Equality Progress Report 2025

Southampton's diverse population

Southampton is home to a diverse population, with almost 160 languages spoken in the city and 31.9% of residents considering themselves other than white British in 2021. While our understanding of the makeup of our community is good and captured in our data observatory, we know there is more to do to connect with our communities to better understand and reflect their needs in our decision making. Delivering a more equal city is at the heart of the new Southampton City Plan (2025-2035). Recognising the vital role Southampton City Council plays in delivering this ambition, we have outlined three key equality objectives in our refreshed Corporate Plan, outlining our aspirations to do more to connect with the diverse communities we serve and deliver services that better reflect their needs. We plan to provide annual progress reports against these objectives in line with our public sector equality duties.

This report sets out progress against the previous Southampton City Council Corporate Plan’s five equality objectives that aimed to improve the way we deliver services to our diverse communities, as well as how we recruit and support our staff’s understanding of the importance embedding diversity and inclusion at the heart of all they do. These objectives centred around the ethos of ‘strong foundations for life’, focussing on ensuring residents of all ages and backgrounds have the foundations they need to succeed, including those groups within the nine protected characteristics, as well as a focus on improving the health and wellbeing of all residents and reducing health inequalities within Southampton.

This Equality Progress Report outlines the key achievements we’ve delivered against these objectives, and marks the progress in which we plan to build upon under a refreshed equalities programme outlined in the new Corporate Plan.

Equality Objective 1: Improving health and wellbeing of all residents, with a focus on reducing health inequalities within Southampton

Five out of six Southampton special schools are rated Good or Outstanding and deliver a high quality of education to our SEND children. The one school that received an RI rating in 2024 is currently being supported by our School Improvement Team to improve its offer.

The Southampton Short Breaks offer provides a range of high-quality inclusive activities for children and young people with SEND. This is enhanced by the extremely successful provision of HAF holiday schemes – both SEND Friendly and SEND Specific settings and activities catering for the needs of all of our SEN children.

Since April 2024, there has been an additional 8 settings sign up to the Southampton Healthy Early Years Award (HEYA) to help reduce childhood obesity levels in the city. 

A key focus of the new city-wide Mental Health & Wellbeing Strategy launched in 2024 is suicide prevention. So far we have delivered:

• Suicide Postvention Guidance for schools and colleagues.
• A real-time surveillance process and postvention response teams, with a standard operating procedure created to allow cross-agency working.
• Workplace postvention and prevention training and support package available for workplaces in Southampton.
• A range of Suicide Prevention Training available to front-line staff and volunteers in public and VCSE roles in Southampton, including basic mental health awareness, Connect 5, and Debt and Mental Health training.
• A suicide specific bereavement support service across the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care System.
• Suicide prevention training and support package for GP practice staff across Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care System.
• A number of mental health awareness campaigns that amplify core messages and signpost to local crisis services and support, including World Suicide Prevention Day and Time to Talk day.

Equality Objective 2: Facilitating life-long learning and skills development to encourage higher-skilled, higher-paid jobs

We’ve provided multi-disciplinary support for families to provide access to early help support workers to work intensively with young people/their families to provide practical whole-family support where needed to tackle the causes of absenteeism and unblock the barriers to attendance.

We regularly bring schools together to communicate messages, provide advice and share best practice between schools and trusts within the area.  Senior Attendance champions in all schools are invited to meet three times a year.

We’ve increased monitoring and support for young people Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET) via monthly NEET panel meetings, bringing together key partners including job centres and virtual schools.

We’ve expanded the reach for our NEET drop-in offer to more venues across the city including the new MP3 building, linking in with Youth Options Mindfulness Mondays and a virtual offer for those unable to attend physical drop-ins.

We offer non-biased and bespoke support to students in our three colleges who have been struggling with their attendance under the UK Shared Prosperity Fund. 

We hold regular Post 16 Engagement and Risk of NEET meetings (one per term) to improve engagement and progression in learning, skills and employment for young people in Southampton and to share data to support progression tracking, inviting colleagues across the council to explore ways we can work together, share best practice and collaborate on how to reach young people most in need.

Levy transfer process

As of January 2025, we have helped to fund 135 apprenticeships via the levy transfer process and committed to paying out over £1m to small local employers.

Between January 2020 and April 2024, Southampton City Council have had 220 individuals commence apprenticeships either as an existing member of staff to upskill or by joining us in an apprentice role.

Apprenticeships are promoted regularly internally for staff and there has been a steady increase in the number of apprentice posts being created externally from 2 vacancies in 2020 to 15 in 2023. 

We’ve hosted 7 Supported Internship placements in total supporting local SEND young people.
Since 2021, we have created 19 Intern posts for students studying at a Southampton based university or individuals whose permanent home address is in Southampton.

We run a work experience programme aimed primarily at year 10 students and have created 38 placements in the 4 years of the programme running.

Youth Justice Service

Through collaborative working, we successfully supported the Youth Justice Service team in offering a bespoke two-week CSCS card course and work experience for 8 participants. Key achievements include:

• ⁠all 8 completed CSCS level 1 health and safety
• ⁠7 did additional tower training
• ⁠6 completed first aid training

Equality Objective 3: Give communities more influence over local decision-making and create child-friendly neighbourhoods

In 2022, Southampton City Council started working with UNICEF UK to become a Child Friendly City. The programme aims to create cities and communities in the UK where all children – whether they are living in care, using a children’s centre, or simply visiting their local library – have a meaningful say in, and truly benefit from, the local decisions, services and spaces that shape their lives. We are now driving the priorities through our existing Children and Young People’s Strategic Partnership Board and no longer working with UNICEF UK on this. We have renamed the board the Child Friendly Board to reflect its new focus. 

In response to feedback from young people about their concerns about knife crime and youth violence, the Violence Reduction Unit launched workshops in specific schools in Southampton. 

Based on young people’s feedback we’ve agreed to a TikTok channel which will enable young people to upload videos about their experiences of Special Educational Needs and Disabilities, in order to help others. The project is being led by a young person, supported by a participation lead. 

Aligned to the launch of our Family Safeguarding Model – with adult mental health, substance use and domestic abuse workers being embedded in children’s social work teams – we’ve used child friendly networks to develop links with local faith communities, which has resulted in better promotion of fostering and connected carer opportunities.

Play areas

Last year we refurbished 7 play areas and delivered 1 new play area installing a variety of play equipment suitable for children of all ages, mobilities and abilities to enjoy.

There are a further 8 play areas and 2 MUGAs planned for improvement works this year. We will also be installing an outdoor gym, a new macadam pump track and refurbishing one of our skate parks. 

Equality Objective 4: Create more resilient communities by coordinating support for those in need and enabling people to live independently for longer, including those with disabilities and those close to retirement age and older

Household Support Fund

Through the Household Support fund we have continued to provide funding to food aid projects as part of Household Support Fund.

We have also used the fund to support residents through supermarket vouchers in the school holidays for Free School Meal eligible pupils and also for vulnerable households via agency referrals.

Food Partnership

We have developed a Food Partnership in the city. The partnership has been developing over the past 18 months and in November 2024 became members of the Sustainable Food Places Network. The partnership facilitates communication and collaboration between organisations in the city that are working to improve the local food system.

Directory of support services

We launched our new and improved directory of support services containing a list of services that support residents in Southampton, including an improved search function and maps.

Residential and nursing care placements

New placements to residential and nursing care for 18-64 and 65+ have come down and are below target. 

New placements for 65+ in 2023/24 was 767 per 100,000 population and is now 560 per 100,000, representing a huge improvement.  Adjusting for Southampton's population, this is 71 fewer people per year.

The total percentage of people receiving residential and nursing care as a percentage of all people receiving a service is falling.  This has fallen from the April 2024 figure of 29.3% and is now 28.6%. Based on our current cohort of people in receipt of a long term service, this equates to approximately 180 people.

Support to live independently

The percentage of individuals with a learning disability supported to live independently has been above our target of 81% all year. This is currently at 88%.

We were above the England average ASCOF measure in 2023/24 and our performance on this measure has further improved since then. In 2023/24, the Southampton figure was 82.4% with an England average of 81.6%.   

Equality Objective 5: Deliver on the council’s Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) Pledge, to promote and champion diversity throughout the organisation

Currently there are 8 Employee Resource groups with the average membership of 20 per group. The ninth group consists of the chairs of all the groups. This group is our D&I advisory group that meets the CEO quarterly to advise on improvements needed and hold leadership accountable.

Learning sessions have been delivered on Diversity & Inclusion (D&I), ethics and values, and bias are being delivered for employees and managers within the council.

Through a repeat campaign using email, cascade messaging and Viva Engage, over a period of 6 weeks, we engaged staff in most council areas to complete more of their own Diversity data. We have at least halved the amount of missing employee diversity information within the council.  

Global Culture Group

Our new Global Culture Group looks at celebrations of festivals, national days and events, such as Diwali, Ramadan, Pride, International Women’s Day, and Black History Month.

We celebrated International Women’s Day 2025 by raising the International Women’s Day flag and holding a guest speaker event hosted by the Leader.

Menopause

Menopause information and signposting support has been provided through a new SharePoint site. We have also run a number of menopause cafés.

HR processes

Our HR processes have equality aspects, such as flexible working and reasonable adjustments such as the disability confident and veteran guaranteed interview schemes. (eg disability confident and veteran guaranteed interview schemes).