Equality and Diversity
Shirley Community Primary School is passionate about celebrating diversity and ensuring equality of opportunity for every pupil. Our hard work was recognised in October 2010 when we were the first Primary School in the UK to achieve the Equalities Award. This was repeated in 2014 when we gained the award for a second time. In July 2022 we were re-accredited with the new Equalities Silver Award.
You can find out more here: https://www.equalitiesaward.co.uk/
What is the Equalities Award?
Through a process of supported self-evaluation, hundreds of education providers across the UK have been using the Equalities audit. This is a robust tool to identify and review the many ways in which they engender equality of opportunity and raise outcomes for all learners regardless of gender, disability, faith and ethnicity, sexual identity and socio-economic disadvantage. The promotion of pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development is a core feature of the audit, which also focuses on safeguarding, bullying and the promotion of British values.
The Award was developed in response to the Equality Act 2010 which established nine ‘protected characteristics’: age, disability, race, sex, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, religion and belief, and sexual orientation.
Further information is available here from the Equality and Human Rights Commission:
The Act places both general and specific duties upon all public bodies, such as local authorities, schools and other state funded educational settings including children’s centres and academies.
The general duty requires public bodies to have due regard to:
- Eliminating discrimination
- Advancing equality of opportunity
- Fostering good relations
- Publish information which shows their compliance with the general duty
- Publish specific and measurable equality objectives to meet the general duty