Our vision is for Polytechnic to be a successful and caring place for staff, collaborators, trainees, clients and stakeholders. We want to create a supportive, respectful and inclusive working environment, without prejudice and discrimination.

By adopting this Policy, we acknowledge the rights of our staff and anti-discrimination legislation, and accept our responsibility to ensure everyone is treated fairly and equally, including the prevention of discrimination on the grounds of:

— Sexual orientation
— Health conditions or disability
— Sex or gender reassignment
— Race
— Faith or no faith
— Age
— Social class
— Marital / Civil partnership status
— Women who are pregnant, have recently given birth or are breastfeeding

POLICY STATEMENT

• ● Equality, diversity and inclusion are central to our professional practice and principles. We take an intersectional approach recognising that people can face multiple disadvantages.
• ● ‘Equality’ means ensuring everyone has the same opportunities free from discrimination. ‘Inclusion’ means creating an environment where everyone feels welcome and valued.
• ● ‘Diversity’ means celebrating the individual differences in people’s backgrounds, skills and experiences.
• ● We are an equal opportunity employer, treating all team members and job applicants equally. We have an open, transparent and welcoming recruitment process and promote flexible working arrangements to encourage further diversity.
• ● Our work is guided by inclusive design standards and tools and we are committed to educating ourselves to understand the experiences of different groups, identify assumptions and biases, and bring in different perspectives so that we are designing inclusively and our outputs are accessible.

COMMITMENTS

• ● Represent with a minimum of 30% of the creative leadership and project team from underrepresented groups: women; racial or ethnic group, LGBTQ+, people with cognitive or physical disabilities.
• ● Reflect the diversity of the audiences our work speaks to
• ● Amplify the voices of underrepresented groups
• ● Utilise diversity-focused networks in our hiring and commissioning practices to embed EDI in our workforce, leadership and governance
• ● Educate ourselves and be effective allies.

POLICY IN PRACTICE

• ● We ensure this policy is circulated to any agencies responsible for our recruitment and a copy of the policy will be made available to all employees and made known to all applicants for employment. It will further be communicated to all private contractors to remind them of their responsibilities towards equality of opportunity.
• ● We run paid training opportunities to support industry access for underrepresented groups; including the Kickstart Scheme which provided
  a year-long paid traineeship to help unemployed 16-24 year olds receiving Universal Credit.
• ● We develop our collaborative project teams on a case by case basis to bring in different skills and perspectives to ensure that we are meeting our EDI commitments.