Mainstreaming Equality in the VEC Sector

Delegate Pack 28th May 2010

“Funded by the Equality Mainstreaming Unit which is jointly funded by the European Social Fund 2007-2013 and by the Equality Authority”

Investing in your future

Introduction

We are pleased to present this "Mainstreaming Equalityin the VEC Sector" Delegate Pack to you which has been compiled by the Equality Mainstreaming Unit. The pack includes background documents to today's presentations along with some additional equality tools that we hope you find useful in building an equality dimension into your Education Plans and within your organisations more broadly.

The Equality Mainstreaming Unit (EMU) has been established with funding from the European Social Fund, through the Human Capital Investment Operational Programme of the National Strategic Reference Framework 2007-2013. The main objective of the Unit is to contribute to addressing labour market gaps in Ireland for specific groups that are experiencing inequality across the nine grounds covered by the equality legislation. These are gender, marital status, family status, religion, race, age, disability, sexual orientation, membership of the Traveller community.

The Unit seeks to achieve this by facilitating and supporting institutional change within providers of further education, training and labour market programmes and within small to medium enterprises by strengthening their capacity to combat discrimination, to promote equality and to accommodate diversity.

The Equality Mainstreaming Unit has developed a programme of work with the VEC sector in collaboration with the IVEA which seeks to support and facilitate institutional change within VECs in order to build and strengthen their equality competency.

During 2009 the EMU supported three equality mainstreaming projects with the following VECs:-

- CountyDublin VEC

- CountyWicklow VEC

- CountyWaterford VEC

Each of these VECs successfully developed and implemented equality mainstreaming approaches which have been presented at today's seminar and documented in this Pack as case studies.

The Pack also provides you with some other practical equality tools including the Equality Action Planning Framework tool developed by the Further Education Support Service.

You will also find enclosed the Equality Authority/IVEA Equality Impact Assessment Guidelines for conducting equality impact assessments on IVEA and VEC plans, policies and programmes.

Content

Section One features the Equality Screening Toolkit which has been developed by the Public Sector Equality Learning Network. The PSELN is a network of public sector bodies which is chaired by Fás and resourced by the Equality Authority.

Section Two, Three and Four contain the good practice reports from CountyWaterford, CountyDublin and CountyWicklow, together with some tools developed during the projects (e.g. template, guidelines, etc.).

Section Five contains the Equality Action Planning Framework developed by the Further Education Support Service which is a resource for the implementation of equality processes which are directly related to the requirements of the FETAC Quality Assurance (in particular Policy Area B2 equality).

We are aware that the VEC sector is about to embark on the process of drafting new Education Plans. We hope that this Pack will support you in making your Education Plans work better by providing you with new tools for embedding equality into those Education Plans.

It is our intention to further refine and develop the contents of this Pack and we would appreciate your feedback in this regard. It is our aim to publish an Equality Mainstreaming Resource Pack later this year.

We note that organisations providing further education and training have already demonstrated commitment, creativity and practical action in their work in promoting equality across the nine grounds. This is evidenced though much of the work of the VEC sector and it is important to acknowledge and celebrate this.

However in a context of ongoing labour market inequalities there remains a need to build on and develop this commitment. Embedding equality within VEC Education Plans offers an opportune time to strengthen existing equality commitments and build on developing more effective equality mainstreaming approaches in the future.

Carole Sullivan

Head of the Equality Mainstreaming Unit

Equality Authority

2 Clonmel Street

Dublin 2

Tel: 01-417 3386

Locall: 1890 245 545

Email:

Website: