Considering care experience in equality impact assessments
published on 24 April 2024
The Care Leaver Local Offer and Cambridgeshire County Council have co-produced guidance to support public bodies to consider care experience in their own equality impact assessment (EIA) processes.
The guide comes because many local authorities have passed the motion to treat ‘care experience’ as a protected characteristic. One way public bodies can treat care experience as a protected characteristic is by incorporating care experience into existing equality impact assessments. However, we identified a gap in support for policymakers in this area and this guidance is a starter to support people to consider the differential impact of policy decisions on care experienced individuals.
Adding care experience as an additional category in your EIA process will ensure the unique experiences and needs of care experienced individuals are considered at policy level. By adding this into your processes you can explore and identify any potential implications of decisions on this group, ensuring that the actions proposed do not inadvertently discriminate against care experienced individuals and promote informed, equitable decision-making.
The guidance will:
- Provide a definition of care experience for practitioners.
- Provide a foundation to support local authorities to explore how they can strengthen their existing EIA processes to include care experience and guide their employees to consider care experience in their EIAs.
- Explore the implications of care experience and provide real examples of the differential impact of policy decisions on care experienced individuals.
- Explore why it is important to engage with care experienced individuals to inform an EIA.
- Provide some good practice examples/case studies.
Here are the resources from the "Treating Care Experience as a Protected Characteristic" Conference held online on 24th April 2024.
Download the presentation and guidance here