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Responding to the Foundation Practice Rating 2025

Published: 13 March 2025 
Author: Olivia Smith 
Foundation Practice Rating
Photo credit: Foundation Practice Rating

Reflecting on scoring an ​‘A’ overall in the Foundation Practice Rating for the third year running.

The three tenets of the Foundation Practice Rating – diversity, accountability, and transparency – are all core to the way we work. We’re pleased to receive an ​‘A’ rating overall, reflecting the way we demonstrate these values in our practice.

Update on last year’s commitments

Last year, Paul Hamlyn Foundation made three commitments alongside our ongoing work to embed diversity, equity and inclusion across everything we do. These were to:

  1. Better understand the diversity of our staff, trustees and advisors and broaden the range of data we collect
  2. Improve the transparency and accessibility of applying for funding, enabled by a new website
  3. Give more information on how we are listening and responding to the people and organisations we fund

On the first commitment, we have started to collect information on socio-economic class in our staff survey. This survey is used to help us understand the diversity of our staff, but had previously focused solely on protected characteristics. We added socio-economic class as we know this can be a significant barrier to entry and progression in the workplace, and we wanted to identify any impact socio-economic class might have on progression and entry in our own workplace. We published the results of the survey on our website, alongside detail of our gender and ethnicity pay gap.

Secondly, we launched our new website in June 2024. As part of this, we underwent significant changes in the accessibility of our site, informed by an accessibility audit and user testing to make sure our website is accessible to as wide a range of users as possible. While this is always a continuous area of improvement, we’re pleased with the progress we have made to streamline the application process and clarify our funding criteria.

Thirdly, we re-launched three funds last year: Arts Fund, Migration Fund, and Ideas and Pioneers Fund. In doing so, we articulated new visions for each fund and traced how decisions we’ve made are informed by feedback from the sectors we work in. This is most explicitly evident in our reflections on our new Migration Fund criteria and an explainer on how and why we changed our Arts Fund application process.

Our commitments this year

We’re making three commitments relating to areas of our strategy where we want to make progress this year. We will:

  • Start planning for a new strategic period, prioritising our values and our commitment to being an anti-racist funder.

  • Undertake a Grantee and Applicant Perception report with the Center for Effective Philanthropy.

  • Share more information about where our funding goes and what we’re learning from our grantmaking practices.

We welcome feedback on our plans and progress. You can get in touch with us at dei@phf.org.uk or complete this anonymous survey.

Olivia Smith
Head of Communications