Treasury scrapped maths test for candidates in order to boost diversity

The Treasury ditched maths tests for candidates after officials came to the conclusion they had an adverse effect on candidates from ethnic minority backgrounds.

Newly released documents show officials remove the assessment to increase diversity following a review of the department’s 2019 graduate recruitment campaign.

The documents suggest the "numerical reasoning test (NRT) was removed due to evidence of the test having adverse impact on candidate diversity".

It was later added the "adverse impact" had fallen after the assessment was dropped in the 2020 recruitment campaign, reports The Spectator.

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According to documents revealed in a Freedom of Information request, minutes of a Treasury board meeting stated the department had expressed an interest in getting "more diverse ethnicities at assessment centre".

The Treasury had also pinpointed numerical reasoning as a stage at which proportionally fewer ethnic minority candidates progressed.

In 2019, officials increased the number of candidates passing an earlier situational judgement test in an effort to "maximise the number of diverse candidates in our process".

And n 2023, the department allowed more candidates through the initial sift due to increased applications, as raising the benchmark posed a risk of reducing diversity among those progressing.

Internal papers said the department later removed verbal reasoning tests as well.

Documents suggested these tests had much more of an "adverse impact on ethnicity” than numerical tests.

Officials cited advice from Rare, a recruitment consultancy, that candidates from ethnic minority backgrounds tended to struggle more with verbal testing.

In 2024, the verbal assessment was replaced by the Civil Service Work Strengths Test, which ditches testing verbal reasoning directly, instead asking candidates to respond to statements about their preferred ways of working and personal behaviour.

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An HM Treasury spokesman told The Times: "It is complete nonsense to suggest that we have lowered our hiring standards for the sake of diversity.”

"We are proud that we employ people from a wide range of backgrounds, while maintaining rigorous, merit-based recruitment to ensure that we have the very best people developing and delivering economic policy."

It comes after a former Treasury employee told GB News diversity and inclusion policies triggered a "mass exodus" of employees from a Whitehall watchdog.

The National Audit Office (NAO) is responsible for the oversight of public spending across government departments and agencies, including the BBC and the NHS.

The whistleblower, who wished to remain anonymous due to mistrust of the NAO, worked at the institution when the policies were introduced in around 2020.

They told the People's Channel "It just sort of went into complete overdrive and they had such a huge overreaction to this, and they seemed very captured and obsessed. I was astonished.

"It was quite a bizarre thing to witness and see and hear about and experience.

The insider source also said it was "insulting" to the diversity hires, claiming they knew they were "just there to bump up their quotas and make them look inclusive".

In response, a NAO spokesman told GB News: "We do not recognise this account. The details of our Diversity and Inclusion strategy are available on our website."

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