Equality Mainstreaming Report 2026

The data below covers the period of 01 April 2024 – 31 December 2025. As above, some data has been suppressed for confidentially purposes and is represented with a *.  

A total of 1632 people applied to roles at FSS within this time period. 134 people were interviewed and there were 43 successful candidates.  

Between the 1 April 2024 and 31 December 2025, most applicants were within the 16-29 age category, this was also the highest category for successful applicants at 11. The high number of applications from the 16-29 category demonstrates our commitment to increasing the number of workers within this category at FSS and supporting young workers into the civil service.  

Within this reporting period, FSS hired significantly more woman (24) than men (11). Seven successful candidates did not report their gender. However, FSS still continue to employ more men than woman. 

Only 2.7% of applicants declared themselves as being disabled. This has only slightly increased since the progress report in 2024, where 2.4% of applicants declared as disabled. The data on the number of successful candidates which have declared a disability has been compressed. 76.7% of successful candidates were not disabled during the reporting period.  

Between April 2024 and December 2025, 45.5% of total applicants declared as an Ethnic Minority, this is significant increase from the previous progress report (34.8% of applicants from 2022-2024) However, the number of ethnic minority successful candidates has been compressed so we cannot report an accurate figure of ethnic minority candidates recruited in 2024-2025.  

Of the 1632 total applicants, 30.8% were Christian, 29.2% reported ‘No religion’ and 16.4% declared as ‘Other religion’

Some of the data for successful candidates have been compressed, however, most successful candidates (53.5%) reported having no religion. This figure has been steadily increasing in both the 2024 progress report and the 2022 report. 

81.3% of applicants declared themselves as heterosexual, 6.9% as LGBT+ and 11.8% either did not declare or chose ‘prefer not to say’. Of the 43 successful candidates, 69.8% were heterosexual. This is line with the majority of our staff declaring as heterosexual. The number of successful candidates declaring as LGBT+ has been compressed so a comparison cannot be made to previous reports.  

The majority of successful candidates were within the ‘High’ category (51.2%) which is the same as the 2024 progress report. 16.3% fell into the ‘routine’ category and 20.9% did not declare. The rest of the data within the ‘intermediate’, ‘never worked’ and ‘unclassified’ categories has been compressed.