We asked you what embedding equality and diversity in everything the Education and Training Foundation does would look and feel like.
This is what you said.
Driving up and down the country, stopping to listen when you invited us was a highly sensory experience that we knew could not be captured by words alone.
You spoke and you wrote and drew on the campervans. We took photos, live streamed debates and tweeted like there was no tomorrow. All to record your vision. And we came away from meeting you with so much more than words.
In the graphic report above we hope we have been faithful to our sense of what you said being much more than words.
“…seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that with words but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.”
Berger, John. (2008) Ways of Seeing. Penguin.
Our activities and methods in the consultation were deliberately about pushing the boundaries. About creating the story in a way that people would (however uncomfortably) recognise and respond to, because we knew that other recent approaches to consulting and monitoring workforce equality and diversity in further education and skills had become a tale of ever diminishing returns and disengagement.
So when it came to our approach to analysis and recommendations we invited the leads of 5 of the national sector equalities networks/groups, involved in the pop-up consultation, to take ‘what you said’ and via recorded peer-to-peer interviews provide expert commentary, analysis and recommendations to the Education and Training Foundation.
Their interviews are reported as graphics and a video (below) The equalities leaders' commentaries, conclusions and recommendations are set in the context of:
Please note: This film is presented in British Sign Language with accessible subtitles (which means that in places we have used 'BSL grammar' rather than English grammar). We have deliberately not added a sound track. Use this link if you use a screen reader
The partnership of national sector-led equalities networks/groups and providers that led the 2014 equalities pop-up consultation for the Education and Training Foundation involved: