Embedding equality and diversity

Getting to the heart of embedding equality and diversity

Available in-person.

Typical inspection issues

Leaders, managers and governors, through their words, actions or influence, directly and/or indirectly, undermine or fail to promote equality of opportunity. They do not prevent discriminatory behaviour or prejudiced actions and views.
Leaders are not taking effective steps to secure positive destinations for learners and are not preparing them for life in modern Britain.

Duration

Equality and diversity is a half-day session.

Publicity information for event organisers

Too often, equality and diversity training can look like the least appealing option on the staff development menu. It’s almost always framed as something staff have to do, or around what inspectors are looking for. This can result in equalities training feeling like an add-on to teachers’ day jobs – something they have to do for someone else. But it shouldn’t. The core of equalities training is not Black History Month, or understanding the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender learners, and it certainly isn’t pleasing Ofsted. Equalities training should focus on the intention that all learners succeed at all stages of the learner’s journey: from recruitment to progression.

The learner-journey step most organisations struggle with is Teaching, Learning and Assessment. Black History Month may well make a great centre piece for a tutorial session, but what will you do for the rest of the year? Ensuring all learners understand society’s stance on gay rights is great, but you’ll begin to have the wrong impact on learners if you bring it up in every pure maths lesson.

This desperation to ‘overtly embed E&D into every lesson’ can lead managers into initiative overload, and further blind staff from the real issues with their practice. So how do you stop initiative overload and get staff to fully buy in to the moral and business case for equalities? And how do you get teachers to understand the potentially seismic negative impact on individuals’ success of their commonplace teaching strategies? This session aims to do both through a series of practical and engaging activities.

Publicity information for potential delegates

Do you ever feel that your liberal heart is not trusted to do the very best for your learners? And do you get that sinking feeling when you’re told that you must attend equality and diversity training? In this session, we get to the heart of equalities in such a way that will stop initiative overload and stop the guessing game about how to embed equalities in your lessons. But we may also expose some of your most commonplace teaching strategies for the negative impact they have on learners’ success.

This session will enable delegates to:

define the impact they want to have with their equalities work
experience a range of equality and diversity strategies and set out implications for their own work
use their understanding the negative impact on equality and diversity of commonplace teaching techniques and set out any implications for change
use provocative debates to test learners’ understanding of equalities.

What the delegates say

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These comments can be invaluable when generating curiosity about forthcoming training.

Timing

Equality and Diversity is a half-day session. This session would combine well with the following courses in a staff development day: