Get a plan

Setting out and delivering your action plan is the most important part of the whole process. Your action plan needs to be clear and prioritized. It should contain specific actions that will lead to demonstrable improvements in equality. If you look at an action and can’t say what difference it will make to equality, the action is not specific or clear enough.

Actions also have to:

• Have clear timescales

• Have indentified people/departments responsible for their delivery

• Be measurable - your indicators for this do not necessarily have to be numerical however

• Cover the entire remit of your organisation – for example, covers actions in relation to policy development, service delivery, employment, procurement and partnerships.

• Include a balance between actions which are about improving your processes for delivering equality and those which are about delivering real outcomes for real people

• Be necessary – it should be possible, through reading your scheme, to understand WHY specific actions are being suggested. There should be a clear link between the evidence you have, the information you have gained through involving disabled people and the actions you are planning to take

If you have created a single scheme, covering many equality aspects, you need to be sure that your actions are specific to the individual aspects. It should be clear which actions are to address disability related issues, which race, and which gender, as a minimum.

There is a whole section on this site dedicated to creating action plans, including templates for you to download.