The Diocese of Westminster is an Equal Opportunities and accredited Living Wage employer. To be successful, we aspire to be person centred at all times and place human dignity at our centre. We aim at all times to recruit the person who is best suited to the job, and we welcome applications from all communities and underrepresented groups, regardless of race, sexual orientation, disability, faith, age and gender. We guarantee an interview to disabled candidates who meet the minimum criteria. We strive to take a holistic approach to the development of our people so that we may better serve and empower the mission of our Church as ministered by the parishes, deaneries, schools and communities that we support. Our ambition is to work together to promote a more inclusive environment, which attracts all candidates and signals our commitment to celebrating and promoting diversity.

We want people from all walks of life to feel valued for their individuality, thrive in our organisation, share a sense of belonging and demonstrate our values. With this in mind, we positively celebrate Diversity & Inclusion at the Diocese of Westminster and place it at the heart of our aim which is to reflect and connect with the diverse communities that we serve.

Actions we take to provide equality of opportunity for all candidates include:
We anonymise application forms during our shortlisting process to ensure that candidates are assessed without any consideration of their name, gender or background.
As part of this anonymisation, we don’t take into consideration where candidates studied, or the method of that study e.g. full-time, part-time or distance learning.

We apply a consistent approach to our question setting across our applications and interviews to ensure that everyone is assessed against the identified values, competencies and job requirements. Our values are important to us and as such we use a scoring framework that marks candidates based on values, behaviours and competencies.

We provide guidance and brief all our interviewers throughout the selection processes in recruitment best-practice to mitigate against any potential for conscious or unconscious bias or discrimination.

Whenever possible we will have multiple interviewers when assessing each candidate to ensure marking is accurate and fair.

We ensure all our assessment venues are accessible. We offer alternative formats of our application forms to encourage applicants with disabilities or who require reasonable adjustments to perform at their best.

We will work together with candidates with a disability or health condition to implement reasonable adjustments to enable them to feel comfortable and strive during the assessment process.