Promoting British values – what key challenges remain?

Equality, diversity and British values continue to feature highly in the April 2018 inspection handbook update. Many organisations have made good progress in integrating and promoting Equality, diversity and British values to help prepare learners as responsible citizens in society. But inspection outcomes show that there are still key challenges for colleges and workplace learning providers. Do you know what these are? And more importantly, what are you doing about them? Interested in finding out what others are doing to tackle these challenges?

Ofsted expect good and outstanding colleges to take advantage of what is going on in society. In recent years, hate crime has soared, sexual harassment stories have dominated the media and far-right extremism has risen.

Ofsted expect good and outstanding colleges to take advantage of what is going on in society. They expect staff to actively promote British values as a vehicle to initiate discussions around controversial or sensitive topics. Why? Because handled well, promoting British values provides an opportunity to develop critical thinking skills and increase the resilience of students to challenge prejudice and stereotyping. It can help counteract unbalanced media reporting to which students may have been exposed.

A lack of understanding and awareness often fuels prejudice, so promoting British values can help provide learners with an understanding of people and communities beyond their immediate experience. It can help empower students to stand up for injustice and inequality, confident to challenge racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and other forms of prejudice that can so easily lead to hate crime.

Key challenges for colleges and workplace learning providers

In my experience, there are staff in every college who are confident and skilled at facilitating sensitive or controversial discussions. They are prepared to take risks to deliver innovative and creative sessions. But there are also staff who are nervous of such discussions, reluctant to initiate conversations and fearful of the consequences if things go ‘pear-shaped’. This raises a number of key challenges, including:

• how do we identify and implement robust strategies to share skills and expertise to help staff overcome the fear factor?
• how do we create environments that encourage diverse views to be heard and challenged in a way that values freedom of speech and freedom from harm?
• how do we help staff to understand the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable freedom of expression?
• how do we provide practical and effective staff training that ensures clarity on what it means to promote British values for different job roles and responsibilities including, for example, staff in reception, student services and resource centres?
• how do we ensure teaching staff in all curriculum areas actively promote British values as part of teaching and learning, including for example maths, engineering, science and construction?
• how do we actively promote British values in a meaningful way to students who spend all of their time in the workplace?

Perhaps one of the biggest challenges for colleges and workplace learning providers is how do we robustly evidence the IMPACT of their activities?

Interested in finding out what others are doing to tackle these challenges?

I am delivering a workshop on Equality, Diversity, British values and inspection on 12 June 2018, on behalf of AoC. This highly practical workshop is updated with the very latest findings from Ofsted. It explains Ofsted expectations including questions that inspectors might ask staff and students.  It explores what the best of the best are doing in the sector. Attending the event will help you to evaluate your own practice, action plan for improvement and be ‘inspection ready’ to improve your inspection outcomes.

You can watch a 3 minute video about this workshop here.

You can find more information or register for the workshop here

Successfully tackling these challenges helps ensure that the active promotion of British values genuinely prepares learners thoroughly for life in Britain’s complex multicultural society.   It can even, ultimately, help change our society for the better.

‘Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world’. Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa and 1993 Nobel Peace Prize laureate