David Malcolm, Deputy Chief Executive and Head of Policy and External Relations, Equality Challenge Unit

As a higher education sector, we’ve come a very long way on equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in the last 25 years and more. The legal, financial and cultural imperatives have increased, and policy and practice are in many instances changed unrecognisably.

To illustrate this in the context of estates, in a 1990 report on the experiences of disabled students in higher education the authors report the example of one institution where the then Department of Education and Science provided a capital grant for a new building, but deleted a lift from the plans on cost grounds.

The sector as a whole has only really started to focus on EDI since then. For example, my own organisation, the Equality Challenge Unit (ECU), which supports the HE sector in understanding and taking action on equality, diversity and inclusion, was established as recently as 2001.

The legal and regulatory context

To some degree that reflects changes in wider society and the emergence of a stronger legal framework for EDI. The first major pieces of equality legislation – the Equal Pay Act, the Sex Discrimination Act and the Race Relations Act – appeared in the 1970s. After that the next major law was the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 – and that did not originally apply to universities; it took another six years, and the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (SENDA) 2001, for that to be the case. Discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or religion and belief was still legal when ECU was established. 

Since 2010, equality legislation in Great Britain has essentially been brought together in one single Equality Act (Northern Ireland retains a separate set of  pieces of legislation covering different areas).

Not only does this Act outlaw various forms of discrimination affecting different groups, it also requires certain public bodies, including public universities, to actively advance equality and foster good relations. This means remove or minimising the disadvantages suffered by people across nine different protected characteristics, taking steps to meet specific needs, and encouraging those groups with low participation in public life to do so. These public sector equality duties operate with slight differences across England, Scotland and Wales but common themes include publishing data around equality, and drawing up objectives and monitoring progress.

Of course, the Equality Act is not the only regulatory or legal consideration. For example, the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 introduced a number of public reporting requirements on HE providers in England around access, participation and success by gender and race, to encourage greater scrutiny and action. In a similar vein, HESA is now collecting student data on sexual orientation and religion and belief across the UK, and ECU (as part of Advance HE) will look to publish sector-level statistics around these characteristics in due course. Bringing such data to light will almost certainly mean institutions considering what more they can do, and reflecting on the facilities they provide.

In addition, the Department for Education has been changing the rules around Disabled Students’ Allowances for English-domiciled students, including those studying elsewhere in the UK. The reforms mean providers are expected to do much more to support students as part of their legal duty to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ for disabled students. The Department very much wants that to mean creating more inclusive learning environments, whether teaching practices or the physical learning environment.

Meanwhile in Scotland, the Scottish Funding Council is requiring a number of actions to improve gender equality, including setting a target that by 2030 no subject will have an extreme gender imbalance – that is to say, no more than a 75:25 split in gender – such as nursing where women form 90% of the students at present, or engineering, where the proportion of men is almost as high.

These are all multi-faceted challenges, and estates will have their part to play in creating change. 

Student and staff equality

However, while there is a legal imperative to further equality, there are naturally other drivers: what you might call the business case, and also the moral case.

For one thing, doing the right thing around equality means being able to attract more students of a diverse range to your campus, and to ensure fewer of them drop out. This will have direct financial implications, whether or not you charge fees or receive funding from the state.

But it is also simply the right thing to do if we are to live in a society where no barriers exist to individuals based solely on their protected characteristics.

To offer just a few statistics, HE students are becoming more diverse, as illustrated by the increasing number of students disclosing as disabled:

This rise only underlines the need for institutions to be more accessible.

Despite this increasing diversity, however, some groups still experience inequalities. Perhaps most stark is the attainment gap for BME students:

There are many people working to understand and address this issue in the sector, but the scale of the problem shows that much more time and effort will be required.

Part of this will be to understand how experiences beyond the classroom affect students from different groups. To take a different example, LGBT students who have experienced a form of homophobic, biphobic or transphobic harassment are 2–3 times more likely to consider leaving their course. Conversely, positive action can make a difference: one in seven LGB students and staff chose to study or work at their institution because it positively illustrated a commitment to LGB equality. 

Addressing equality issues for staff is also critical, for example disabled academics will need to access learning environments just as disabled students do. The fact is that student equality issues can never be fully addressed if staff issues are not.  Beyond that, there is also a need for estates directors to consider whether more needs to be done to ensure estates staff themselves are sufficiently diverse.  

ECU’s statistics do not look at estates in isolation to other professional and support staff (PSS). However, the median gender pay gap for PSS staff in UK HE was 11.1% in the UK in 2015/16 (ranging from 2.9% in Wales to 20.1% in Northern Ireland). Meanwhile, only 11% of PSS staff were BME in 2015/16, about 2% lower than the proportion of BME people in the wider population – but outside of London, individual institutions can often have significantly lower proportions than their local communities. 

Estates and belonging

So what can we do? There are a multiplicity of ways that estates can address issues of equality and diversity, and sometimes there will be tensions to manage in that the needs of some groups may cause issues for another. For example, some disabled students will need assistance dogs to access their courses, and we rightly try to ensure that these are accommodated. Yet, if another student has severe allergies to animal hair, that can cause a problem.

Different issues will therefore require different responses, but one particularly useful concept to help identify the actions that may help is that of belonging. As defined by Professor Liz Thomas, belonging is a:

…students’ sense of being accepted, valued, included, and encouraged by others... More than simple perceived liking or warmth, it also involves support and respect for personal autonomy and for the student as an individual.

The signals a student’s physical environment out is a key component in determining how they feel about their institutions, and how much they feel they ‘belong’. All too often, institutions can send unconscious signals to students that they don’t belong, that this is not the place for them, including through the physical environment. That has a real impact on the recruitment and the retention of students from diverse backgrounds. For that reason, we must not underestimate the power of estates to contribute to a sense of belonging, to be a visible symbol and a practical tool, by creating inclusive environments.

As one example, ECU’s work with trans staff and students highlighted a small number of very key issues that can arise within university estates, most particularly provision of gender neutral facilities, which can often be limited, but also being asked not to use facilities that correspond to their gender identity. Having gender neutral facilities as standard, having the right training of staff so trans students and staff are not challenged when they use facilities corresponding to their gender identity, sends a very important signal.

Considering belonging will also require some lateral thinking. Students living at home (sometimes known as commuter students) are often overlooked by institutions. About 20% of the overall full-time undergraduate student population live in the parental home and nearly as many in their own residence. In some institutions, there are significantly more commuter students. There are strong EDI aspects to this group: in particular, Black and Asian students are much more likely to live at home, as are older students. Yet very few institutions have specific provision on campus. In research, these students say they want to have a ‘place’ on campus – they would love lockers so they can store sports equipment, or a place they can use as a common room, as much to access plug sockets as to be able to socialise. Other issues include access to food outlets, or limited parking, or concerns about security.

Clearly, there are always going to be competing priorities and limited resources and space – but if you view your campus from the perspective of a commuter student, or a trans student or staff member, or a disabled student or staff member, or a student or staff member of faith, what message do you think the physical environment sends you, and what changes might you make as a result? Answering this question won’t solve all EDI problems on its own, not least because students and staff from different groups should be involved to give their perspectives on what needs to change – but it can certainly help to start the right conversations.