ROUNDTABLE REVIEW
“We recognise these varying needs and then develop a programme that caters to them. However, we also want to make sure we create commonalities across all the various profiles, so the dimension of belonging is key. “We have put together a 24/7 platform, where any student who experiences discrimination can report it. We are committed to investigating every single case. This has really opened up communication between students and the administration, ensuring everyone feels safe reporting and confident that each case will be assessed and addressed.” Sally Everett “Increasingly, we find it is about a sense of ‘mattering’, ie ‘Do students feel they matter and how can we demonstrate that?’ I think this is a slightly nuanced dimension within the concept of ‘belonging’. “We need to ensure that the initiatives we put in place benefit everyone. For example, in terms of accessibility, specific fonts may need to be used and slides provided a few days in advance. The other area of work at King’s, particularly at our Institute for Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, is mental health. Throughout the pandemic, we’ve seen levels of mental health issues increase. We’re going back to first principles in terms of what it is that we need the students to demonstrate and then assessing that appropriately. “We have incorporated some new questions about inclusion into the standard module evaluation forms. That enables not just student representatives or more confident types to voice their opinions, but all students to feed back to us anonymously and discreetly.” Sankalp Chaturvedi “Socio-economic disadvantages tend to affect some students more than others, so we are proactively trying to help them. We have embedded social clubs around inclusivity/diversity themes, too. Students need a proactive goal because they are going to be ambassadors, so we are giving them that space, engaging them in voicing what they want more of and how we market ourselves.” Sharon C Brooks “Gender is one area of diversity that came to the fore when we reached out to our alumni. We got a lot of feedback that, at the admission stage and on alumni surveys, people were not able to express their gender identity. We formed a taskforce of sorts and we are in the middle of implementing a wholesale change within our data collection processes, adding alternative gender categories to allow people to feel represented. “Once we understand who’s in our community, we can come up with programmes tailored to them. It sounds
we have an embedded workshop called Working in Diverse Organisations, which we are looking at making mandatory and we are considering gamification to increase engagement. “Recently, we organised a collaboration with the Empathy Museum. This includes anonymised bullying and harassment testaments from people, staff and students to encourage people to empathise and engage with the problem more. We are also implementing a 360-degree assessment so that more people can voice their opinion on leadership to highlight any issues because, no matter how much we talk about this, it is about whether people feel there truly is inclusivity and fairness at a grassroots level.” Anne-Claire Pache “I would say the main challenge is to go from diversity to inclusion. What we’ve noticed, especially within the dimension of social diversity, is that getting students from lower economic backgrounds into the school is just the start. Initially we assumed that once they were in, it would all go perfectly. “The truth is that travelling abroad to five destinations for exchanges, or professional experiences, represents a challenge because of the associated costs. It was even more difficult to address cultural norms that are familiar to students coming from elite backgrounds, but not easily accessible for students from lower economic ones. “This notion of belonging is what it is all about; having everyone feel they are safe, recognised, that they have a voice and are understood for who they are and what they want to express. “We have designed a charter on having respect for others, covering how we want to cultivate respect for diversity among the student body. It means that when there is an infringement of this charter we need to respond in a fast and fair way to ensure that we don’t let infringement go unpunished.” How do we ensure that diversity initiatives are inclusive of all under-represented groups? Anne-Claire Pache “At Essec, we’ve approached this by recognising that there may be different needs for different groups of students. If you take, for instance, students with disabilities, their needs might be related to how the curriculum can be adapted, or the way exams are taken. If you consider students from various religious backgrounds, some may ask for specific conditions around holidays, or ways in which they can practice their faith. On the topic of gender, women may have needs when it comes to learning how to negotiate job offers once they graduate.
| 27 Ambition | MAY 2023 | 27
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