Equality and diversity

As an employer, we actively seek to ensure that our workforce reflects the communities we serve, recognising that this makes us better able to understand their needs and priorities.

We can only do this by ensuring that the people who work for us are the best they can be irrespective of age, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, disability, marital status, religion or belief.

As part of this, we're proud signatories of the Race at Work Charter, committing to improving racial equality in the workplace against the five charter principles.

What matters to us is that we have talented, enthusiastic and experienced professionals working with us who can help deliver our strategic outcomes.

You don't have to be sporty to work at Sport England. We value the ideas and contributions from everybody and welcome and support difference.

A group of people chatting and smiling on a rugby field.

Our aim is to make sure that equality, diversity and inclusion run through everything we do as an employer.

As such, and in light of the discussion around race and the global Black Lives Matter movement that led to protests during the summer of 2020, we’re focusing work in four areas to ensure this happens.

We hope these areas of focus will lead us to achieving our four broad ambitions.

Read about our areas of focus and our broad ambitions

Our broad ambitions include ensuring that, by 2026, our own organisation is representative of the population and the people it serves, at all levels within the organisation, by setting a new target to double the proportion of Black, Asian and minority ethnic background staff in Sport England.

To help us realise this, we'll look at how diverse and inclusive we are internally, in terms of our staff, our policies and procedures, and the specific work we undertake – ensuring each have a strong focus on equality, diversity and inclusion from the start.

As part of this, in January 2021 we announced the appointment of our first director of equality, diversity and inclusion.

We have since updated our Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan for 2021-24 and have formed a terminology task group, to examine how our use of language can help us to be more inclusive.

Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan

Our internal Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan clearly sets out our equality ambitions.

They represent our internal objectives for ensuring equality, diversity and inclusion for the period 2021-24 and recognise the principles set out in the Code for Sports Governance and our public sector equality duties.

The plan is focused on the delivery of three themes we've identified as priorities: