Graphic report of the ETF equalities consultation pop-up tour

The tour, debates and what you said

Image of the graphic report of the Education and Training Foundation Equalities Consultation Pop-up Tour, 2014

What were we asked to do?

On 9 December 2013, the Education and Training Foundation (the Foundation) issued the following Invitation to Tender (ITT): "A strategic consultation on premium graduate recruitment, initial teacher education and Equality^definition and Diversity to help inform future areas of Education and Training Foundation activities". The ITT was described as:

Image showing the front cover of the Foundation's Equality and Diversity Consultation Invitation to Tender

" ...a further strand of this engagement strategy and is in two stages. Stage 1 is information gathering and framing the question with stage 2 to undertake the research, to consult stakeholders and to report... [on sic] the critically important activities and support that the education and training workforce needs. These activities and support will then become the focus of the Strategic Plan for the next three years... how these issues will be approached and addressed...Equality and Diversity (E&D) - The Foundation implementation plan states that E&D will be embedded in all work and will not routinely be a separate work-stream. Whilst this should remain an overarching approach, it is apparent that this may not be sufficient to encompass the whole of the E&D agenda.This strand should therefore examine what elements of E&D can be covered by the planned Foundation activities and whether there are wider E&D issues which need to be addressed and if so what are the options and priorities for doing so..."

Over Christmas 2013, our national partnership of national sector-led equalities networks/groups and providers wrote the successful bid and submitted it just as the Foundation's doors opened after the holidays at 9am on 6 January. And so the pop-up tour and live debates project was born. In A-Z order this partnership was made up of:

City College Plymouth
Council of Faiths and Beliefs in Further Education
Equality North East
FE Providers' Network
Forum for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity
NIACE (Learning and Work Institute from 1 January 2016)
VIBE
Women's Leadership Network

Our activities and methods were deliberately about pushing the boundaries. About creating the story in a way that people would (however uncomfortably) recognise and respond to, because we know that traditional approaches to consulting, monitoring and understanding looking at workforce equality and diversity in further education and skills was becoming a tale of ever diminshing returns and disengagement.

Stage 1

This involved background research and discussions with each of the national networks to frame the questions we would go on to ask you on the tour and in the debates. We wrote a short report for the Foundation setting out the context and came up with the following questions:

Q. What do you think an embedded approach to equality and diversity would look like in each of the Foundation's priority areas:Leadership, management and governance, maths and English, vocational education and research
Q. What do you think the Foundation should do to ensure that workforce development opportunities in education and training are fair?
Q. What personal ideas and insights do you have from your experience that can inform the Foundation's approach?
Q. How will the Foundation be able to tell if it's getting embedding right?
Q. How will we (the Education and Training workforce and learners) know if they are getting it right?
Q. How can the Foundation's approach help each of us to embed equality and diversity in really meaningful ways in our jobs and learning?
Q. How's that going to be different in the future?

Stage 2

This stage was all about finding ways to get your responses to these questions through the pop-up tour and live debates. We've presented the process and findings and outputs so far as a graphic report (above). The image shown above is made up of four 2" x 3" panels that are on display at the Education and Training Foundation.

Stage 3 - the graphic reports of our findings and recommendations

In May 2014, we analysed what you said. Our method was to work with a graphic artist as we reviewed and reflected and made sense of what we heard, saw and learned from you, she captured the story of the tour and presented our findings and your recommendations in this graphic report.

As part of the process, we spent time uderstanding this in the wider context of the Foundation's work on its 3 priority themes and in particular its leadership, management and governance framework:

The Leadership Conversation, which is being led by 157 Group^definition
The management framework being led by Oxford Brookes University
The governance pipeline for FE colleges being led by the Association of Colleges

The next stage involved identifying recommendatiosn for The Foundation based on what you told us and the expertise of our various networks:

We asked leaders of 4 of the well-established national equalities networks to analyse the findings and make recommendations through a process of recorded peer-to peer interviews, represented in 4 more graphic reports, containing rich, visual and powerful recommendations for change and chellenge to the Foundation, sector membership bodies and the sector as a whole:

Analysis and recommendations report from the Forum for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (Seth Atkin)

Analysis and recommendations report from the national Council for Faiths and Beliefs in Further Education (John Wise)

Analysis and recommendations report from the Network for Black and Asian Professionals (Rajinder Kaur Mann)

Analysis and recommendations report from the Women's Leadership Network (Sara Mogel)

We asked Heart of Deafness to produce a short video in BSL with subtitles containining their analysis of the pop-up tour and findings

Analysis and recommendations from Heart of Deafness (Brian Kokoruwe)

We commissioned Richard Tomlins (visiting Professor of Race^definition Equality at Coventry University) to write a specific review for us, called: Advancing Workforce Equality of Opportunity in the Education and Training Sector. This report looks in detail at our track record as a sector in collecting, analysing and making use of workforce equalities data and offers the Foundation 10 urgent recommendations for change.

Stage 4

Is and will continue to be ongoing. It started the first day when we turned the key in our ignition and set off in the campervans and one way or another it has continued ever since.

This is why we have live published online our journey and progress all the way through. It is of coure about presenting our findings to the Foundation, to sector membership bodies and back to you but it is also a process of inviting and capturing people's reactions as we do so: as the Foundation says, it's about 'keeping the conversation with the sector going' and of course for those of us who worked on and contributed to this project, it's about keeping equality, diversity and social mobility in the sector's 'conscious mind' and firmly on the agenda.

What did we do?

We asked people to invite us to pop-up - and they did

We sent e-bulletins out to 3,900 people. About 700 people of them opened their emails. Some, like one of our partners in the project, Equality North East then spread the word, sending the bulletin out to the 7,000 people on their mailing list.

Twenty-eight education and training organisations invited us to visit. Unfortunately we just didn't have time to pop-up at all of them. We held two national panel debates that were live streamed and then made available for people to watch online. The first debate was in the North East on the first day of the tour. The second was in London on the penultimate day of the tour.

For details of where we visited hover over the flags on the tour webpage map to see where we went. If we visited several providers in an area (i.e. the North East) you need to zoom in to view the individual visits otherwise it looks like a single visit.

What was our reach?

The total number of people we engaged with through the pop-up visits, debates and live streamed videos is at least 682 individuals. We have not included in this figure people who responded by phone, people who tweeted and those who simply visited the website. Much as we woudl have liked to do so the nature of the (pop-up and live/live-streamed and virtual) activities meant that we did not ask people to complete the workforce diversity monitoring questionnaire we developed for the Foundation. See http://www.equalitiestoolkit.com/content/etf-workforce-equalities-monitoring for more information about the rationale for and content of the workforce diversity monitoring questionnaire.

Image showing the number of people we reached on the pop-up tour via each of the different activities

In addition there were 4,684 visits to the pop-up tour webpage between March and April 2014 and 59 tweets that included the hastag #equalitiespopup.

What did you say?

We gave you lots of different ways to engage in this consultation. Similarly we've captured your ideas, comments and conversations in several different ways and you can explore what we found out and what different people said to us through the graphic report above and using the links and resources below:

Pop-up tour page is still live here on the equalitiestoolkit website
North East report Equality North East (one of the project partners) led the consultation in the North, hosting the debate on the first day of the tour (see attachment at bottom of the page)
Campervan visits not captured on film/photos (see attachment at bottom of the page)
#Equalitiespopup twitter feed – see beneath the map and scroll through the twitter feed. There were 59 tweets that we can track as having used the #equalitiespopup hashtag
Recording of the debate held in the North on 31 May 2014
Recording of the debate held in the South on 8 April 2014
Filmed interviews with students at the NUS annual national conference in Liverpool on 9 April 2014: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
Write up in FE week
ETF pop-up tour webpage
Photos from the tour on Flickr
Pinterest board

How should we understand it?

Ultimately this consultation was for the Foundation to use to develop its own view of where and how equality and diversity 'fits' within its purpose, strategic vision and priorities. As part of our analysis 5 national equalities leads provided expert analysis and commentary on the findings/graphic report/debates and online discussions through peer-to-peer recorded interviews with each other.

The interviews are reported below as 4 individual graphic reports and a silent video. The equalities leaders' commentaries, conclusions and recommendations are set in the context of:

the Foundation's priority themes,
the consultation questions
what people who participated did or did not raise as issues and solutions