June is chartermark month on the University’s 2024 Diversity calendar.   2023 was an important year with the submission of our Athena Swan and Race Equality Charter Silver applications, our Disability Confident Level 3 application and our Stonewall Workplace Equality Index application.  These submissions reflect on progress made but also highlight ongoing challenges.

Having been awarded Silver for both Race and Gender Equality Chartermarks, work is ongoing in 2024 to progress our Athena Swan and Race Equality Charter achievement plans.  The achievement plans were co-created with staff and students from across the University.    Our achievement plans align with our EDI strategy and represent our commitment to making meaningful cultural and individual change to work towards gender equality and to build an anti-racist, anti-discriminatory organisation. 

As we start to convene a Self-Assessment Team to co-create a Disability Confident achievement plan, work will continue to align all our Chartermark and Framework plans to understand the intersections between various protected characteristics and recognise how an individual’s multiple identities can affect their lived experience.

There is much more work to do in order to progress equality of opportunity in our university community.  To be a truly, welcoming, and inclusive organisation, we must be prepared to have difficult conversations, listen to our staff and students as they share their experiences, ensure our staff and students feel heard and work collaboratively when creating and reviewing actions.

Monitoring our achievement plans is not just about whether an action has been completed, it is about measuring what impact this action has had.  Our achievement plans are agile documents that are intended to change as the latest information emerges.

               These are ambitious plans with a broad range of actions to progress this year and beyond including:

• Implementing the recommendations of the Inclusive Recruitment Review to advance diversity and inclusion;
• Establishing the Future Families project to review, develop and align all staff and student policies relevant to staff and student parents and carers;
• Increasing progression and reducing non-continuation rates for students from ethnic minority backgrounds through targeted access activities, bursaries, and student support;
• Developing wrap-around support for participants of career development programmes such as Stellar HE, Aurora and 100 Black Women Professors Now to ensure programmes are accessible and inclusive of staff at all career stages.

The current 100 Black Women Professors Now cohort during their first meeting with     President and Vice Chancellor, Nancy Rothwell in March 2024.

Whether you are a staff member or student, feeling that you belong at your place of work or study matters and it is a shared responsibility to make this the case.  Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion is everybody’s work and nowhere is this more apparent than in the breadth of actions outlined in our Equality Chartermark achievement plans. 

If you would like to find out more, please contact equalityanddiversity@manchester.ac.uk

By Laura Cragg, Equality Chartermark Co-ordinator and Advisor

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