Equality and Diversity Impact Assessments

An Equality Impact Assessment is a service improvement tool for identifying the potential effect of the college’s functions on its learners, staff and visitors. They encourage us to provide and deliver excellent services by helping us to take into account the needs of the college community. The assessments give us the material on which we can conduct an analysis to determine whether the way we carry out our functions has a differential impact on any particular equality group.

We have introduced a programme to systematic review all of the colleges policies using the Equality Impact Assessment process. This helps us to highlight areas of Equality and Diversity best practice and enables us to identify in advance the possibility of any discriminatory practice. As a result of this process we achieve several goals such as actively promoting equality of opportunity, meeting the college's specific legal requirements regarding Equality and Diversity and maintaining the excellent teaching and learning environment.

How do they work?

The heart of the process lies in giving teams the opportunity to think reflectively about the impact of their work and take action to place equality at the centre of service development. These Equality Impact Assessments help us to improve services for the entire community through targeting the needs of groups with specific equality characteristics, such as disabled people. This helps us to meet our legal duties such as those to foster good relations between groups and improve outcomes e.g. course success rates, maintain the outstanding reputation of the college and improve retention of staff and learners.

Good quality teamwork is essential to the Equality Impact Assessment process. It therefore needs the participation of as wide a cross section of the college community as possible, staff and students, men and women, from varied backgrounds who have experience of what the issues may be for people of different ethnic groups, sexuality, beliefs, ages, transgendered individuals and those with disabilities. We sometimes use focus groups to provide feedback which helps to guide and appraise policy formation within the college. These dialogues help us to address areas of perceived inequality. Managers are then able to implement any changes to practices that they had made discoveries about.

The screening record of the Equality Impact Assessments can be found at the end of the Policy to which they relate.