Following HEFCE’s ‘Call for evidence of sector-leading and innovative practice in advancing equality and diversity’, HEFCE commissioned the Equality Challenge Unit (ECU) to report back on the range of equality and diversity practice undertaken across the higher education sector. Of 120 submissions received, ECU chose 68 projects from 36 institutions to include in this report – Diversity Matters is recognised for a variety of projects and workshops facilitated at UAL (University of the Arts London)!

The report highlights nine themes common to the most innovative and successful policies and practices: collaboration, communication, data, leadership, networks, research, resource, scale and strategy. It further reports that the majority of submissions were not targeted at specific equality characteristics, and there were noticeably very few submissions on age, gender identity, religion and belief, and sexual orientation.

Kai Lutterodt at ECU National Conference ’16

In concluding, the ECU makes six recommendations including repeating this call for evidence, that any future calls be targeted to specific characteristics, and that institutions place greater emphasis on qualitative and quantitative evaluations of their best practice submissions.

To accompany ECU’s work, HEFCE has created a searchable web resource which holds the successful documents as submitted by the individual institutions, as well as contacts and other related web material.

CLICK HERE for to the report to HEFCE by the Equality Challenge Unit Findings: Sector-leading and innovative practice in advancing equality and diversity

To discuss how Diversity Matters can support your organisation to reach its race equality goals please email Kai kai@diversity-matters.org.uk