Race Equality Charter

In April 2022 ¶º±ÆÖ±²¥ joined Advance HE’s Race Equality Charter. The REC provides a framework to help universities identify barriers to representation, progress, and success for minoritised ethnic staff and students. It covers professional and support staff, academic staff, student representation, progression, and awarding as well as the diversity of the curriculum.This is our joining letter.

Our journey towards becoming an anti-racist University requires sustained commitment and dedicated resources. To this end, we created an additional permanent Equalities Officer post to lead this work and Danielle Williams was appointed to this role in October 2022.

The University has now developed a Race Action Plan and will be submitting an application for the REC Bronze Award in November 2024.

As part of our REC work since 2022, the University has:

• Established a REC Self-Assessment Team (REC SAT) with diverse staff and student representation from across the University and 4 REC Working Groups to look at Staff Experience, Student Experience, Teaching and Learning, and Data.
• The Executive Board and the REC SAT took part in a ‘Understanding Race and Racism’ programme across 2023/24 and our VC has attended a REC Masterclass at the UUK conference in 2023.
• Carried out a whole staff and student race equality survey from October- December 2023.
• Analysed key staff and student data data alongside REC survey data and feedback to form key priorities for a university wide Race Action Plan.
• Funded 2 places for minoritised ethnic academic and PSS staff at BU on the Stellar HE accelerated leadership programme in 2025.

Comprehensive Race equality webpages are in development and will soon replace this page alongside the introduction of a new ‘Introduction to Race Equality’ e-learning module for staff.