Equality & Diversity Monitoring Report 2015

Introduction

The promotion of equality and diversity is central to the mission of Truro and Penwith College. As a tertiary college, a philosophy of inclusiveness is enacted through widening access and participation in education, training and community activity. The college is wholly committed to meeting the needs of individual learners, irrespective of ability, age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnerships, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, gender or sexual orientation.

The college is therefore committed to both monitoring the impact of policies relating to equality, to identifying and removing any gaps in achievement and to ensuring we have an environment within which all people feel comfortable, supported and positive about the nature of diversity in our communities. The College Corporation approved a Single Equality Scheme in October 2013 for 2013-15 to ensure the College complies with its legislative duty under the Equality Act 2010, this has been updated an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Policy produced for 2016-2018. The college has retained Investors in Diversity accreditation by the National Centre for Diversity.‘Truro & Penwith College have continued to demonstrate their commitment to ensuring EDI is embedded into the structure of the College.’ Investor in Diversity 2015

The impact and effectiveness of the college in promoting equality and diversity and narrowing any identified gaps in achievement is monitored by:

  • Involving staff in reviewing organisational data
  • Involving staff in setting priorities for further data gathering and action planning
  • Involving staff and students in assessing the impact of policy and procedures
  • Involving students through course reviews
  • Involving students through learner voice meetings
  • Involving Governors in monitoring relevant college complaints
  • Involving senior managers in setting strategic objectives to meet the Equality duty
  • Involving Governors through the annual Equal Opportunities Monitoring Report

How does the college promote equality of opportunity and tackle discrimination?

  1. Enrolment

‘Truro & Penwith College is a tertiary College that is committed to ensuring access to education in areas of Cornwall that have high levels of social deprivation.’ Investors in Diversity 2015

Basic principles in our enrolment advice processes include the notions that:

  • Post-16 learners choose the programmes that they study
  • The College provides a framework of high quality information and guidance to enable learners to make well founded decisions
  • Guidance from the College is always aimed at meeting the needs of the learner
  • Information about any learner’s previous achievements is an important guidance indicator but not an unreasonable barrier. Individual circumstances and the level of support available are always considered.
  • Course information is available via the college website which has been designed to work effectively with text to speech software. Access to the College Single Equality Scheme 2013-15and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Policy produced for 2016-2018is via the College Website and Intranet.

The College has successfully extended its matrix accreditation for its Initial Advice and Guidance service to cover the whole range of its provision and have whole institution accreditation. The assessment for the award evaluates how inclusive and sensitive to equal opportunity issues the College’s services are and we were pleased with the extremely positive feedback on our policy and practice from the extensive accreditation process.

AoC analysis of our student recruitment in terms of deprivation shows that college recruitment mirrors closely the local district population profiles.

Action to Improve:

Develop promotion of EDI via the new website

  1. Curriculum

‘EDI is now not only enriched within the curriculum, but is being developed and advanced creatively at different levels of the organisation and across the different sites of the College.’Investors in Diversity 2015

The most visible evidence of our commitment to the promotion of equality of opportunity lies in the extent to which the education and training curriculum has been consistently extended to meet the needs of young people, adults and employers, including learners from those groups traditionally under-represented in further and higher education. This is particularly evident in our extension of the curriculum to include construction and professional cookery, the breadth of our foundation studies provision,including provision for students with Profound Multiple learning difficulties and ASD, meeting the needs of the community through effective activities that support social inclusion and widen participation.

For example working with the Isles of Scilly Council a range of bespoke programmes recognising their geographical remoteness have been developed and delivered on the islands including a programme on equality and diversity to over 75 people.

In addition the progress made by students on their courses, as evidenced by the executional value added performance of learners at the college, significantly increases the progression opportunities open to students from Cornwall.

Staff development opportunities ensure that lecturing staff are effectively prepared for promoting Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the classroom.

Equal Opportunities and diversity are promoted cross college through focus weeks. These include:

  • Cross college awareness events including tutorial focus on prejudice, discrimination and stereotyping. Equality & Diversity Awareness month, Safer Internet Day
  • Student EDI group organised a cross-college ‘sexual identity’ fair including a broad range of external groups andwritten, visual and performance art competitions held on this theme.
  • Promotion of Autism, Asperger’s’ syndrome and Autistic Spectrum Disorders through the college Autism steering group and ASD curriculum champions

Equality and diversity is also actively promoted through teaching and learning and enrichment activity:

  • Links with Toynbee Hall, a charity based in London’s East End, whereby Health, Social Care and Early Years students take part in a one week residential providing outdoor education activities for 300 ethnic minority children from deprived inner city areas. This, together with ‘multi-cultural’ residential visits for Community Studies students to Bath, Bristol and London raises the students’ awareness and commitment to anti discriminatory practice which is fundamental to their chosen vocational pathways
  • Young Carers lunch club established, supported by Kernow Young Carers
  • Links established by Hair and Beauty with CoNEL College in London including student video links to aid better understanding and skill development in meeting diverse customer base.
  • Penwith students have formed positive relationships with the local Rotary clubs and over 50's forum with joint working including members being interviewed by students about the ageing process, planning and attending ‘full of life events’ including summer charity fetes, music events, Dementia Awareness Workshops, Memory cafes and Contact the Elderlyleading to students now being board members of the over 50’s Forum.
  • College has actively promotedthe Exeter University Progression programme designed to widen participation and encourage access to Russell Group Universities from under-represented socio-economic groups
  • Wheelchair basketball,Boccia and Blind Football coaching sessions
  • IB sponsorship and visit to Aids orphanage in Swaziland.
  • Cornwall Sports Partnership Disability Sports Development Officer ran workshops leading to students hosting Inclusion Festivals for learners with SLN and PML
  • Foundation learning multisensory culture sessions
  • In computing three learners won an award at the national Raspberry Pi competition for an application to support control by eye movements for people with restricted movement.
  • Extensive Health, Wellbeing and Sport programme open to all students

Action to Improve:

Further training for staff relating to the Prevent Strategy

Additional tutorial focus on core values (linked to British values as defined by Ofsted) with Mutual Respect a focus for annual student fair

Further development of EDI Champions with an increased focus on support for students with Free School Meals

Work with employer and community partners to develop innovative projects that will upskill individuals, support business and improve progression

Set up Penwith Junior Academic Academy for year 10 and 11 learners, to raise aspiration

  1. Access

Accessibility to the physical environment of the College is addressed by compliance with the DDA of all new building projects and the external audit of the existing site and facilities for disabled access.

One issue identified was that wheelchair users moving across the Truro campus from the main site to cross the road to Fal, Lynher etc. have to travel around the swimming pool due to the steps outside of Calenick. A lift for wheelchair users alongside Calenick steps to aid access across the Truro campus was built during 2015.

The college provides Specialist equipment to support high needs learners including specialist teaching suite for ASD learners, Eye Gaze technology, Sensory rooms and a SafeSpace as standard. Assistive technology is available to learners as identified in Education Health Care Plans. Dragon (speech activated programme) and Claro (accessible software) are available and laptops and Dictaphones may be loaned from learning Services. Learners using Dragon software are invited in for training at beginning of August.

“The College has continued to support local organisations and to ensure College resources are shared within disadvantaged local communities.” Investor in Diversity 2015

How does the college identify and narrow achievement gaps?

  1. Learner Voice

Students are specifically invited, through course reviews, to comment on any aspect of equality of opportunity as it may have impacted on their experience of the course. For example 98% of learners across the college either agreed or agreed strongly that they are treated in a fair and unbiased way during classes (11,532 responses). Course teams review such student feedback and make an annual report on issues arising to the relevant Programme Team Leader. There were no issues arising from this process during 2014/15. Following advice received in the Ofsted Race Equality Survey visit, course evaluations includes a specific question to learners about their perceptions of bias in learning materials, 99% of students reported that there was no bias. Focus group or learner voice meetings take place within programme teams, first in groups chaired by SMT, then in PTL-led groups. One previous concern linked to equality and diversity was raised relating to the free school meals support introduced by the College through its own funds. The restricted menu and mechanism for claiming resulted in some students being reluctant to claim their entitlement.This was also raised when Governor’s held focus groups as part of their Residential Conference. The response to the cashless catering system introduced in 2015, where students entitled to free school meals have their cards automatically preloaded and cannot be identified when buying food, has been very favourable.

Another significant source of learner feedback (and feedback from parents, employers, neighbours etc.) is the College Complaints Procedure. 10% of complaints (9 in total) were related to issues that might have been founded in equality of opportunity matters (9% in 13/14 and 13% in 2012/13 with these including issues around additional support and bullying.Governors receive details of recorded complaints and their outcomes and complaints involving equality and diversity issues are highlighted. The college’s policy and practice has been to record and respond quickly to all complaints, written or spoken, and not to deflect students’ attempts to register their unhappiness or dissatisfaction through requiring them to go through elaborate formal paper procedures. In the light of feedback from the Ofsted Race Equality visit, governors agreed that, rather than institute a detailed complaints form which would include a range of questions about learners’ identities, the College would not routinely record ethnicity data about all those making a complaint.

The college has an Equality and Diversity Student group which was established to ensure all protected groups within the Equality Act 2010 are represented. During 2014/15 the group led on a number of initiatives across the college:

Resulting actions included:

  • A fair raising awareness of sexual identity
  • An art and creative writing competitionwhich will be judged by the student body at the fair by voting on uploaded work to the college VLE and using QR codes
  1. Performance Data

Performance data is monitored at course level, programme level and at SMT level in respect of both success rate data and where possible value added. The college Equality and Diversity groupwhich is chaired by the Director of Quality and has staff representatives from across the curriculum and support staff, reviews this monitoring report.

Performance is monitored by ethnicity, gender, learning difficulty/disability and socio-economic disadvantage. Value added by gender is monitored to identify any trends in performance. Three year trends in the data are identified with actions to address achievement gaps previously taken including refining the ALS profiler undertaken by learners, SMT exit interviews to identify why learners fail to complete their programmes, a review of marketing materials to ensure inclusivity, the appointment of 8 learning mentors focused on identifying and removing barriers to learning and a benchmarking visit with Exeter College to share good practice and identify further areas of development.

2 (a) Gender

The aggregated headline figures for participation by gender show that female enrolments account for 54% of the total. The comparative figure for 13/14 was 56%, 12/13: 58% and for 11/12: 59%. This imbalance is reflected in full-time 16-18 provision where 54% of enrolments in 14/15(and indeed 13/14) were female. This is broadly in line with the overall gender demographic in Cornwall where 52% of the population is female.

In terms of headline success rates by gender in the16-18 cohort the female success rate was 3.0% above the male which is a decrease on the 3.6% in 13/14 and a reverse of 11/12 where males outperformed females.This performance gap is larger than the 2.6% gap nationally. Male performance rose by 1.8%whilst females rose by 1.2%. One factor is that more male students are taking foundation level mathematics and English qualifications which have a lower success rate than the college norm, although male students outperform female students on these courses. If these are excluded the gap falls to the national average of 2.6%. The gap was not consistent across course types, on A programmes and Diplomas there was very little difference in success rates, however on AS levels female success rates were again 4% above males.

In the 19+ cohort, the success rate gap has significantly narrowed with females outperforming males by just 0.2%. There is a 3 year trend in 19+ of females outperforming males althoughthe national averages have changed from females outperforming in 12/13 to males in 13/14 and 14/15. Success rates for 19+ learners on some long courses have been identified as an area for improvement in the college SAR.One course type with a large gap is againfunctional skills qualifications where, opposite to 16-18 year olds, at 19+ females outperformed males.

In terms of value added, at AS/A2, internal residuals based on college set minimum target grades show no significant difference in performance.

Action to Improve
Course teams’and learning mentors awareness will be raised regarding gender gaps in performance. Course teams will provide additional support to male learners at risk of not passing.

More detailed information (by course type, course subject, level and course length) is analysed by course teams, together with participation rates in subjects where there are traditional gender imbalances. For example in Music Technology, participation is male dominated but with slightly better success rate performance at both AS and A2 for females. However male value added achievement was well above the female performance. Learner voice suggests all students are treated equally by the staff team. Appropriate actions are included within course level SARs where areas for improvement are identified. It is not possible to reproduce data of such detail here, but the cross-college Equality and Diversity Group look at some of the gender data.

Although A-levels are only part of our provision they remain the qualifications for which it is relatively easy to obtain national benchmarking data from the awarding bodies, not only for participation but also achievement by gender. Year on year data (e.g. the percentage participation and achievement at A level of male linguists and female physicists etc.) can vary considerably but there are no clear established trends of significant under-representation or under-performance by either gender in comparison with the available national data. It remains important, as with all other equal opportunity data available to them, that course teams keep these issues under review and make real efforts to counter stereotypical views of the nature of their courses. Marketing materials, teaching materials and styles of learning are reviewed to ensure that there is no discouragement to any individual to pursue any course. This is considered through learner voice and impact assessed by the college Equality & Diversity group.

2 (b) Ethnicity

Participation

The most recent (2011) estimates of population by ethnicity in Cornwall give the percentage defined as ‘White British’ (which excludes ‘White Irish’ and ‘Other White’) as 95.7%. A comparative figure for the college is difficult to establish because of the level (10%) of students with ‘not known/not provided’ ethnicity. If one defaults all not known learners to the ‘British’ ethnicity category, the percentage at the college is 93.1%. This suggests that the levels of participation by ethnic minority groups in the college are broadly consistent with the levels in the local population.

The low numbers involved mean caution must be used in assessing the statistical significance of the data in relation to ethnicity. There are no clear patterns in the retention or achievement performance gaps. The numbers of learners involved is smaller than the number of starts (learners on more than one programme) and the learners involved are distributed over a range of programmes.