Making the ladders outnumber the snakes
July 17, 2026Posted by:
SRAG Summer Summit | De Vere Grand Connaught Rooms, London | 16 July 2026 | Hosted by Mitie
Over 100 delegates from 70 organisations, among them employers, commissioners and delivery partners, gathered for the Social Recruitment Advocacy Group's (SRAG) summer summit, Powering Potential: Skills, Access & Digital Inclusion, to consider how to stop digital exclusion and skills gaps adding yet more snakes to a board where ladders are what makes lives better.
Social value: keep the promise: the thread that ran through the whole day, applied in the round across four questions: how potential is found, nurtured, protected, and, ultimately, fulfilled.
Potential found
PeoplePlus CEO Kenny Boyle took to the stage to recognise SRAG members who have progressed on their SRAG Charter journey. Pictured below, left to right: Smart Solutions and M Group, both reaching Ambassador level, Gateway Qualifications reaching Gold, and Karndean Design Flooring reaching Silver. All four are celebrated for understanding that real change doesn't happen overnight -it takes structure, encouragement and a genuine stretch, sustained on top of already demanding day jobs. Do it for long enough, and that's exactly the point: social value stops being extra, and becomes how the business runs.
The fifth image is of the recipients of the new SRAG Social Value Awards, this time for Social Recruitment in Action. Jay Davies stands in the centre of the photo, flanked by Peter Lee, who drives how winner Omni Facilities Management ringfences roles for social recruitment, and Lee Hamilton, who supports Omni through SRAG and connects them to PeoplePlus's Social Recruitment Framework and Restart teams. It's a fitting place for him to stand: Jay was appointed after a long search for steady work, and is now thriving - proof of exactly what this work is for. There's a lot more to his story, and we'll be telling it properly soon.
Potential nurtured
An interactive workshop from the Digital Poverty Alliance and Mitie, with Essex County Council's Pranay Kavathekar, showed what nurturing that potential requires in practice. Mitie's Digital Essential Skills Pilot, run with the Digital Poverty Alliance recently, identified 130 digitally excluded or under-connected colleagues. As a result of the programme, team engagement has improved. “I can now easily get into the MyMitie app to access what's available,” said Giovannina, a Mitie cleaning supervisor. Helen Longfils, Group Director of Social Value, used her keynote to set out Mitie's own route to Ambassador status under Plan Thrive.
Potential protected
The fireside chat, chaired by Anne Milton with Kenny Boyle, CEO of PeoplePlus, and Jane Hussey, Executive Director at swipejobs, asked whether AI can be a force for good in a labour market that already filters out too many people before it hires them. The panel that followed, with Kathryn Dolan, Chief People Officer at Mitie, and Joshua Reynolds, Senior Delivery Officer at Lloyds Banking Group, carried the question into practice. “Don't be seduced by the technology,” said Dolan. “Position AI from a human perspective.” Reynolds agreed: “Don't use AI to predict what people can do or achieve. People are unpredictable, and that's exactly the point.” Tony Hyland MBE, from the Department for Work and Pensions, gave the same question its starkest numbers: 957,000 young people in the UK are currently NEET, up 250,000 since 2021 - a gap the government's £2.5bn Youth Guarantee is now trying to close.
Towards potential fulfilled
Jimmy Cockerton of Impact Advantage, a self-described “career mongrel” who moved through tech support, sales, programme management and company leadership before landing on impact measurement, gave the room a line that stuck: “The number of times you say ‘Boo!’ is just an output. The outcome is striking fear.” The afternoon's Partner Carousel included the Digital Poverty Alliance, Auticon, Action Funder, Serious Tissues and Game Academy, exploring potential being fulfilled from five different angles.
During the update on the 2026 SRAG and PeoplePlus participants with SRAG strategic partner Inspiration for All, including Tony Stallard, Sarah Caton, Daniela Grasso and Tim Allman, we heard about a visit Tim, headteacher at Harris Academy Purley, made to a local prison alongside Kenny Boyle, CEO of PeoplePlus. The visit happened because of the relationship between PeoplePlus and Tim's school - enabled by the mentoring the charity brokers, pairing headteachers with business leaders for nine months of monthly sessions. The experiences in these partnership are profound, and not captured in any handbook: as Tim walked those prison wings, he wasn't seeing statistics, he was recognising faces. There's more to that story, and we'll be coming back to it.
Social value: keep the promise. As with every SRAG event, the summer summit didn't claim the work is finished; it explored where potential is found, how it's nurtured, what protects it, and what it takes to see it fulfilled.
What's Next for SRAG
The next Lunch and Learn is a Justice Recruitment Advocacy Group session on understanding Probation as a phase of rehabilitation and opportunity for employment on 22 July, followed by the next CWAG Summit on 16 September, hosted at HMP Perth. The final face-to-face SRAG event of the year is on 19 November, hosted by NHS Employers in Leeds.
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The SRAG is convened by PeoplePlus Social Value Solutions
Discover the Social Recruitment Covenant, launched at Westminster in 2024 and backed by the Department of Work and Pensions.
July 17, 2026Posted by:
