Diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging: 6 key tips for school leaders

Diversifying curricula and recruitment will only work if all school staff feel they belong, says Hannah Wilson, before an event for educators in Scotland next week
28th January 2025, 11:19am

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Diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging: 6 key tips for school leaders

https://www.tes.com/magazine/teaching-learning/general/diversity-equity-inclusion-and-belonging-6-key-tips-school
Diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging: 6 key tips for school leaders

Next Monday the Scottish Council of Independent Schools (SCIS) and the Diverse Educators training company will host a joint event on diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB).

Hannah Wilson, founder and director of Diverse Educators, speaks to Tes Scotland ahead of this event in Edinburgh, explaining the key issues that she will address on the day.

She sets out the common pitfalls and misconceptions around DEIB and explains what a school should focus on first if its wants everyone who passes through its doors to feel included.

Diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging in schools

1. Prioritise staff - and include everyone

Wilson says she often starts her presentations with a “provocation”: while many schools talk about the importance of pupils having a sense of belonging, they may not put the same emphasis on adults feeling that way.

School leaders “tend to think about the pupils first, not the staff, because the staff conversation is often a harder one to have”, she says.

“Are we inadvertently excluding people because we’re not considering them?” she asks.

Schools should examine whether they might exclude some staff without meaning to - often staff who have roles other than teaching. Perhaps staff are not included in certain communications or have not felt comfortable on return from maternity, paternity or sick leave.

When school leaders write a policy, organise an event or run a school trip, says Wilson, “are we thinking about who this might marginalise, who this might exclude, and building that into the design process?”

She adds that once schools “begin to scratch the surface, you realise there are loads of barriers there that don’t need to be”.

2. Embrace messiness and get going

Getting it right with DEIB is not about insisting on a perfect approach from the start, says Wilson, but creating an environment where staff “know that they can ask questions and make mistakes and be vulnerable”.

I worry that people could spend years reading all the books, listening to all the podcasts, building their vocabulary, waiting to be ready to get it right - when actually, this is about accepting the messiness of it,” she says.

Wilson, whose organisation is based in England, describes a vicious circle whereby many headteachers and multi-academy trust CEOs feel completely out of their depth” but “don’t really want to admit what they don’t know”.

Schools are adept at letting pupils know that perfection is not demanded of them and that they can make mistakes, but staff should know that, too, says Wilson.

3. Start with training

Schools should offer “foundational training to anchor everyone, to create a baseline of understanding, to unpack some of the [DEIB] terms”.

With these foundations agreed and commonly understood, schools can then look to “create a culture where people feel safe and belong”.

One problem, however, is that “a lot of schools just jump on the curriculum bandwagon” and start, for example, diversifying the books in their library. While this is important, if it is done before the basics of DEIB are established and understood, a school has got its priorities the wrong way around”.

We need to be really clear on what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. We need to understand what we’re trying to achieve,” says Wilson. Otherwise good intentions “can actually get lost and go awry - and cause more harm than good”.

4. Make DEIB everyone’s responsibility

A common mistake, says Wilson, is to make one person in a school responsible for DEIB.

We wouldn’t ask one person to do all the safeguarding in a school,” she says. “It’s about every single adult in the building understanding their role and how to contribute.”

The foundational training” mentioned above might involve all school staff gathering in a room for two hours, discussing appropriate shared language and identifying gaps in understanding.

Everyone must get a chance to say “what’s working or what’s not working”; they should know that their colleagues will “truly listen” and that school leaders will not impose a mandatory one-size-fits-all approach to training.

Wilson has heard from many people of colour, for example, who have been required to attend anti-racism training when they were already acutely aware of all the issues being addressed.

Foundational training, as the name implies, is just the start of a long process, not a solution. Wilson has been working with some schools and MATs for five years.

One of our mantras is that it’s a marathon and not a sprint,” she says. “It needs to be an iterative process - you don’t do it, fix it and leave it.”

5. Diversified recruitment must be matched by inclusive culture

Another big mistakes, says Wilson, is to change approaches to school recruitment without making other changes.

If there is a concerted effort” to address a lack of representation in the staff body without properly striving to change culture, new recruits may not be set up to succeed and apparently more diversified approaches are “not going to survive and thrive”.

The result can be “disjointed”: schools diversify rapidly” in their staffing but give little thought, for example, to their calendar and whether in-service/Inset days and exams coincide with religious festivals.

So they’ve done a numbers game, but they’ve not done the culture stuff,” says Wilson.

6. Not everyone feels a sense of belonging in the same way

We have to unpack what we mean by ‘belonging’, because we use it like it’s a word that everyone understands - but it means such different things to different people,” explains Wilson.

Schools leaders might have a high sense of psychological safety and a high sense of belonging, so they assume that everyone else in the school is experiencing the same space in the same way”.

However, the reality is, if you are junior support staff, a person of colour, a person of faith, your experience of the same space is very different”.

In short, for DEIB to work, schools need to pave the way for some really open, honest and curious conversations about what belonging actually means”.

The joint SCIS and Diverse Educators event, which takes place on Monday 3 February at the Radisson Blu in Edinburgh, is open to anyone who is interested, not only staff in the independent schools sector. Other speakers include Sadia Hussain-Savuk, Kelsey-Ann Caldow, Laura F McConnell, Bennie Kara, Laura Goff, Nuzhat Uthmani, Robin Macpherson, Sinead Daly and Shoeb Sarguroh.

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