Identifying innovative and sector leading practice in Equality and Diversity

In broad terms, the tender contributes to fulfilling a request made by the Secretary of State in the 2016 HEFCE Grant Letter, as explained in the background. The specific aims are as follows:

• To engage with the sector (specifically with equality and diversity practitioners) to understand what works in advancing equality and diversity • To identify and disseminate of impactful practice in advancing equality in higher education • To provide an enhanced understanding of the breadth of institutional equality work, enabling HEFCE to hold better informed conversations with institutions about their equality work • To contribute to HEFCE’s own demonstration of due regard to the public sector equality duty

The overarching objectives of the tender are as follows:

• To develop a methodology for analysing self-evaluations of institutional equality and diversity work collected through a voluntary call for evidence (in liaison with HEFCE) • To qualitatively analyse these self-evaluations • To identify examples of sector-leading and innovative practice • To produce an initial draft for discussion with practitioners at a validation workshop by mid-September 2016 (exact date to be determined) • To facilitate a validation workshop in late September 2016 (exact date to be determined) • To produce a final report in advance of the deadline (expected to be 10 October 2016)

Specifically, the validation workshop should:

• Discuss and critically evaluate the draft findings of the analysis

Specifically, the final report should:

• Demonstrate rigorous and consistent analysis of the self-evaluations received through the call for evidence • Identify a range of examples to highlight and clearly illustrate sector-leading and innovative practice in advancing equality and diversity in the English higher education sector, supported by the discussions at the validation workshop

Additional information: UK Shared Business Services eSourcing

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