Some Benefits of Ethnic Monitoring:

• Elimination of racial discrimination - identification of inequalities, institutional discrimination and effectiveness of any initiatives to tackle it -systematic measurement is essential for this process.
• Both qualitative and quantitative data is needed and understood in context to ensure meaningful identification of areas of concern & Tapping into the potential skills, markets and human resources in our area!
• Helps to identify concentrations of people in particular geographical areas or with particular concerns, needs and issues
• Helps identify under-representation of particular groups of people and where action may be needed
• Helps to establish the baseline of an organisation and track any progress in particular areas
• Lack of access to services & information - identify use, more effective use, non-use, under-use and other implications for resources and services
• Assists identifying demographic trends in the local communities
• Identifies newly arriving and evolution of local communities and their potential needs and issues
• Ensuring all sections of the community are aware of and using your services and being considered in service planning and resource allocation
• Can assist in identification of common issues and the potential needs and capacity for particular services - implication for non-use/lack of appropriate services in public sector
• Identification of areas where development of appropriate, specialist services may be required
• Personnel records - assess equal opportunities in employment
• Statistical, quantitative evidence such as ethnic monitoring data can provide the justification and context needed to apply to external funders.
  
  

Local voluntary, community and refugee organisations may be monitoring their own service users and often have rich and useful data about sections of the community that area particularly disadvantaged or new communities in the area. Likewise, detached workers, youth workers and neighbourhood wardens may have local intelligence of areas of deprivation or need not obvious from census or deprivation indicators. However, there is by no means no obligation for other organisations or communities to share their information/data, (certainly not personal details) and the DATA PROTECTION ACT may protect sharing of some information.

However many organisations and communities are willing to contribute to the understanding of issues, barriers and needs of disadvantaged sections of the community and assist with identifying LOCAL VARIATION that you should be monitoring for your services & employment.

Public services are required to provide appropriate services and combat disadvantage and discrimination for disadvantaged sections of their population. Often communities are evolving but these changes go unnoticed by services and employers. Often the most vulnerable Newly Arrived Communities, including Refugees and Asylum Seekers are currently unaccounted for in any mainstream monitoring and therefore are excluded even when public services are proactively trying to identify areas of institutional discrimination or inappropriate service delivery or lack of access to services and information available.

The Commission for Racial Equality and the Race Relations Act (1976, 2000 & 2003) Statutory Guidance recommends using the latest Census data from your local area PLUS LOCAL VARIATION. This form has been designed to incorporate Local Variation of a particular area (Slough), and can also be related back to the main census categories if necessary. Please feel free to add categories to this ethnic monitoring form. Ensure you use extra community categories - that is, CENSUS 2001 PLUS YOUR LOCAL VARIATION, as required for effective implementation of legal duties of the Race Relations Act (1976, 2001, 2003) and to ensure discrimination is identified and systematically rooted out. Neglect of adding these extra community categories or space to allow for self definition can result in inaccurate, invalid and ineffective data.

You should consider demographic changes and newly arrived communities in your local area. For example, there is estimated to be over 2000 Somali people in Slough, plus many more from other African countries. ‘Black African' is insufficient to understand who we are serving, At the time of writing, some other countries of origin of newly arrived communities are:

Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Angola, Burundi, Cameroon, China, Colombia, DR Congo, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Eritrea, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Kosovo, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Russia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, former Yugoslavia, Zimbabwe

You may want to analyse your data relating to local census data. In expanding your categories, you can still bring them together to conform to the census categories afterwards at the analysis stage. Remember, in being consistent with the census, you could be consistently excluding and consistently potentially discriminating!

In deciding what categories to incorporate, you should consider:

• Function - why are you monitoring? If you need to understand if there are communities that are not accessing you service, you should include options to capture all the variations on local demography and community characteristics
• Size of the population (even 20 people in a community have distinct needs and issues that your service should proactively monitor/measure)
• Validity - are you really measuring what you want to if you leave out certain communities or categories?
• Cost - How much will it really cost to add categories to your monitoring forms?
• Efficiency & consistency - by being efficient and consistent, are you excluding particular groups and their issues? Categories may be collapsed back and related/compared at the analysis stage with the census data.

N.B. There are ways of capturing more detailed information about local communities - allowing many opportunities to self-define or further specify from a category will give both the main census categories plus other information about nationality, religion or other that, upon analysis, may indicate natural groupings or communities that require further attention.

Please contact your local Race Equality Council and local voluntary, community & refugee organisations for further details of your local communities and local variation.

• How is information collated and kept up to date?
• Who needs to be consulted?
• Are all relevant people informed about the need for monitoring, its importance and relevance?
• What analysis is needed?
• What happens to the information - how is it fed back into policies, procedures and planning of services or resource allocation?
• To be effective, Ethnic Monitoring must be part of an ongoing process of analysis, asking questions, investigation and change. What happens to your ethnic monitoring data?!
  

• How do you request this information? Issues of sensitivity and fear/mistrust in clients. It is important that you understand fully why you are monitoring and what will happen to the information. Is it explained to clients the reasons why it is important to monitor by ethnicity & how the data is anonymous and confidential?
• Confidentiality and anonymity - Is information about ethnicity kept separate from clients records? (Must comply with Data Protection Act 1984 - collecting, storing, analysing and publishing data)
• Whose responsibility is it to deal with the data? Who else needs to be involved?
• How is the data audited, analysed and fed back into policies, procedures & processes?
• What implications does the data have for the organisation, the service, the communities needs and compliance with the legislation?
• Monitoring should be meaningful. Do you understand what the data is telling you? How can you link the data with what is happening in the context of your local communities, your organisation or your service?
• Monitoring should contribute towards change and making a difference. What DIFFERENCE is your monitoring making for your communities and employees?
  

• The most important category is the first, allowing space for SELF DEFINITION - giving the applicant/service user the opportunity to give their own identity as they see it. This will ensure everyone is included no matter what main categories you have.
• Then the category boxes should also then be filled in if appropriate to the person. Spaces to further specify under these boxes also can capture important community characteristics. This way, the form can gain the full and appropriate details as everyone is unique and will not always fit any of our boxes! Some categories could apply to a mixed identity (e.g. I am an English Sikh, not an Asian Sikh! I am an African-Caribbean Traveller! I am a Swahili speaking Somali). Hence the importance of self-definition.
• Categories on the form are in ALPHABETICAL ORDER to ensure no preference or superiority is suggested.
• Local Variation - (even these can be further expanded) The following categories have been added as constituted ethnic groups (Mandla v Lee 1983 House of Lords) and appropriate to Slough's communities - Sikh, Jew, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Gypsy, Traveller of Irish Heritage. Also added are - Arab, European and Pacific categories as local intelligence suggests people may wish to self-define under these categories also.
• Each main nationality of British is included (in alphabetical order) - English, Irish, Scottish & Welsh are sometimes thought of as distinct communities, nationalities and are protected as ethnic groups in law.
• All categories may be further expanded into diverse ethnic groups - for example there may be many different ethnic groups within one nationality, and may have distinct language needs within the same nationality. Therefore, Religion and Languages Spoken have been added to give an idea of the further breakdown of local communities and their potential needs.
• There are various examples given that could be used explain to the user/client the reasons why you are monitoring - this helps to overcome any negative connotations or mistrust about why you need to monitor.
  

To download this ethnic monitoring example, please click on the links below:
Ethnic Monitoring Proforma - MS Word format
Ethnic Monitoring Proforma - Adobe Acrobat format

Please update this form to suit your needs and to reflect the local variation of your area!

Briefing by Slough Race Equality Council

Last updated: 28/03/2006