Anti-racism statement - reaffirming our vision and commitment

Across the last few years, the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT) has undergone much change. With the departure of Dr Kamini Gadhok MBE and the appointment of Steve Jamieson as Chief Executive of the RCSLT, we want to take this opportunity to reaffirm the commitments the RCSLT has made to both become an anti-racist organisation and to expect active anti-racism across the Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) profession.  

Racism is a scourge to society. 

We stand in solidarity with Black, Asian and all minoritised communities who face racism and discrimination. 

We stand firm on that commitment and that will never change. 

A vision renewed 

Our journey towards anti-racism was solidified in 2020 with the culmination of the Black Lives Matter movement, which gave us the impetus to develop and outline RCSLT’s anti-racism vision and commitments. 

We have since then been working hard with our members to develop multiple workstreams and projects towards achieving this vision and those commitments. We established the RCSLT Anti-Racism reference group as a mechanism for scrutiny by the profession, we developed a training package to foster greater understanding and awareness of anti-racism, and we embedded anti-racism in RCSLT’s strategic plan. 

While we have delivered on our initial commitments, we do not want our members to feel that we have in anyway become complacent or lost sight of our key objective, that is to embed anti-racism in the SLT profession. 

So we take this opportunity to reaffirm our vision and commitment. 

The RCSLT continues to be committed to equity, inclusion, belonging and creating better lives for all. We will always stand with all ethnically, culturally and linguistically minoritised communities who face racism, whether overt, insidious or structural. 

Racism will always be a scourge to society, and we continue to expect the SLT profession to be actively anti-racist. We encourage our members to deepen their understanding of racism, privilege, and what it means to be an ally, to recognise and challenge racism wherever they may encounter it. Our training package was developed to support you on that journey. 

While we have been working hard to encourage active anti-racism across the SLT profession, we would like to go further, and are now working towards ‘normalising anti-racism’ across the SLT profession, for everybody in the SLT profession no matter what stage of your career. 

Conversations around race, identity and privilege continue to be out of the ordinary – we want these conversations to become the new normal within our profession.  

An actively anti-racist profession would encourage the allyship necessary for the SLT profession and the services we provide to be more accessible and effective for people of diverse cultural and racial backgrounds. 

As we work towards developing a new EDI vision and strategy for the profession, we are working with the anti-racism reference group and our wider membership to develop a new and ambitious programme of work building on our current work, towards normalising anti-racism for the SLT profession.