This resource is designed to help you think about how to embed equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) into your work, how small changes to everyday management actions on EDI can make big differences to your team and learners, and how you can develop as an inclusive leader.
There are three main sections in ‘Deeper thinking and stronger action: A personal and organisational
commitment to Equity, Diversity and Inclusion’:
1. Knowledge and understanding
This section will give you an insight into the key conceptual frameworks for understanding equity,
diversity and inclusion with a Further Education and Training context
2. Deeper thinking
This section is about you as a person, how your lived experiences shape how you think and act, and
how that could impact on your practice as a manager
3. Stronger action
For there to be any change to equity, diversity and inclusion we must commit to action. This section
is about the kind of collective action that we can all take in teams, organisations and across the
sector
The following films can be found within ‘Deeper thinking and stronger action: A personal and organisational commitment to Equity, Diversity and Inclusion’.
These short films are (simulated) extracts from line management meetings. They illustrate some of the challenges that leaders and managers can face when upholding the Equality Act. The films are semi-scripted and improvised by actors. We have chosen to use situations which recur frequently in Further Education and Training contexts. The discrimination shown here is not dramatic and crude but quite subtle and insidious. The films show the traps that managers are frequently drawn into when handling equity issues. Each film has ideas for discussion and points of good practice.
This clip is about the importance of naming behaviour – naming it as racism, sexism etc. Naming is empowering but has to be handled with delicacy and tact. The film also illustrates intersectionality – how we have more than one identity and these can all contribute to a composite discrimination.
After watching the clip, you may wish now to ask yourself ‘What are the pros and cons of naming behaviour?’
This film is about victimisation and harassment on the basis of disability, race and gender. It shows how disability and ‘reasonable adjustments’ are often excused away, delayed or re-framed as ‘budget’ issues. It also shows how complaints or challenges are turned back on the person raising them as performance issues or personality conflict. The effect is to build up a ‘negative swirl’ around the member of staff where they can do nothing right or everything they do is ‘not good enough’. This is often where disciplinary and grievance cases start.
After watching the clip, you may wish now to ask yourself ‘If you inherited this situation, what would you do?’
This film shows how a line manager deals with a member of staff who raises a complaint about her discriminatory behaviour. In this case it is homophobia but could equally well be about racism, sexism or another issue. It also raises the point that we all experience behaviour differently, often in the light of previous experiences, because what one member of staff may experience as bullying, another may experience as homophobia. Both experiences are real and both have to be handled just as they are described by the staff member not how the manager rationalises them. The essential point of the film is that discrimination is about effect not intention, about the person’s experience of the situation not the intentions or motives of the other person.
After watching the clip, you may wish now to ask yourself ‘Why is discrimination about effect not intention?’