Less than half of Sheffield Council staff have taken mandatory equality training

It is compulsory for all council staff to complete two modules, and three for managers, of equality, diversity and inclusion training but less than half have.

The shocking figures were revealed in a recent meeting of the council’s overview and scrutiny management committee.

In the meeting, Clare Corneille, head of human resources, said: “It is now mandatory for all staff to complete the training…I’m not going to sit here and say that is what people are doing.

“We have a 45 percent compliance rate at the moment for the two general courses and 42 percent for the manager course.

“That is a significant increase from where we were last year when we were averaging around 18 percent.

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“We have done a lot of communication internally around increasing that but we have got a lot more work to go.

“Hence we are blocking a lot of people from being on recruitment panels who have not done the training.”

She urged councillors to recommend everyone to take the training, adding: “It’s three hours of your life, an hour on each module. They are not the best but they will give you what you need to be able to think about (equality, diversity and inclusion) and we are looking at how we can develop them and personalise them to (the council) but they will give you exactly what you are looking for.”

It comes shortly after a councillor exposed shocking racism at the council and said a number of serious incidents were ignored.

Councillor Kaltum Rivers, representative for Broomhill and Sharrow Vale ward, said she was shocked by the “blatant racism” at the authority which she said had been the hardest problem she has dealt with in her role.

She shared her experiences ahead of stepping down as a councillor in May, to focus on her PhD, in the hope the council will do more to tackle racism.

This included a senior councillor trying to remove an amendment to recognise racism and being asked on multiple occasions to declare an interest in admissions committee meetings when members of the public were Muslim.