Equality and diversity

Our work covers all students - whether undergraduate or postgraduate, home or international, young or mature, full-time or part-time, studying on a campus or by distance learning.

We will collaborate with UKRI to ensure our work benefits all students, including postgraduates, and links through to academic and research careers.

Diversity and power are connected. The structure of power and society places some groups of people at a disadvantage. We see this at work in higher education where certain groups of people do not access, continue, achieve or progress in the same way as others.

Often, if an individual has more than one characteristic which places them at a disadvantage, this makes it even harder for them to succeed. So we believe we need to understand these characteristics, but also how they ‘intersect’.

To do this, we analyse national data about the profile of higher education, so that we can identify and address inequalities across the sector. If the right data does not exist or is not good enough, we will work with the sector to improve it. We also combine quantitative and qualitative analysis, so that numerically smaller groups (such as trans students) are not overlooked.

In practice, this means we will be able to find those discrete groups experiencing more intractable barriers to access, continuation, attainment or progression in English higher education.