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What a tumultuous Summer! First, we had the Covid-19 pandemic, which without doubt, has changed the way we do work and socialise. Then there was the shocking murder of George Floyd which caused consternation across the globe.
All this has meant organisations have changed, adapted and responded quickly to events.
As part of NCFD’s commitment to sharing best practice and look at what is going on in different sectors I decided to catch up with Kirsti Lord, Deputy Chief Executive at the Association of Colleges (AoC), socially distancing of course, over Zoom, to find out how Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter campaign in particular have impacted the FE sector.
I started by asking Kirsti to comment on how colleges are rising to the challenge of Covid-19 in terms of equality and diversity.
KL: There are a couple of key issues. The first one is around students and disadvantage; The proportion of BAME students within the cohort that come to college tend to be from disadvantaged backgrounds is high and black and ethnic minority staff are quite often some of the lowest paid salaries.
Let me chunk that out. There are huge concerns about achievement gaps widening for disadvantage students, for example, those with English as their second language, who are perhaps are on lower level courses because they don’t have the language skills to engage online and through digital remote learning, because of access to learning materials and resources. Not being able to come to college means that some do not have the right kit and even if they do, they don’t have access to stable and reliable internet. So, not being able to engage with the resources leads to a massive challenge and concern. For adult learners this has been difficult in terms of vulnerable e-learners and those furthest away from being able to learn from home, who potentially haven’t been able to come in because the policy focus has been on 16 to 18-year olds.
In simple terms the adults have been working towards qualifications that had delayed assessments because there’s a licence to practise or a health and safety aspect or element, haven’t been able to qualify, as guidance was only released in July allowing them to return to college.
Of course, we understand the reasons why, in terms of transmission rate and seriousness of infection, but for adults there’s been the extra disadvantage of not being able to finish their qualifications as they’ve not been able to come in and do exam or practical assessments, complicated by the fact you can’t practise gas fitting or electrical skills at home.
In terms of students, delay and disadvantage is quite concerning.
Another area around students and staff, in terms of some of statistical data that’s come out around Covid and black and minority ethnic staff working in hospitals, for example, being more likely to catch Covid and actually having a higher fatality rate, is hugely concerning for the staff involved in college life.
Given there will be a lot of people on campus I think there is something around senior leaders being mindful and thinking about how they are generally considering whether working from home is appropriate and what can be done to support people particularly those who are vulnerable, even though they might not be categorised as such in guidance. How can colleges be sensitive to these concerns and adapt what they’re doing to accommodate needs to minimise exposure on sites and trying to manage to keep everybody safe.
It’s about being able to reach vulnerable people in one way or another and giving reassurance and confidence that by engaging with their workplace they’re not going to be put at unnecessary risk of catching the virus.
SC: How cognisant of this do you think colleges are?
KL: I facilitate the reopening colleges working group and I’ve got 28 principals on that, so just over 10% of the sector and they’re all very mindful of it and it is a high priority on their agenda. The other thing I suppose is the guidance on shielding; from August onwards you can work from home if you can but you can go back to work, which means a lot of colleges are having to think about what accommodation they can make regarding working from home because you don’t want to put somebody in a position where you expose them to something that you don’t need to. Then there are broader issues around mental health and wellbeing, when you’ve got people who are home working or home studying. A few colleges reported quite a lot of staff who live on their own, so could potentially have been isolated for this whole period and just considering their wellbeing and keeping them engaged and switched on when they’re not getting in person social interactions from colleagues or peers.
SC: The AoC put out a very powerful statement which I thought was very authentic, real and honest about the AoC’s position in terms of Black Lives Matter. Can you summarise how you feel both personally and from the AoC agenda,
KL: We published a statement a couple of weeks after the George Floyd murder. We thought about that very carefully because organisationally we’d actually been giving some of our members support on putting together a statement and had encouraged them to make a statement on black lives matters because clearly with the communities they serve, to say nothing was not tenable. Our members wanted to know the AoC’s position. A really good point. We had been advising people on what they should be saying, in terms of authenticity, transparency and honesty those were how we shaped our messages.
It was important for our members to know that a statement has to be honest about where you are and what you think.
In terms of black lives matters there’s a frustration isn’t there? It takes an international incident like the murder of George Floyd to get everybody talking about it, the big concern at this moment in time is that social media has died down and the news is not reporting on it so the statement was a moment in time. The statement was really talking about what we as an organisation have done in small steps around improving FREDIE for example, and reflecting on it, then thinking that actually that really isn’t sufficient as there’s a lot more that we need to do.
We looked at ourselves and reflected on what we needed to do to improve the diversity. This was powerfully brought home by zoom! When you see an AoC SLT meeting on zoom – there is no diversity. It’s quite stark and telling. Because we don’t often get everybody in the same room together physically, seeing a screen full of white British-based people.
There’s clearly a lot more that we have to do and we started to work through that thinking. But the other part is how we are trying to provide or offer leadership for the sector, which is even more difficult.
I remember saying to you Solat, when we first started the Investors in Diversity process, we need to start getting our own house in order before we start facilitating that process for the sector because there’s something about having authority to do these things. At the very least, to be starting to look at your own organisation and practices you can start to reflect that back.
We’ve got an equality diversity and inclusion steering group which is made up of college principals. That group has been meeting three or four times for about a year. It sets the direction of travel so there’s 10 to 15-year ambitions with long term goals around the diversity of leadership within the sector.
The starting point has to be actually having accurate data collected centrally in one place, which we haven’t had that for a number of years. So, it’s finger in the air guesswork. About five or six years ago, there were about 13% black and minority ethnic leaders in the sector and that’s dropped to around 6 or 7% in the last headcount that anybody tried to do. You can correlate that with the fact that there were a number of really fantastic initiatives in further education around pipeline progression, development and training of black and minority ethnic staff in leadership roles that finished in 2010.
You have the five-year overhang of that with people who benefited from that with people who have either stepped into roles or have been in roles then have started to leave or retire and the pipeline isn’t coming through. This means we’ve had 10 years without any of those initiatives and suddenly we have proportionately halved the number of black and minority ethnic leaders within the sector and that screams volumes doesn’t it? The Department for Education has commissioned some work but it’s all been quite short term and quite limited so far. What we are really clear on is that we need long term aspirations that have to be sustainable. When you think on average that 60% of the workforce in colleges are female there’s a challenge there and in terms of student demographics it is about 50:50 so slightly more females, because you get more adult returners in colleges, on a ratio of 52% female to 48% male all the way through the organisation.
It’s really difficult to map and manage, so we wrote to the permanent secretary of Department of Education at the end of last month to say we need to have a long-term plan and sustained investment in the development of black and minority ethnic staff into those leadership roles.
But beyond that pipeline if you haven’t got people seeing FE as a viable and attractive career not just a job, but a career with prospects in the future you don’t have a talent pool to draw from.
We are talking very actively into the recruitment and retention team for the Department of Education around case studies, role modelling, a national campaign all around prospects and careers in further education and enable anybody but particularly black and minority ethnic people who might be interested in a role in further education, to be able to visualize a pathway for themselves and to be able to be facilitated on that.
The other big thing for us is around students.
There are some teachers and tutors who are confident about having conversations about equality and diversity and you get some staff, for whom, and I’m going to be blunt, don’t see it as their responsibility; I’m here to teach my subject, not here to teach equality and diversity. There are also those teachers who would be willing to have a go but are absolutely terrified of managing a conversation because you open a can of worms with a group of 16 to 18-year olds and you don’t know what’s going to come out.
I always start those tutorials by saying you will have your view and opinion, probably formed by your own cultural and family background whatever that will be. I can challenge them and I’m aware that I probably won’t change opinions but can point them to our equality and diversity policy and say whilst you’re in this building, if you if your views and opinions would be discriminatory, you don’t have a freedom of speech to be able to express that and make somebody else feel bullied harassed or uncomfortable as part of it.
You hope that their peers are going to do it and they’re going to have a robust discussion at which people are going to feel comfortable to step in and challenge one another. In essence what we’ve done is to acknowledge it’s not enough thinking about what we have to and need to do next.
SC: I just want to ask you a final question – often we have these kind of training events activities and programmes that fix the minorities on say just a BAME programme, a women’s programme, an LGBT or disability. What seems to me more and more is that it’s not necessarily those people that need fixing.
It seems to me that it is senior leadership teams that need fixing. When we look at the AoC conference, which we have been attending with a stand for 10 years, by observation my colleagues tell me that 85% of the visitors to our Investors in Diversity stand are women.
KL: We have a challenge and it starts at governance level. I think it’s a really interesting discussion. Before lockdown, we had done a series of governors’ conferences and I was running the breakout sessions. I did about two or three before lockdown running a breakout session on the importance of diversity in your governing body. Because you can fix that sooner than you can fix your senior leadership team. My session on the benefits of diversifying your board talking about cognitive dissonance, about role modelling, talking about representation. So, the two conferences that I went to I would suggest that of the 80 to 90 people at one and 30 to 40 another 70% were white men over the age of 55. I saw maybe two men across two conferences in my breakout session and that’s quite extraordinary and I think there’s the bit for me where I’m not sure that they are not interested but more importantly, I wonder if there is a thinking “I’m a white man and what place have I got in this conversation?”
Solat added that “feedback from white blokes suggests that sometimes men feel inauthentic and disempowered to engage in that conversation because you they think they are often seen by the equality movement as the problem’ and actually not realising that they are the solution”
KL: “Yes we’re finding it really hard to recruit white British men onto any of the diversity groups that I facilitate or support And I don’t think it’s because people aren’t interested I think it’s because they’re worried about perception of them taking up a space on something like that’”
SC: There’s a real irony the the inclusion movement has served to exclude white men. David [Hughes AoC CEO] told me he had gone to support a woman in leadership event, seeking to address the under representation of women in senior positions. And he was quite surprised by the hard time he was given. He said I’m there to help.
This is why a lot of white straight blokes don’t put their head above the parapet.
He came back to me and I said carry on keep on doing what you are. You are on the case if you don’t do it and nobody will open the doors.
KL: Yes, Solat you are talking to the right people! Here at NCFD we have launched a suite of e-learning EDI courses which are not only proving to be popular but have had rave reviews. Have you had a demo yet?
National Centre for Diversity
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