Dear Colleagues,

I agree with Marcella on this and hope that the ECU will be encouraging HEFCE to promote equality and set good practice examples. The raw data will be available in Universities, if not collated nationally, and it will need to be gathered and analysed to assess the EI. I would be very surprised if there were any HEI's who had not already examined the data to assess the affect that this policy would have on their funding and adding three equality fields would help to assess whether there will be any differential impact on race, disability and gender.

I am also disappointed that the HEFCE bid proposal requirements for the Centres for Excellence in Learning and Teaching were strong on equality (see Para 52 January 2004/05 Special initiative Invitation to bid for funds http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2004/04_05/ ) and had to be signed off for that within each bidding HEI, yet I can find no mention in the the guidelines for the interim reports or overall evaluation regarding reporting on or demonstrating equality provision and awareness.

In a search for "equality" within the evaluation guidelines and assessment docs nothing came up, yet, "The centres will be expected to demonstrate adherence to good practice in their policies, procedures and operations in a diverse teaching and learning community...CETLs will be expected to demonstrate awareness of legislative and institutional requirements for equality of opportunity and compliance with institutional policies relating to race and other forms of equality, and provision for learners with special educational needs and requirements arising from disability."

Unless I have inadvertently missed something here, this is a seriously disappointing omission in the evaluation given the very significant impact of L&T on equality and HEFCEs own statements in relation to L&T in the SES.

Mel

Melanie Landells
Head of Equality and Diversity
Secretariat
University of Plymouth
PL4 8AA
01752 233973
www.plymouth.ac.uk/equality<http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/equality>
http://intranet.plymouth.ac.uk/equality
________________________________
From: HE Administrators equal opportunities list [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Marcella Wright [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 12 November 2007 09:43
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Proposal to withdraw funding for equivalent or lower level qualifications (ELQs)

Dear Nicola,

Without disputing what you say re the availability evidence, isn't it Hefce's responsibility to undertake a full equality impact assessment and ECU's to remind Hefce, on behalf of the sector, of due process?

Kind regards,

Marcella
Dear colleagues,

We have received some queries about the HEFCE ELQ consultation, and whether we in ECU will be responding.

At the moment, I don’t think ECU will be making a submission to the consultation because we have so far been unable to find any convincing national evidence of adverse impact on a particular equality group that is likely to lead to a change of policy – but we are still looking into this and if anything emerges then we will let admin-eo know.

There is hypothetical evidence of a potential impact on people with disabilities returning after an injury or illness, and women returning from maternity leave/career break and needing to re-qualify. But these examples are hypothetical and we have not been able to find any robust evidence of significant impact on these groups.

Potentially the most obvious impact is of course in relation to age – this policy must surely impact on older rather than younger workers. But here we run up against (i) the lack of a public sector duty on age, and (ii) issues of justification, and the extent to which the Government have sought to justify the impact by arguing that the money saved will instead fund those (of whatever age) who have not got a first higher qualification.

Like no doubt many of you, in ECU we find this policy decision by DIUS ill-conceived and destabilising, and one that conflicts with the Government’s own priorities on lifelong learning. But unless and until we can identify a robust and evidence-based equalities angle I don’t think we can make any formal submission to the consultation.

Do let me know if you disagree, because we would very much like to be in a position to respond!

It may be that individual institutions are in a better position to draw on internal equality data to identify the impact that the policy will have on equality groups within their own institution. In particular, there is an argument that the institutions which will be hardest hit are those which have done a great deal to encourage inclusion of disadvantaged groups. However, we have looked at the HESA statistics for those institutions and the equality arguments are not immediately obvious. But if any individual institutions consider that their internal equality data is helpful and that it would be useful to have ECU support in any submission that they make then do let us know.

Best wishes

Nicola



Nicola Dandridge
Chief Executive
Equality Challenge Unit
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Marcella Wright
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