Becoming an anti-racist college

Pat Carvalho, Principal and CEO, Birmingham Metropolitan College

At BMet, we have been working with the Student Commission for Racial Justice (SCRJ) for more than four years to ensure student voice is heard on anti-racism.

The SCRJ have played a pivotal role talking with students and then making recommendations for education, health, policing and employment which institutions have taken forward to allow them to progress. BMet has embedded the methodology of students leading the discussion, review, and recommendations within our own annual cycle where senior leads oversee actions and progress shared with students.

We also use an annual survey about students’ experience within BMet. The nuanced questions attempt to glean the impact of the implementation of strategies on students; for example, do they feel there is a difference in approaches towards diverse groups of students?

All the questions are designed to take the temperature on four themes: teaching and learning, support, safety and wellbeing, events, social life and college culture, and the world of work and aspiration. The SCRJ collate the survey results, and the anonymized ‘benchmarking’ and raw data are shared with each institution so that we can analyse it further across areas and campuses. The results are also shared with students by our student commissioners who formulate responses alongside staff to enable us to seek further insight and act. Actions form part of our central action planner monitored by the senior leadership team and reported to our student council. Governors are kept informed via both these reporting mechanisms.

We have significant student engagement in the survey with over 1,000 students completing it annually. The interesting thing here is that the proportion of BAME students that took part in the survey almost reflects the actual proportion being 61% in the first year, and 69% in the second.

We have student recommendations that further confirm areas of work for the college such as increasing the number of culture days, including students in the recruitment process and professional development of staff so that they can confidently talk about issues of race as well as recommendations to improve the communication and implementation of our whistle blowing policy (which students redesigned and called ‘Speak Up’).

Our aim at BMet is to ensure this work with students is just part of what we do benefiting all our students and not perceived as an add-on favouring particular student or staff groups.