An introduction to the Breaking Through Programme from Yvonne Coghill, Programme Lead

The NHS needs the Breaking Through programme because it's one of the biggest organisations in the world. We have 1.3 million people working in the NHS and 14.75% of them are from black and ethnic minority backgrounds; that's nearly 200,000 people – in fact that's the size of a small town like Luton or Milton Keynes. Of those 200,000 people you'll be interested to know that only five of them are currently chief executives of NHS organisations, there are probably only 50 or 60 executive directors, that's people that are sitting on the boards from BME backgrounds.

There is a strong business case for increasing the number of senior leaders from a BME background. The immigrant population is rising therefore the talent pool will become increasingly more diverse. Young people will want to work for organisations that are seen to embrace diversity, the NHS needs to be a the forefront of that drive, particularly as the population ages and companies will be vying for the best talent, regardless of where it comes from. In addition having a workforce made of the population that its serves makes good commercial sense; it would give organisations a clearer understanding of the needs of all members of the population and enable services to be redesigned and/or commissioned appropriately.

The Breaking Through programme is in business to ensure the NHS draws from all its talent pool, that it's using all the resources that it can possibly use to make sure that the best people are sitting at board level to make the decisions for an entirely diverse population.

The Top Talent programme is the flagship programme for the Breaking Through Programme initiative. We aim to identify and select talented people from black and ethnic minority backgrounds. Top Talent participants go through a rigorous selection process.They take online verbal and numerical reasoning tests, are interviewed and go through a development centre based on LQF competencies before they are allocated a place onto Programme.

The aim of the programme is to prepare people for executive director level positions. There are people who will say that the programme is not fair and that it is “positive discrimination”. However they need to understand that Breaking Through is a "positive action programme". And positive action differs from positive discrimination in two or three key ways.

First and foremost we don't have quotas – that is we do not give people posts just because they are from black and ethnic minority backgrounds. They have to prove that they are people with experience, with the competence to be able to function at that level. The 2000 Race Relations Act actually states that in this country we can have positive action programmes. There can be positive action programmes where there are very few people from one ethnic group or a background in certain positions in any organisation – in the NHS we have that in executive director positions which is why the positive actions programme (i.e. Breaking Through) is a legitimate programme in the NHS.

It's important that we have that distinction between positive discrimination (which is about quotas and numbers and making sure that you have numbers in a specific position) as opposed to positive action (which is supporting people to become the best that they could possibly be so that they are actually performing on an equal playing field with their counterparts and with their non BME counterparts). We aim on the programme to give people the confidence, the skills and the expertise that they need and deserve to be able to perform really well at interview for executive director level jobs and I'm really pleased to say that the programme has the support of very senior people in the NHS.

I think the programme benefits the individual in more than one way. It gives them confidence which is key for black and ethnic minority staff. One of the things that we have discovered is that a lot of black and ethnic minority staff do not have the confidence that they should have bearing in mind the level of qualifications that they have and their level of expertise.

So the programme gives them a lot of confidence, it gives them the experience that they need, and it also gives them the exposure, which is really important.

The exposure to senior people in the NHS who support them, who will help them, who will nurture them, is something that they wouldn't receive if they were not on this programme.

And what does Breaking Through give the NHS? This programme gives the NHS black and ethnic minority people who are ready and able to perform and function at director level and executive director level competently, appropriately and properly.

In order to get onto the Top Talent programme you will need the support from your organisation. You will be educated to degree level and have been working in a substantive post in the NHS at a relatively senior level.

To get onto the Top Talent programme you have to be band 8 or above or clinical equivalent.

If you're not at band 8 and still want to go onto a Breaking Through programme there are other programmes that you could possibly apply for such as the Transformation or Leadership programme or the Towards Success for Men and Women's programmes.

Alternatively you could actually talk to your strategic health authority leadership lead because all of our SHA's have got leadership and development programmes for people of all grades and all bands across the NHS.

From a Breaking Through perspective what we're aiming to do is to support people who are less than band 8 to get to where they want to get to, which is potentially the Top Talent Programme. This is why the Transformational Leadership or our other programmes such as Towards Success for Men and Women, and our master classes, are running up and down the country.

So where do I see Breaking Through in five years time? The good news is that we have the level of support that we have from senior people in the NHS, and we know from the recent Next Step review that leadership is at the top of the agenda. So we know that the support that we're going to get will enable us to make sure that the programme progresses and hopefully gets bigger, enabling many more black and ethnic minority people to participate on the programme.

In five years time its my dream that we have so many more BME people in executive positions that this programme will not be necessary, that my job won't be necessary and that actually the NHS does what it says it going to do “on the tin”; to be appropriate and right for all the population; and to have staff, managers and executives from all sections of the population, in order for them to make sure that people from black and ethnic minority backgrounds get the health services that they deserve.