The Government has unveiled its long-awaited strategy to “counter the pessimism that often prevails in debates about race in the UK”.

Kemi Badenoch, the equalities minister, on Thursday published a 97-page plan containing 70 actions which she believes will tackle racial inequality and address mistrust by levelling up opportunities. She gave more details on the strategy to the House of Commons on Thursday morning.

The Inclusion Britain strategy was developed in response to a controversial report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (Cred) last year.

It was commissioned by Downing Street and a report published by Dr Tony Sewell – the founder of Generating Genius, a charity that helps black children access higher education – concluded: “We no longer see a Britain where the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities.”

He also faced backlash over the claim that: “There is a new story about the Caribbean experience which speaks to the slave period not only being about profit and suffering but how culturally African people transformed themselves into a re-modelled African/Britain.”

In her foreword to the report, Ms Badenoch said: “The panel found that racism does still exist in some areas and does still require action to overcome it, but the panel also found many minority groups have achieved successes that have gone unreported or unacknowledged, and far from the nature of our society and institutions constituting a bar to success, they are more often than not an enabler of opportunity.

“Of course, there is more to do to overcome barriers to opportunity, but that applies beyond ethnic minority groups, as the Commission found a huge proportion of white people from deprived backgrounds continue to be left behind by society.”

The new strategy covers a number of points from healthcare and education, to employment and language. It includes:

Crime

In a bid “to tackle the disproportionate criminalisation of young adults, who are often from ethnic minority and deprived backgrounds” the report calls for more first-time offenders, particularly for drug crime, to be dealt with without going to court or by deferred prosecutions. This will aim to divert young people and first-time offenders away from the criminal justice system, particularly young black men from getting criminal records that can hinder their chances of getting jobs.

Furthermore, to ensure that more people using illegal drugs receive “a relevant and proportionate consequence”, it said that the Home Office will support a number of police forces with £9 million in funding to introduce, or expand, out of court disposal schemes from summer 2022.

The report also said that only about half of suspects in custody request legal advice, often leading them to make poor decisions that can lead to harsher penalties. As a result, ministers are planning a pilot scheme so that “vulnerable individuals” have to explicitly opt out of free legal advice.

Children and education

The new strategy also includes plans for a new “model history curriculum”. Officials are currently establishing “a diverse panel of historians” to develop “a new knowledge-rich model history curriculum by 2024 to support high-quality teaching of our complex past”. The overhaul of history in schools will cover topics such as slavery to “help pupils understand the intertwined nature of British and global history”.

The school history curriculum will be rewritten in the wake of Dr Sewell’s controversial race report which said pupils should be taught that slavery was not just about “profit and suffering”.

Responding to data showing that black children are more likely to be in care and less likely to be adopted, the review also promises a new drive to match children to families. It said that the Department for Education (DfE) “will work to ensure that potential adopters are not discouraged to apply because of their ethnicity”.

It also said the DfE will work with leading schools to create a resource on pupil hairstyles and uniform policy “to avoid unfair treatment of ethnic minority children whose hair type may not be like the majority”.

Furthermore, to help all pupils – “but especially the most disadvantaged” – who are more likely to have fallen further behind in their studies during the pandemic, the DfE will invest almost £5 billion to support recovery for children and young people, with extra help for those who need it most. Ministers are investing over £800 million across the next three academic years to fund 40 additional learning hours for 16 to 19 year olds – the equivalent of one extra hour per week in school or college.

Workplace

For the first time, the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) will publish guidance to employers on voluntary ethnicity pay reporting in summer 2022. This guidance, which will include case studies of those companies who are already reporting, will give employers the tools to understand and tackle pay gaps within their organisations and “build trust with employees”. However, unlike reporting on the gender pay gap, it will not be mandatory.

The equalities minister will also commission a new Ethnicity Pay Gap research project to close the gap in pay between different ethnic groups working within NHS England, and produce recommendations on how to reduce it.

Health

The report challenges the “widespread view that ethnic minorities always have worse health outcomes than white people”, yet also concedes that there are substantial differences in death rates between different ethnic groups. As a result, it commits the government to publishing a strategy to reduce the health disparities by the end of the year.

It also accepts a key recommendation from the Sewell report – establishing a new Office for Health Improvement and Disparities to investigate inequalities (which was formally created in October 2021) – such as alcohol use, diet, smoking and physical activity which often disproportionately affect some ethnic groups – to “level up the health of the nation”.

Language

The report also confirmed that the Government and public sector bodies would stop using the term “BAME” (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic), claiming it was “imprecise”, “poorly understood” and obscured “important disparities between different ethnic groups”.

The report also referred to other “racialised terms”, such as “white privilege”, which were “unhelpful, stigmatising and potentially divisive” and “have the unintended consequence of pitting groups against each other”.