Corporate report

SLC Gender Pay Gap Report 2022

Published 30 March 2023

1. What is the legislation?

Under the Equality Act 2010 (Specific Duties and Public Authorities) Regulations 2017, all public sector organisations listed at Schedule 2 that employ over 250 employees are required to report annually on their gender pay gap using a snapshot date of 31 March and must publish information by 30 March the following year.

2. What is a gender pay gap and why do we want to report?

The gender pay gap is a high-level overview of pay within an organisation and shows the difference in the average earnings between men and women in the workplace. This report is crucial for SLC to understand how our organisation is performing in relation to gender equality. We also want to effectively utilise the information in the report to show our commitment to achieving gender equality and reducing our gender pay gap.

Please note a gender pay gap is different to the issue of equal pay (the legal requirement to pay men and women the same for equal work).

We will provide information on the following six areas in this report:

1. percentage of males and females in each hourly pay quarter
2. mean (average) gender pay gap using hourly pay
3. median gender pay gap using hourly pay
4. percentage of males and females receiving bonus pay
5. mean (average) gender pay gap using bonus pay
6. median gender pay gap using bonus pay

3. Gender profile of SLC

SLC’s gender profile is 54.16% of the workforce are female and 45.84% of the workforce are male.

——-	Female	Male
Gender profile %	54.16	45.84

4. Gender pay gap

The mean female hourly rate is 12.8% lower than the mean male hourly rate. The median female hourly rate is 7.55% lower than the median male hourly rate.

The ‘mean’ figure is calculated by adding up the wages of all relevant employees and dividing the figure by the number of employees. The mean gender pay gap is calculated based on the difference between mean male and mean female pay.

The ‘median’ is the figure that falls in the middle range when the wages of all relevant employees are lined up from smallest to largest. The median gap is based on the difference between the middle range of male and female wages.

There has been an increase in the gender pay gap in comparison to 2021 . The following table details the gender pay gap figures for the last two years and highlights the change between the 2021 and 2022 figures:

	2022 Pay Gap	2021 Pay Gap	Change between 2022 and 2021
Median	7.55%	4.63%	+2.92%
Mean	12.08%	11.46%	+0.62%

5. Performance Related Pay - Bonus

The proportion of females receiving a bonus is 82.12% versus 80.01% of males. The mean female bonus pay is 12.57% lower than the mean male bonus pay. The Mean/Average male bonus is £740, the Mean/Average female bonus if £647. Difference is £93 or 12.57% which has reduced from 12.91% in last years’ report. The median bonus for both Male & Female is £400 and therefore a 0% gap.

——-	Female	Male
Bonus pay received	82.12	80.01

To note: Bonus data includes all performance-related non-consolidated payments made in Financial Year 2021-22.

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, females occupy 43.34% of the highest paid jobs and 56.04% of the lowest paid jobs. More females are placed in lower, lower middle and upper middle quartiles of hourly pay. More males (12.32 percentage points more) are placed in the upper quartile of hourly pay.

In addition to the above, the following table details the percentage change in the number of females in each pay quartile in 2022 compared to 2021 for reference. This data shows that there has been a 1.27 percentage point decrease in the number of females in the upper hourly pay quarter (highest paid earnings) and a slight increase of 0.86 percentage point increase of females in the lower middle hourly pay quarter which has contributed to the increase in our Gender Pay Gap:

——–	Female	Male
Lower Quartile - Employees earning £7.38 per hour or more	56.04%	43.96%
Lower middle Quartile - Employees earning £9.84 per hour or more	55.54%	44.46%
Upper middle Quartile - Employees earning £12.14 per hour or more	55.99%	44.01%
Upper Quartile - Employees earning £17.63 per hour or more	43.34%	56.66%

	2022	2021	Change between 2021 and 2022
Upper hourly pay quarter (highest paid) – employees earning £17.63 per hour or more.	43.34%	44.61%	-1.27%
Upper middle hourly pay quarter – employees earning £12.14 per hour or more	55.99%	56.58%	-0.59%
Lower middle hourly pay quarter – employees earning £9.84 per hour or more.	55.54%	54.68%	+0.86%
Lower hourly pay quarter (lowest paid) – employees earning £7.38 per hour or more	56.04%	59.49%	-3.45%

7. Pay by department

A further analysis has been conducted highlight the Gender Pay Gap for each directorate within SLC. As you can see the largest pay gaps are present in Technology Group, PCER and People Directorate. As Technology Group has a higher proportion of males than females, making these changes, although critical to resolving our recruitment and retention issues in these specialist roles, may have further exacerbated our gender pay gap in this area. We will look to obtain further data in relation to the proportion of males and females in department, broken down into pay quartiles, for further analysis as part of the next Gender Pay Gap report.

	Mean Gender Pay Gap
Chief Financial Officer	-0.58 %
Change Function	6.81 %
Data Centre of Excellence	8.85 %
Operations	0.72 %
People	10.19 %
Product, Customer and External Relations	10.92 %
Repayments & Customer Compliance	5.29 %
Technology Group	11.85 %

The table below displays the mean bonus pay gap for males and females within each directorate. As you can see, the Technology Group department contributes to SLC’s overall Gender Pay Gap with the highest overall mean gender pay gap and bonus pay gap recorded. As part of our Pay and Grading reform in 2022, we implemented new technical pay bands and aligned to the Government’s Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) profession framework. This included aligning a small group of defined roles (known as DDaT Group 1 roles) to the DdaT pay framework, which allows higher salary rates for these roles.

	Mean Gender Pay Gap
Chief Financial Officer	-21.62%
Change Function	-30.35%
Data Centre of Excellence	-12.71%
Operations	7.58%
People	-8.79%
Product, Customer & External Relations	7.79%
Repayments & Customer Compliance	11.63%
Technology Group	15.49%

8. What are we doing to reduce the gender pay gap?

We are disappointed with the increased gender pay gap within the organisation and know we still have much work to do. We will continue to focus on addressing this issue as a priority for 2023-24 and beyond. We will continue to monitor progress against specific EDI action plans underpinning our three-year Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Strategy spanning 2020-23 which has gender equality as a core element and the commitment to gender equality will be a key element of the strategy refresh for 2023 -2026.

SLC has continued to undertake a number of activities aligned to our People Strategy with a focus on closing the Gender Pay Gap. Our key activity over the last 12 months has focused on the following commitments:

8.1 Recruiting and Retaining Talent

A continued focus on attracting, retaining, and recruiting from the widest possible talent pools to ensure a diverse workforce, specifically:

• A commitment to normalising diversity in shortlisting, with a move away from all male shortlists where possible.
• Greater transparency in decisions regarding promotion and remuneration, including new hires.
• Succession planning and sponsorship – more overt with recruitment to encourage female applicants to apply for promotional opportunities. Building on existing mentoring and coaching, training line managers in coaching and consider reverse mentoring to support women and others who wish to progress into senior roles.
• Ensuring gender representation across panel members for interviews.
• A reliable and valid selection process, including education on the effects of unconscious bias to managers and other employees involved in the recruitment process through training and e-learning.
• Undertaking audits post recruitment to improve selection, for example by surveying successful and unsuccessful candidates around their experience of the application and interviewing process.
• Continued focus on our Emerging Talent programme; building apprenticeship, intern, and graduate programmes to enable better career paths for those starting their working lives.
• Building on the success of our previous returners to work campaigns to identify and deliver more women returners and to align with our focus on multi-generational teams.
• Introduction of part-time school hour contracts within our Operations Directorate to attract more females to the workplace and provide part-time leader roles.

8.2 Performance Management

A continued aim to introduce greater transparency regarding performance related reward processes to ensure managers understand that their decisions need to be objective, and evidence based:

• The introduction of an integrated digital talent and performance management platform. We have launched a set of organisational competencies aligned to key roles, allowing for the ability to see how our behaviors and objectives are being measured. This will aim to improve fairness, consistency, and transparency in how performance and development is managed for all SLC colleagues as well as support better decision-making regarding performance-related bonuses to reduce bias.

• Activity is currently underway for the development of the second phase of the integrated digital talent and performance management platform, we aim to incorporate succession planning; development prioritisation; and a much more dynamic process for career planning which will help colleagues advance their careers at SLC.

• We have launched the Workday ‘learning on the go’ app which allows colleagues to continually engage with learning just when they need and want it. This promotes increased opportunity for all colleagues to access the learning fairly and consistently when required. Face to face learning has been re-introduced, alongside the capability to effectively career coach, and on demand user guides for talent and performance management have also been provided. In turn, these tools will level the playing field so that all colleagues are treated equally, have increased opportunity for career growth and enjoy job fulfilment.

8.3 Pay and Recognition

Reform of our pay and grading framework has been a long-held ambition for SLC, and we were pleased to have been granted approval by HM Treasury in later 2021 to take our reform plans forward. From February 2022 we implemented a new pay and grading framework to provide a fairer, more transparent and effective pay and grading framework that is aligned to Career Pathways through the job family groups.

We had previously received confirmation from HM Treasury that we could align certain technical roles in SLC with the Government’s Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) framework, and this was also implemented alongside SLC’s new pay and grading framework. However, as noted above, as the DDaT framework allows us to uplift the salaries of a small number of roles only, which are predominately held by men, this particular aspect of our pay and grading reform appears to have exacerbated existing gender pay gap within our Technology Group.

We will continue to consider how our new pay and grading framework can help is to reduce our gender pay gap overall and look for additional specific interventions within the Technology Group (to complement existing interventions for STEM, set out at 8.7).

8.4 Performance Related Pay

Work has already begun on redesigning and reforming the long-standing performance related pay (PRP) in line with the Performance Management process. It needs to be better aligned some of SLC roles to the external market, which will help SLC to be competitive and to attract and retain the right people with the right skills.

For the 2022-23 performance year SLC trialed using part of our non-consolidated pay budget for payments based on collective organisational performance, with the same level of payment for all employees. This approach to PRP will be reviewed and examined for next year. We will continue to engage with Senior Managers and PCS to ensure any changes carefully consider fairness, transparency and any equality impacts as well as recognised best practice in this area.

8.5 Flexible Working Practices

We recognise the importance of providing flexible working for all colleagues but know that women in particular benefit from flexible working practices. As part of the Blend project, all colleagues who can work from home will have the opportunity to adopt blended working, balancing business needs and colleagues’ personal circumstances.

Our commitment to facilitating blended ways of working will have a positive impact on workforce flexibility for women and support working parents and carers as we continue to build on positive strides made in this area during the pandemic. We are currently reviewing our Flexible Working policy as part of ‘Project Flex’ which aims to incorporate generous flexible working benefits based on colleague feedback and insights including the right to request flexible working from day one, access to flexi-time, multiple requests in a 12-month period and additional flexible working models.

8.6 Career Progression and Development

Work continues on our newly introduced career pathway programme to further build colleagues’ and managers’ awareness and skill in using the product. This activity enables colleagues to take ownership of their own professional development and provide flexible learning opportunities to support our existing and future female leaders and individual contributors at all levels to build a rewarding career at SLC.

A suite of inclusive leadership development programmes will build the pipeline of senior talent in the organisation, deepening our leaders’ ability to build and develop diverse teams, and to support resilience and wellbeing. The introduction of our Senior Leadership and Executive Leadership development programmes will include a focus on wellbeing and inclusive leadership in the workplace.

8.7 Diversity in STEM Roles

SLC are actively attempting to address the gender imbalance in STEM roles but acknowledge that the following activities have a longer yield time to effect results, activity in the last 12 months has been:

• Pledging our support to the We Are Tech Women network and participating in various STEM events to increase the number of women in technology roles in SLC.
• Joining the ‘Women into Tech’ steering group set up by Skills Development Scotland and University partnerships. This involves female employees conducting information and ‘meet the expert’ sessions, as well as our Operations Business Intelligence Senior Manager being featured as a case study for the programme.
• Partnering with schools to encourage and support young women who are interested in STEM careers by promoting tech opportunities in SLC. This will create a feeder pipeline for our Graduate Apprenticeship Programme. We have participated in several school visits and career fayres throughout the year and attended STEMfest2022 where workshops were led by female role models and our careers stand provided information on tech roles within SLC. These positive steps have already helped SLC to increase the proportion of women in technology roles, 25% of participants in our STEM Apprenticeship programme are women and the uptake of women on our Graduate STEM roles is in the majority at 57% women and 43% men on the programme for financial year 22/23.

An overall commitment to share Gender Pay Gap best practice using the SLC cross government and non- departmental public bodies networks and forge strong connections. Moving forward SLC aims to be involved in further initiatives to support the aims as above.

9. 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 as of 31 March 2022. 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.

10. Gender Pay Gap Action Plan:

We have reviewed current activity and developed a robust action plan to reduce our pay gap that takes a holistic approach in targeting focus areas including data, recruitment, retention, development and inclusive flexible working practices. We’re taking strong action in relation to how we attract, retain and develop women in our organisation.

11. 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: Chris Larmer