Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging

NCG and all its constituent colleges are committed to ensuring that our students, our staff and all of our stakeholders’ study and work in environments that embed the principles and practices of equality, diversity and inclusion. We do not tolerate racism or discrimination in any form.

Recent world events highlight the need to look even more closely at what we do and how we do it, and make sure we know we are doing everything we can and should do to tackle racism and all other forms of discrimination and prejudice.

NCG is dedicated to our mission in pursuit of social mobility, in an inclusive and diverse learning community, and we know that great organisations really listen to stakeholders without defensiveness, or being distracted, or making excuses.

We have committed to revisit and review our work over the next few months to ensure we are in the leading class of practice in creating a diverse and inclusive environment. This work will begin in earnest in June and will accelerate over the summer, culminating in a revised and refreshed comprehensive EDI strategy and action plan, so that we know we can demonstrate continuous learning and lead the sector on EDI through external accreditation.

We will enhance our existing EDI Strategy through new work with EWG, an established specialist diversity and inclusion consultancy and training company, to:

• Carry out a forensic review and analysis of all policies, processes and practices through an equality, diversity and inclusion lens. This will include all the work of our People and Development colleagues, and will also give an assessment of management and leadership programmes, and all learning and development offers.
• Perform additional qualitative research with staff and students about their current experience of EDI at NCG. We will talk to a representative range of staff and student groups by role, characteristics, length of tenure and so on.
• Revisit our performance indicators on EDI to ensure we can measure our progress effectively.
• Commit to achieving/work towards achieving EWG’s Diversity Development Standard at the highest level as soon as possible.
• Build the capacity of all of our staff to understand how unconscious bias works and ensure they have the skills to eliminate discrimination and prejudice through a blended learning and development programme. The learning from that will then be translated into our entire curriculum offer for students.

Please help us to be the organisation that you are proud of and want to work with by being involved in the forthcoming work to make sure we do things better.