The scale and scope of projects we tackle for clients requires a broad range of skills and experience. We're investing in learning and development opportunities for our people (nearly £35 million in FY16), and making sure we provide multiple routes for them to succeed – whether that's by changing the way we recruit, offering flexible career paths or improving global mobility within Deloitte.

We've seen increasing demand for skills in areas such as technology, data analytics and cyber security. We're working with education providers to help the UK's workforce develop the skills needed in a changing business world. For example, our people are helping teach the newly developed cyber security MSc from De Montfort University in Leicester; a degree that combines technology with the role of linguistics, psychology and sociology in dealing with new cyber challenges. Students on the course get to study real-life cyber issues, as well as a chance of a placement with our firm.

In Northern Ireland, we're working with Ulster University to offer school leavers full-time employment together with a fully funded BSc in Business Technology. Such initiatives give students the chance of a high-quality education and employment, regardless of their background; they also enable us to tap into a much wider and diverse pool of talent. This year also sees the launch of Ada – the National College for Digital Skills – created to support students' progress into computing-related roles, and to address the digital skills shortage facing businesses in the UK. We've played an instrumental role in the development of the college, including providing a secondee from our Deloitte Digital team.

The issues of employability and skills development have long been a core focus for our firm. Our Deloitte Access programme, delivered in collaboration with Teach First, gives young people from disadvantaged backgrounds the ambition, skills and opportunities they need to access professional careers. We've continued to grow the programme this year, supporting 17 schools across the UK through 1,200 volunteers who work with more than 4,500 pupils in low-income communities. 

Improving social mobility is one of the UK's biggest challenges and, all too often, career paths are determined by a person's social or economic background rather than talent and potential. To help tackle this, we must remove the perception that some careers are a closed shop. We are one of the government's 11 Social Mobility Business Compact Champions, and in September 2015 held our first social mobility week. The aim was to create debate about the role business can play in breaking down the barriers of social mobility.

In parallel, we announced major changes to our recruitment process, introducing blind recruitment and academic contextualisation – allowing our recruiters to make more informed choices about candidates by considering the context in which their academic achievements have been gained.

Reforming our recruitment process has been a key part of both addressing the societal challenge of social mobility and recognising the need for our firm to access a broad range of talent. To serve our clients, we need people who think differently, who come from a variety of backgrounds and who bring a range of perspectives and experience. We're putting in place better ways to collect data on our workforce, and we were one of the largest UK firms to publish the socio-economic and educational background of our partners and people. We hope this can help demonstrate that a career at our firm is open to all.

Gender diversity is a priority for our firm, and we've made good progress in FY16 on ways to attract, retain and develop our female staff. We're committed to our target that 25 per cent of our partners will be women by 2020. This year, 24 women were promoted to partner (30 per cent of the total partner promotions), bringing our percentage of female partners to 17.6 per cent, as of 1 June 2016³. We recognise, however, that we still have much to do. 

We were one of the first firms to report our gender pay gap, which stands at 16.8 per cent⁴ compared to the national average of 19.2 per cent⁵. When looking across the organisation as a whole, the pay gap between male and female employees at each grade is significantly lower, at 1.8 per cent. 

Our use of concrete data to form our gender-equality strategy was recognised by the United Nations this year, with our CEO David Sproul awarded the Business Case for Action Award. The UN referenced our decision to voluntarily publish our pay gap, as well as David's role in championing and supporting our Women in Leadership and Respect & Inclusion action plans. Our Managing Partner for Talent, Emma Codd, was also recognised this year, winning Women in the City's Woman of Achievement Award. The award celebrates those who actively promote and encourage the progress of women above and beyond their everyday jobs; and the judges recognised the significant strides Emma has overseen in the talent agenda at our firm. 

As part of our Women in Leadership plan, we were the first professional services firm to launch a Return to Work programme, aimed at helping women who've been out of the workforce for an extended period to return to the office. In addition, our Working Parents Transitions Programme, which provides coaching for those returning to Deloitte from maternity, paternity and adoption leave, has received overwhelmingly positive feedback from those who've taken part. The programme is coming to the end of its first 12 months, and we have already seen a significant reduction in the number of women leaving us within a year of returning from maternity leave. 

Although such actions have been crucial in moving the bar in relation to gender diversity, we also believe that the support and contribution of men is critical to achieving long-term change. To coincide with the legislation on Shared Parental Leave (SPL), we introduced an enhanced rate of SPL for fathers, partners and co-adopters. In the first year of SPL, we've seen 12 per cent of our male parents take up the option. The Top Employers for Working Families Special Awards, which celebrate employers that support the work-life balance of their employees, recognised Deloitte as a leading organisation in this area. We also received the award for Best Innovation for our WorkAgility Time Out programme⁶. 

We continue to support agile working, helping our people to balance a successful career with their commitments outside work. To date, 379 of our people have taken part in our Time Out programme, and a recent survey identified that over 72 per cent of respondents feel encouraged to work in an agile way.

We believe an inclusive environment that embraces difference is vital to our firm's success, both in terms of attracting and retaining the best people and enabling us to provide innovative solutions to our clients' most complex issues. True diversity can only be achieved where the working environment is inclusive and underpinned by respect. 

A key pillar of our Respect & Inclusion (R&I) action plan is education, and we've set up an ongoing programme of learning for all our people, making sure they understand not only the firm's expectations but also the consequences of unacceptable behaviour. During the past year, over 1,700 of our partners and directors have taken part in R&I leadership sessions. In addition, all our people must complete online R&I training, and our recruiters undertake unconscious-bias training. In FY16, we introduced the role of R&I Advisers, comprising senior leaders who've been trained to provide confidential, one-to-one support to those who would like help in addressing any R&I issues they have encountered.

Deloitte has ten diversity networks that connect our people across gender, race, religion, sexual orientation and disability, as well as parenting responsibilities. With around 4,000 members, these groups create a sense of community and belonging, help us build our external client relationships, and support the attraction and retention of a diverse workforce. Our ten networks come together regularly to share their plans, discussing ideas on how to increase interaction between the groups and colleagues across the firm.

We're always looking to evolve what we do to ensure we have maximum societal impact across all areas of our business. With this in mind, we're launching a new strategy to focus our activity on a particular theme that matters most to our people, our clients and the society in which we work: education and skills.

Our One Million Futures programme aims to inspire a million people; whether in the classroom, the workplace or the boardroom. We will use the strength of the Deloitte network to raise aspirations, build skills and develop leaders. We believe it's not where you're from that's important; it's where you're going. We want to overcome barriers to education and employment, giving individuals the skills and opportunities to succeed.