In the second episode, we speak to Andrea Stone, service director for Children's Social Care in Dudley and Emina Atic-Lee, service manager at Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and a member of our National Advisory Forum. The forum provides expert advice, support and challenge to our work and how we achieve our objectives. Both have been registered social workers for over 20 years. They talk to us about why diversity data collection is key to practice and highlight its importance. Transcript Ahmina Hi, I'm Ahmina Ahktar, Head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at Social Work England. Welcome to this is Social Work, a podcast from the specialist regulator for social workers, Social Work England. Equality, diversity, and inclusion are sent forward to our work as an effective regulator, an employer. They are inherent in our values, which are to be fearless, independent, transparent, ambitious, collaborative, and to act with integrity. As part of our equality, diversity, and inclusion action plan, we made a commitment to better understand the social work profession. We're doing this by actively seeking diversity data from social workers on our register to help us to continue to ensure our processes are fair and to set a benchmark for further insight to support this work and following a successful first podcast season. These special podcast episodes will focus on diversity data collection. In this episode, I'm joined by Andrea Stone, Service Director for Children's Social Care in Dudley and Emina Atic-Lee Service Manager at NHS Foundation Trust. Emina is also a member of our National Advisory Forum. The forum provides expert advice, support, and challenge to our work and how we achieve our objectives at Social Work England. Both have been registered social workers for over 20 years. They talk to us about why diversity data collection is key to practice and highlight its importance. We hope you enjoy. So I'm delighted to be joined by Andrea and Emina today. So before we go any further, I'm gonna ask you to introduce yourself. So I'll start with Andrea. Can you say who you are, your job title and link to the social work profession? Andrea Okay. I'm Andrea Stone and I'm service director for Children's Social Care in Dudley. And I've been a social worker for about 22 years. Ahmina Thanks Andrea, and we'll go to Emina. Emina Hi. So I'm Emina, I'm a registered social worker. I've been social worker for the same time as Andrea, 22 years, and I worked for Local Authority for 22 years after the last year when I joined the NHS. I'm also a member of the National Advisory Forum, which works with Social Work England closely, and I've been a member since March 2020 when it first kind of formed. Thank you both. So we've been talking about the importance of diversity data. In part one, we were talking about the importance of providing information about our identities and how providing information about our characteristics has become commonplace. And we're often asked to share this data when we apply for a job or a course or when we register with the new service. And in this part of the podcast, we'll continue to explore this, and look for some thoughts and reflections from Emina and Andrea. So I'm just going to move on to my first question. Why is it important for social workers to share this data with us? So, I'll start with you Emina. Emina Yes, thank you. I've been thinking about this and I think as a registered social worker, I feel a real sense of belonging within the social work community. I'm really aware that this community is very kind of wide and diverse, as over 22 years I worked with colleagues, when we write your backgrounds in terms of culture, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, and I think it's this kind of richness and diversity that makes social work of the most resourceful professions in the public sector. I think they to serve the needs of our diverse communities. And I think this is something we need to feel quite proud of as a profession. And I think the only way for us to have a clear sense of who the eyes are in the profession, and what our identity represents is for social workers to share their personal characteristics with Social Work England, at the point of kind of registering or renewing our registration. And then what would happen, I think is social workers, we would have access to overall figures collected. And I know as enough member that when social work England writes their annual report, there's a really good data around diversity and equality. And we need to, I think, contribute to that. And I think we also hopefully make sure as a workforce we are kind of better presented within social work itself and enough as well. And I think we'll also, hopefully we'll have the regulator kind of have a better understanding. Who we are, so they're better equipped to meet our needs and ensure there's a fairness at every level. Ahmina Thanks, Emina really helpful to hear ...
