Corporate report

SLC Gender Pay Gap Report 2020

Published 8 October 2021

1. What is the legislation?

Under the Equality Act 2010 (Specific Duties and Public Authorities) Regulations 2017, all organisations listed at Schedule 2 in the regulations that employ over 250 employees are required to report annually on their gender pay gap. Other organisations with 250 or more employees need to comply with the Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017.

2. What does the gender pay gap mean?

The gender pay gap is a high-level overview of pay within an organisation and shows the difference in the average pay between males and females in the workplace. If a workforce has a particularly large gender pay gap, this can indicate that there may be a number of issues within the organisation, the individual calculations can give specific insight into what the key issues are. The existence of a gender pay gap does not equate to the existence of an equal pay problem, albeit a gender pay gap may be a trigger for further investigation about the reasons why the gap exists.

3. Gender profile of SLC

The SLC gender profile is 54.62% of the workforce are female and 45.38% of the workforce are male.

——-	Female	Male
Gender profile %	54.62	45.38

4. Gender pay gap

The mean female hourly rate is 10.69% lower than the mean male hourly rate. The median female hourly rate is 3.70% lower than the median male hourly rate. There has been a slight increase in the gender pay gap in comparison to 2019. The following table details the gender pay gap figures for the last two years and highlights the change between the 2019 and 2020 figures:

	2020 Pay Gap	2019 Pay Gap	Change between 2019 and 2020
Median	3.70%	1.89%	+1.81%
Mean	10.69%	10.27%	+0.42%

5. Performance Related Pay - Bonus

The proportion of female’s receiving a bonus is 76.06% versus 76.40% of males. The mean female bonus pay is 12.27% lower than the mean male bonus pay. The median female bonus pay is equal to the median male bonus pay.

——-	Female	Male
Bonus pay received	76.06%	76.40%

6. Pay by Quartiles

The following chart details the proportion of females and males in each of the four pay quartiles. The four quartile pay bands are created by dividing the total number of full-pay relevant employees into four equal parts from highest paid (upper hourly pay quarter) to lowest paid (lower hourly pay quarter). In SLC, women occupy 44.5% of the highest paid jobs and 58.6% of the lowest paid jobs.

——–	Male	Female
Upper hourly pay quarter (highest paid) – employees earning £15.69 per hour or more.	55.54%	44.46%
Upper middle hourly pay quarter – employees earning £10.81 per hour or more	43.48%	56.52%
Lower middle hourly pay quarter – employees earning £9.40 per hour or more.	46.38%	53.62%
Lower hourly pay quarter (lowest paid) – employees earning £7.12 per hour or more	41.37%	58.63%

From highest paid to lowest paid, the following table details the percentage of females in each pay quartile for the last two years:

	2020	2019	Change between 2019 and 2020
Upper hourly pay quarter (highest paid) – employees earning £15.69 per hour or more.	44.46%	42.99%	+1.47%
Upper middle hourly pay quarter – employees earning £10.81 per hour or more	56.52%	58.88%	-2.36%
Lower middle hourly pay quarter – employees earning £9.40 per hour or more.	53.62%	51.82%	+1.80%
Lower hourly pay quarter (lowest paid) – employees earning £7.12 per hour or more	58.63%	55.57%	+3.06

7. What are we doing to close the gender pay gap?

SLC continues to undertake a number of activities with a focus on closing the gender pay gap, including:

• A People Strategy that focuses on the workforce and their rewards. A key element of this strategy is to recognise the strengths and commitment of a diverse workforce
• Published a new three-year Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Strategy spanning 2020-23 which has gender equality as a core element and monitoring progress against specific EDI action plans.
• We will continue to use high quality data to understand the drivers of our gender pay gap to target actions to deliver the most effective results.
• To ensure that there is a focus on attracting, retaining and recruiting from the widest possible talent pools:
  • There is a continued focus on our Emerging Talent programme; building apprenticeship, intern, and graduate programmes to enable better career paths for those starting their working lives.
  • We continue to promote diversity across our workforce, utilising recruitment platforms including Women in Tech Jobs, participating in various STEM events to address the gender imbalance and pledging our support to the We Are Tech Women network to increase the number of women working in technology roles in SLC.
  • A suite of leadership development programmes will build the pipeline of senior talent in the organisation, deepening our leader’s ability to build and develop diverse teams, and to support resilience and wellbeing. The coming year will see the introduction of our Senior Leadership and Executive Leadership development programmes.
• In 2020 SLC responded quickly to address the Covid crisis, as we moved the majority of our workforce to homeworking and put policies and guidance in place to support working parents and carers, developing our workplace culture to support them at this unprecedented time.
• We will continue to improve workforce flexibility for women building on positive strides made in this area as a result of the pandemic as we embrace new ways of working.
• We continue to invest in a total reward package for all our employees with varied offerings including a range of new and enhanced employee benefits which can be tailored to personal choice to support a varied range of demographics and lifestyle choices reflective of our diverse workforce.
• We will introduce greater transparency regarding performance related reward processes utilising high quality data at Directorate level to improve the bonus gap, ensuring managers understand that their decisions need to be objective, and evidence based.
• Our continued commitment to pay and recognition will enable a culture of reward for performance, skills and contribution, and in turn support our overall commitment to attract, recruit and retain from the widest possible talent pools.
• We are continuing to work on our submission of a pay business case to improve our pay and grading framework, with focus on fairness, consistency and transparency.
• A newly introduced career pathway programme to attract, develop and retain a workforce to reflect the public we serve. Career Pathways will provide the structured support to enable personal development and career progression for our existing and future female leaders and individual contributors at all levels, while helping to embed a culture where colleagues are rewarded for their skills and contribution to SLC. Flexibility in learning opportunities and choice in career development are core principles of this programme.
• A commitment to share gender pay gap best practice using the SLC cross government and non- departmental public bodies networks and forge strong connections.

8. Staff included in the gender pay gap data

This report sets out The SLC’s gender pay gap based on the snapshot of data taken at 31 March 2020. The SLC data does not include agency workers or contractors as these are not included in the payroll. Agency workers and contractors will be captured in the gender pay gap reports of their employing entity.

9. Declaration

We confirm that data reported by the Student Loans Company is accurate and has been calculated according to the requirements and methodology set out in the Equality Act 2010 (Specific Duties and Public Authorities) Regulations 2017.

Chief Executive: Paula Sussex