust Equality and Diversity data to evidence Prince’s Trust performance in recruiting a workforce that reflects it’s local community.

They also specified that with the training they would like:

• A general introduction to equality and diversity monitoring, legalities associated with it in terms of disclosure / data protection
• Improved understanding of why we collate this information and how it is used
• Identifying barriers to young people providing this information and potential ways to overcome them
• A training resource pack for participants to utilise post training

With the detailed outline requirement already in place, we created an outline proposal covering the following key objectives:

• Objective 1: Understanding of legislation relating to Equality, Diversity, Disclosure, Confidentiality and GDPR
• Objective 2: Identifying barriers to young people providing diversity information
• Objective 3: Identifying appropriate interactions with young people to increase willingness to provide diversity monitoring information

We then had a detailed meeting with Emily and identified how the training could be delivered and how this would fit in with other activities already happening. For example, Prince’s Trust had previously completed an internal survey of staff confidence in discussing Diversity information with their participants, so this information was used to inform our programme.

Two weeks prior to the training solution being delivered all resources were sent to Prince’s Trust for review and suggestions before anything was finalised.

A learning and development package was agreed to be delivered to Prince’s Trust staff (executives, managers and data analysts) working within the Health and Social Care department of the business. Our bespoke intervention was designed to enable Prince’s Trust to understand the value and importance of diversity monitoring information.

We delivered a 2 hours interactive virtual workshop with an associated workbook.
The workshop focused on promoting diversity as a positive influence on individuals and organisations alike, identifying the barriers involved with the teams, then identifying their own practical solutions to addressing these barriers.

We used pre- and post course RARPA based evaluations to identify changes in behaviour and improved confidence in the attendees.

Identified barriers and solutions include: Creating engaging video content and case-studies promoting diversity to communicate with young people why data is collected and how it is used; Changing the point at which data is collected to allow executives to build rapport virtually; and engaging with previous participants to become ambassadors and attend recruitment events for example.

The post course evaluation data shows an average 13% improvement across performance measures. It also demonstrates an average 86% satisfaction rate – with some excellent testimonials from the attendees on how the training has helped to improve their work. (see below)

Prince’s Trust now have a clear set of actions and ideas for improving data collection, which they are taking forward to their EDI committee for implementation.

Prince’s Trust will look to implement the actions identified and, due to the success of the programme, are now looking to use the same training for other departments.