The Client University had struggled to cope with the pace and complexity of addressing Equality, Diversity and inclusion and espoused a culture of leadership and managerialism that ensured that the priorities for equality and diversity remain skewed. This was especially evident with the issue of Race Equality. This had led to a de-moralised Black and Ethic minority (BME) staff group, dissatisfied BME students and a growing problem of BME staff attrition rates, a widening attainment gap and a poor Race Equality reputation within the sector.
Challenge
Rather than engaging with the many important, weighty issues of fairness and representation on campus, staff generally felt that the this university seemed to be more concerned with protecting the reputation of the institution. There was evidence that the issue of a lack of black role models among academic staff was contributing to success and achievement of black students and this wa being demonstrated by an increase in the attainment gap.
Institutional leadership on diversity issues was exhibiting as vague rhetoric, with the focus being on maintaining the impression of rather than on the promotion of genuine equality. There were individual leaders, and members of staff who were passionate about the issues of diversity and inclusion, but this did not always translate into significant action because they lacked the resources to take meaningful action and were also given a multitude of other priorities to attend to.
People talked about some institutions having only a single senior person assigned to an inclusion role, but they were expected to work on this outside of the main day job and didn’t have assigned time or other resources for this.
Solution
Helen Deane (HDC) was engaged to determine the root cause of the issues, restore stability and identify and re-establish EDI priorities, before a new permanent Equality Diversity and Inclusion Manager was hired. After an initial period of observation and data collection it quickly became apparent that the university had not evolved over time to cope with the current EDI agendas, in particular the impact of events around ‘Black Lives Matter’ meaning that EDI function was always under pressure and constantly ‘fire-fighting’ leaving very little time to take a step back and address the root causes. Helen introduced a number of initiatives including a revamped recruitment and selection process and toolkit to support recruiting managers, a promotion process review, updating of EDI policies and the preparation for the university to become a Race Equality Charter member.
Results
Within six months some key development were implemented including a diverse recruitment and selection strategy being in place, a revised promotion process started, an EDI team established including the p recruitment of a EDI data analyst and coordinator as well as the EDI manager post.
