Equality a lottery in the apprenticeship scheme in Scotland

A routine approach to equality in the workplace is to monitor just who is in place, what level/pay they are at and other things, like how long they stay before moving on.  With that kind of data and some basic intelligence about what your workforce should look like if discrimination was eliminated from how you recruit and retain a workforce, employers have a reasonably straightforward task in changing how they operate so that they get the diverse workforce they should have and provide evidence that discrimination has been eliminated.  It is a lot easier than landing people on the moon.

And yet.  In a session with the Equality & Human Rights Commission in September, the Scottish Parliament Equal Opportunities Committee heard, in response to a question :

The EHRC found that employee monitoring was “patchy and inconsistent across all sectors”.  Overall, performance was poor: of the 184 public authorities examined, only 27 per cent produced the full set of information on the protected characteristics of their staff. Will you comment on why performance seems to have been poor?

The EHRC response ? :

We are moving into what we are calling a diagnostic phase, in which we are working with the Scottish Government to try to get underneath the data. We can see the outcome, which is poor results, as you highlighted. We need to know why that is.

Put another way.  The organisation responsible in Scotland for regulating and enforcing the law on equality was unable or more likely unwilling to use those three little words : I don't know. 

Elsewhere in that session, the EHRC were asked about monitoring of protected characteristics of young people getting access to what is called the Modern Apprenticeship scheme in Scotland.  They said in response :

we managed to get data about the numbers of people who are involved in the current programme by different characteristics. As you know, we found—as we expected to find—significant gender segregation but also a very low level of participation among ethnic minorities and a particularly low level of participation among disabled people.

What the EHRC did not share with the Committee was that there is, as yet, no data on the protected characteristics of religion or belief, or sexual orientation.  See this response from Skills Development Scotland [SDS] which confirms that they have only just this year started monitoring these characteristics.  When asked to explain why they had not been gathering this data already, SDS replied with this.

In other words, what they and we do not know is just how well such as young Catholic people are benefiting from the Modern Apprenticeship scheme, if at all, and certainly in comparison to young Protestant people.  If the first experience of work for young people in Scotland is through a Modern Apprenticeship scheme which seriously struggles to evidence an absence of discrimination, the future of working life for those young people and their capacity to help shape a discrimination-free workplace will be forever tainted and compromised by their initial experience.