Are you meeting your duties to publish equality information?

Are you meeting your duties to publish equality information? The Equality and Human Rights Commission have just completed a sampling exercise in the public sector. Many colleges are not meeting their duties.

In December 2012, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) published a report on how public authorities in England have met their transparency obligations on equality.

A significant number of authorities were sampled, including 130 universities and 115 colleges.

The report found that the performance of universities is relatively mixed:

• Better (50%) than average (36%) at publishing information on actual service users, but this information was unlikely to be disaggregated by service or function.
• Slightly above average (35% compared with 30%) in providing evidence of the approach used to assess the impact of their work on equality. However, less than 1 in 5 (18%) actually published evidence that they are assessing impact on equality in practice.
• Universities were the lowest performers in providing employment information (31%) and service delivery information (11%) on race, gender and disability, age, plus either religion/belief or sexual orientation.

Colleges performed relatively poorly.

• It was the sector with the lowest proportion of organisations publishing information on staff (57%), except for national organisations.  A third of the colleges assessed did not publish equality information on either their staff or service users. This was the worst performance of any sector.  As with universities, a very low proportion published information on the newer characteristics, other than age. Furthermore, the sector is less likely to make equality information available in alternative formats than any other sector.  Very few colleges (along with universities) made the equality information available in different languages. 
• Colleges were the least likely to identify an approach for using equality information in assessing the impact of their work on equality.  They are the least likely to provide examples of where they are actually using this information (only one in 10 of those assessed in each case).
• Despite the very poor coverage of the newer characteristics, only 16% recognised gaps in staff equality information (the lowest of any sector) and only 14% recognised equality information gaps for service users (though of the small number recognising this, two-thirds indicated plans to do something about them).

The Commission recommends that all colleges review the findings in the report and take steps to publish their equality information in line with best practice criteria. They will be writing to all colleges who have not published equality information, asking them to provide information about their published information or their plans to publish it. The findings and learning from this assessment will feed into the Commissions regulatory work on the equality duty, including an assessment into the performance of public authorities with regard to the specific duty to publish equality objectives.    

My findings

My own findings are anecdotal. I contacted a number of good or outstanding colleges who I have been working with on a regular basis. Many did not appear to be meeting their duties when I scrutinised the published documentation on their website. When I spoke to senior managers they often expressed surprise. Many had ‘benchmarked’ their performance with one or two outstanding providers, thinking that this meant that they were meeting their duties. They did not realise that these providers were also failing to meet their duties.

So you may want to check that you are meeting your duties to publish equality information and objectives – take a look at my free guidance on the resource page of my website, and the checklist in the EHRC document. I will suggest to the AoC that we run some workshops for providers – keep an eye on the ‘events’ page of my website.

Click here to read the EHRC report: ‘Publishing equality information: Commitment, engagement and transparency’