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.

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.

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.