Our commitment to inclusion and diversity

We’ve made a commitment to ensure all our communications and advertising make the National Trust and its benefits available and accessible to all. We’re also working with local partners to better connect the places in our care to the communities they serve.

We’re making this happen through:

• Improving online and offline accessibility: We’re improving experiences for people with disabilities and different needs, including across our handbook, website and app so that they’re accessible for everyone.
• Listening: We’re working to ensure that all our communications are more inclusive of the communities we serve, and make it easier for people to share their views.
• Improving access for disabled people: We’re installing ramps, boardwalks and investing in mobility vehicles and improved pathways at the places we care for.
• Increasing access to the outdoors: We’re working in partnership with Sport England and other local and national organisations to help everyone access the outdoors.
• Connecting with children and young people: We’ll be talking to children and young people about how to better connect them with nature, beauty and history at some of the places we look after. We’re also launching a Young Staff and Volunteer Challenge Group.
• Promoting places with free access: We’ll be increasing awareness of the places in our care that are free to access so that more people can visit.

What we’re doing in the workplace

We want our staff and volunteers to reflect the local communities they serve, and we’re working to ensure that the National Trust is an inclusive place to work and volunteer.

We're making this happen through:

• Listening, hearing and responding: Staff and volunteer surveys help us to understand the experiences that everyone has within the National Trust. We’re determined to listen, respect and value contributions of under-represented groups and have developed an Inclusion Council with senior members of staff and representatives from our staff Race Equity, Workability and LGBTQ+ networks.
• Our ‘This is us’ Inclusion Fortnight: We have an organisation-wide programme that celebrates and recognises difference and encourages conversations.
• Staff and volunteer development: We’re continuing to deliver training on everyday inclusion and have developed training for inclusive recruitment and disability awareness. We’ve also integrated wellbeing and inclusion into all our learning materials.
• Talent programmes: We’re investing in external partnership programmes to improve the development and progression of staff from under-represented groups.
• Reasonable adjustments hub: We’ve introduced a new information hub to explain the reasonable adjustments process for disabled employees and job applicants.
• Inclusive recruitment: We’ve introduced strength-based recruitment for some of our visitor-facing roles, moving away from shortlisting and selecting applicants based on previous experience and education.
• Being transparent about the gender pay gap: We’re continuing to publish our gender pay gap report with a focus on reducing the gap, and we’ve made plans to extend our reporting to include ethnicity, disability and sexual identity.

How we'll measure progress

We’ll do this by measuring:

• Staff and volunteer inclusion scores: We’ll record the responses to questions around the theme of inclusion and trust within our annual staff and volunteer survey.
• Awareness, trust and relevance: We’ll listen to our members’ and supporters’ feedback on these issues through surveys.
• Investment in and impact of access improvements: We’ll focus on access standards and their impact on the visitor experience of disabled people.
  
  

We know that in an evolving society there’s always more we can do when it comes to inclusion and diversity, and we’ll continue to listen, learn and share our progress.