Lifting the lid on social value with Debbie Terrell, Senior Social Value Manager at BW: Workplace Experts

29th September 2026

For Debbie Terrell, social value is all about people. The communities around our sites, the young people finding their way into construction, and the teams who make every project happen.

As Senior Social Value Manager at BW: Workplace Experts (BW), she has spent close to three years making sure social value is never just a promise.

We sat down with Debbie to hear why she’s so passionate about social value, and the initiatives that make BW’s approach stand out.

What does social value mean at BW?

For me, real social value doesn’t start and stop on site, or end when the project is handed over. It’s about forming real and lasting connections with and for our clients, so that they can make a measurable, positive difference to their people, place and community. It touches everything we do. Our business, our people, our supply chains and collaborators.

What makes BW’s approach different?

I’ve always been passionate about helping people, and at BW that starts with our own team. If we want to make a difference in the communities around our projects, we need to look after the people doing the work first.

That’s why our apprenticeship scheme works the way it does. Rather than asking young people to pick a career path on day one, we give them a year to rotate across every team in the business. By the time they choose a specialism and start their degree, they know where they genuinely fit.

The same thinking carries onto our sites. Our welfare areas are designed to get people talking, with games and mindful activities on hand, and we’re not afraid of the harder conversations either. We’ve brought Andy’s Man Club on site to talk about suicide prevention, with people sharing their own stories first-hand, and invited people with lived experience of modern slavery to speak to our teams as part of their training. Our supply chain partners are part of those conversations too, because looking out for each other shouldn’t stop at our own team.

And it reaches well beyond our sites. Many of the organisations we support have been with us for years. That time has built real trust, so we understand what they do and where our teams and client projects can make the biggest difference.

How does social value work on BW projects?

Every project we tender for gets its own social value plan, and our team creates it before we’ve even won the job. Here’s how it works:

• We research the client and the location first.
• We focus on the communities and causes that matter within two miles of the site.
• Once we’re on site, we test the plan, adjust it, measure it and report on it for the life of the project.
• It doesn’t sit in a folder. It lives with the project team, and our clients can see it at any time.

People notice. When assessors from the Considerate Constructors Scheme visit, it’s our bespoke, hyper-local approach they flag back to us as what sets us apart.

What does that look like in practice?

Some of the work I’m proudest of is with children and young people. For more than three years, we’ve supported Urban Forest School’s Garden Classroom. The programme gets children outdoors to explore, discover and grow, building confidence, resilience and a love of learning. Our team gets stuck in too, helping to create hands-on, child-led sessions.

So far, our work with Urban Forest School has:

• Given pupils at Winton Primary School, one of the most deprived schools in Islington, weekly access to nature, boosting their wellbeing, confidence, skills and knowledge.
• Built Winton Primary a new library, with books in the different languages their bilingual pupils speak at home. Our volunteers go in to read with the children too.

Beyond Winton, our funding has also supported:

• 10 Urban Forest School sessions at St Matthias School in Hackney, where 49% of pupils receive pupil premium funding, well above the national average of 38%.
• Almost 1,000 Urban Forest School sessions across North East London in the 2025/26 academic year.

Rohan Knox, Director of Urban Forest School & Deputy CEO, said: “BW’s passion and enthusiasm is a key part of the partnership’s success as they continue to look for ways the company and its staff can have a positive social impact on the communities they work in. Thank you for your continued support!”

We also want to give something back to our own industry. With one of our clients, we’re working with Construction Youth Trust to support the next generation of construction professionals.

30 students will join on site through Construction Youth Trust’s Building Future Skills programme. The project spans four floors, so they’ll split into teams and each design a floor. Our volunteers will mentor them along the way, showing them how commercial design works and what it really takes to deliver a project.

On the final day, each team will present their designs to BW board members and the project team. If the project team sees an idea that could work, we’ll look at building it into the scheme. For the students, that means their ideas get considered for a real workplace, not just marked as a classroom exercise.

Why does this work matter so much to you?

It’s really rewarding to work somewhere that puts social value at the heart of everything. At BW, it’s never a tick-box exercise. It’s something we genuinely care about, and we want it to leave a lasting legacy.

We believe every organisation should do what it can to give back to the communities where it works, and we’d love to see more of our industry doing the same. For me, the real measure of social value isn’t what we promise at the start of a project. It’s what’s still there long after we’ve gone.