Over the last few months, the Governors and Staff, Equality Diversity and Inclusion (ED&I) Committee has been working on establishing their Committee and carefully considering next steps around ED&I.
The Committee consists of 12 members of staff including Governors, Senior Leaders and staff from across the Foundation. It is a subset of the HR Committee, focused on delivering actions and priorities related to ED&I and employment matters. The Committee has been considering learning and development needs for all schools in relation to ED&I and identifying key objectives.
The Committee has designed and conducted a Diversity and Inclusion Health Check survey involving senior leaders and governors from across the Foundation and together with the results of the survey, has also taken into consideration feedback from a number of sources in relation to ED&I as follows:
- Feedback from discussions with the schools on their ED&I priorities and development needs
- The student committee
- Results from the recent engagement survey - the survey included a number of questions linked to ED&I
- Conducted benchmarking looking at other MATs and schools and their approaches to ED&I
Having reviewed all of this feedback the Committee is aware that staff are requesting ED&I training and knowledge across the Foundation in relation to a number of key topics that cover both the employment and the educational context. These are as follows:
- Development of the curriculum
- Unconscious bias at work and in the classroom
- Managing microaggressions at work and in the classroom
- Ability to have inclusive conversations at work and with students
- Developing diverse talent pools to support recruitment and;
- General knowledge and understanding of ED&I
The Committee has listened to this feedback, has begun researching options and has identified a number of possible learning and development providers to deliver training. The Committee has attended taster sessions to consider options and has identified a company called EqualiTeach which provides Equality, Diversity and Inclusion training to schools and MATs.
The training will be provided as a ‘train the trainer programme’ and schools are asked to allocate at least 2 people to attend, one teaching and one support staff member. The training will provide the opportunity for knowledge to be embedded in the school and those that attend will then be required to cascade their learning to others. The 2-day training programme will be delivered in the latter part of the summer term and the start of the autumn term.
In addition to the development programme, the Committee has identified a number of key objectives that it will be working to deliver, focused on the following:
- To establish a Communications framework for the Foundation that enables the effective delivery of key ED&I information to appropriate stakeholders.
- To ensure that employer branding across the Foundation demonstrates and reflects the Foundation’s supportive and inclusive culture.
- To establish a collaboration network related to ED&I employment matters for ED&I leads across schools within the Foundation.
- To provide support to schools and encouraging diversity in recruitment to encourage the development of diverse talent pools.
- To establish a set of metrics and set up ED&I reporting within the new HR System.
- To provide opportunities at regular intervals for listening to the voice of our employees in relation to ED&I.
- To conduct benchmarking of other Academy Trusts, Independent Schools and other organisations to identify key ED&I activity and work being undertaken to provide a source of assessing our progress, developing capacity and best practice.
- To provide assistance to the Foundation with identifying appropriate training provision and training needs for the delivery of ED&I training to schools related to employment matters.
The Committee will continue to assess these objectives and ensure that it continues to be reflective of the ED&I priorities of the Foundation. An employee ED&I survey is also being worked on, that will be implemented for all staff during the autumn term.
In the meantime, if anyone would like to get in touch regarding the work of the group or if you would like to be involved in working towards achieving any of these objectives, please email Ali Bretherton from the Foundation Office HR team: [email protected].
