Advance HE Race Equality Charter

The Race Equality Charter (often called the REC) is a framework created by Advance HE to help universities like ours improve racial equity for both staff and students. It’s all about identifying and tackling the barriers that Black, Asian, and minority ethnic people face in higher education.

When a university signs up, it commits to a serious self-assessment process and develops an action plan to drive real change. Institutions can apply for either a Bronze or Silver award, depending on their progress and impact. These awards aren’t just symbolic. They reflect a university’s long-term commitment to equity and inclusion. They’re reviewed by an independent panel of assessors and are valid for five years. And with updates to the Charter now including things like academic freedom and freedom of speech, it’s evolving to reflect the complex realities of race issues and university life today.

Student Services can play a really powerful role in the Race Equality Charter process. At the University of Birmingham, for example, Student Services became an anchor, bringing together a wide range of brilliant colleagues from within our Student Services teams and other student-facing services like the Library, Careers, Security, Accommodation, Catering, and Sport. Together, we developed a suite of holistic REC interventions as part of the university’s action plan.

This included everything from analysing sport participation data to create more inclusive sport offers for underrepresented groups, to working with authentic suppliers to introduce a wider range of culinary options on campus. We also developed belonging programmes for international student residents. Moreover, we recognised the importance of representation and inclusion among staff. So, we introduced anti-racism training for our teams and made sure that no recruitment panel consisted of a single ethnicity. These steps are helping us broaden our staff pipeline so it better reflects the diversity of our student population.

What’s important here is that, while wider institutional work, like tackling awarding gaps or widening participation in higher education, can take years to show results, these kinds of student-facing initiatives can be introduced and felt much more quickly. They give our current students a real sense that change is happening now, not just promised for the future. As such, I would argue that Student Services can play a leading role in your institutional REC process to drive impactful, real-time, and student-centred change.

The Race Equality Charter has been a real catalyst for positive change in Student Services. It’s helped us align our work with the university’s Access and Participation Plan, our EDI strategy, and the growing internationalisation of our student population. In addition, as our home student body is also becoming more ethnically diverse, especially with more students coming from our local catchment areas, our services must evolve to reflect that change.

At the University of Birmingham, REC became an embedded approach that helped us galvanise institutional power to drive meaningful change. For example, our Student Disability Service is now actively working to reduce the gap between White and minority ethnic students who disclose a disability, so that reasonable adjustments are more equitably available to all. We’ve also taken creative steps, like recording wellbeing messages in Mandarin Chinese to help demystify mental health support, and our Chaplaincy team has promoted inclusive tips for non-Muslim students and staff to help make Ramadan a more considerate and supportive experience on campus. Meanwhile our Student Communications team has been working hard to ensure that our visual materials, promotional content, and student stories genuinely reflect the ethnic diversity of our student body.

What’s powerful about these REC-driven actions is that they help us reimagine how we engage with current students, ensuring our services aren’t stuck in a legacy model, but are responsive, inclusive, and ready for the changing campus population.

I’ll be honest. This is a significant undertaking, and it is hard work. At the University of Birmingham, I chaired our REC student working group, which brought together student-facing services and student representatives from across the university. I was fortunate to be supported by a dedicated project manager for our REC application, who coordinated a campus-wide campaign that received over 2,000 student survey responses and involved more than 150 students in focus groups.

Once we analysed the REC survey data alongside institutional data, we spent several months working with professional services and academic faculties to agree on data-informed actions that would shape our REC plan for the next five years. In total, the process took around 12 to 18 months, partly due to the scale of our university community of around 50,000 people.

That said, there are creative ways to manage the workload. You can build on existing data, align REC actions with other institutional priorities. This helps maximise impact while making the most of available resources. At its core, for Student Services, REC is about developing a thorough and honest understanding of the barriers faced by Black, Asian, and minority ethnic students in their university lives, and creating well-justified, measurable actions to address those systemic issues. It’s a commitment to meaningful change, and while it takes time and efforts, the outcomes are absolutely worth it.