My name’s David Hermitt and I’m headteacher of Congleton High School, which is in Cheshire. I’ve been headteacher here for three years, and over that time we’ve seen lots of developments and changes in the life of the school. We’re an 11-18 school, we’re larger than average and Congleton, where it is based, is a small market town.

About 95% of our students are white heritage children and so, as such, the school reflects the heritage of the youngsters that we serve. The school’s always wanted to have diversity within itself but the population that we serve isn’t as diverse. So what we’ve always done is we’ve tried to find ways of bringing people to the school who might bring that diversity, or taken our youngsters out from the school to get them involved in more diverse communities.

Like many schools, we’ve always had policies to ensure that we comply with the legislation around equality issues – what we’ve tried to do now is to move from just having a policy on paper, to actually also have procedures to make sure that we are following those policies. Some of that involves helping our youngsters to understand that they live in a diverse world, and so a lot of our energy and of our effort in terms of diversity and equality has been directed at our students foremost.

The staff population pretty much reflects the population of the students that we serve. I’d say 95% of our staff are from white backgrounds, but myself as headteacher and other senior staff within the school do come from minority ethnic groups.

Most of my career I’ve worked as a minority ethnic person in an all-white environment and that’s never been a problem. In the majority of schools I’ve worked in, people have been accepted on their merits and judged on their merits and that’s been a useful way really of settling in.

The research shows that many people from minority ethnic backgrounds find it difficult to make progress in their careers and often that’s because they have self-imposed restrictions that they put on themselves as well as the external restrictions that come inherently. There aren’t many people as role models that they can look to.

We started the process of looking at equality and diversity by examining our existing policies. We felt it was important to look at the impact of what we were already doing before we started to consider what we might do in the future. In looking at those policies, we have found things that we can improve upon and so we’ve done that straight away. One of those is in terms of our recruitment policy. We found that our recruitment policy meant that we were advertising in local press, and often people who might apply from minority groups do not live locally, and so we’ve extended the places where we advertise on that basis. We’ve also ensured that all the documentation that goes to candidates clearly shows that we value a diverse workforce.

As a school we involve as many people as possible in helping to deliver our equality and diversity scheme. We’ve involved the governors foremost in the looking at policies and we’ve involved members of the senior leadership team who have responsibility for various aspects of the policies and we’re also involving the students, in terms of research. Some of our students are studying courses such as Health and Social Care, and they’re able to carry out research on the impact of some policies at grass roots level. Next term, we’ve already arranged for parents to be involved in some consultation about how we might improve our equality scheme.

I would feel that the impact of our work in terms of processes in school is a stronger feature than the quality of our policy writing. That’s one of the big changes of looking at the equality scheme and we are trying to find information at grass roots level about how people feel about these issues so that we can change and adapt how we work to match what people are telling us.

Because our equality and diversity policy is an overarching scheme, it includes many, many policies and what we’re trying to help people to understand is the process of evaluating policies against their impact, is the new process that is coming into the life of the school. For many people that’s a new thing and so we’re involved a lot more in gathering data – data about applications for posts to the school, data about the existing workforce – and using that data to inform policy and practice rather than just lifting the policy off the shelf.

I am Richard Winn. I’ve been a governor for 16 years of Easton Primary VA Church of England School, and chairman for five years. This is actually a very special school in the context that a very large majority of the children are of ethnic minorities. What makes is unique also is that we have a Muslim headteacher: Rehana Siraj-Allan. She was appointed five years ago.

Our interview board consisted of three foundation governors and a teaching member of the governing body, also the Diocesan Director of Education and the Local Authority representative. We wanted the very best because this school could have been in special measures, quite soon. We wanted someone exceptional, and she was exceptional. She had been head of two inner-city schools, and she was fairly obviously the very best person. We were fortunate that she came for the job.

Following Rehana Siraj-Allan’s appointment, there’s no doubt that the standards of the school, the standards of education, have increased tremendously. Ofsted who came in 2006 said this, and they said that the leadership of Rehana and of Ms Zoe Welsh, the deputy, was of a high standard. So we felt we were vindicated in the appointment. She is a visionary and she has this ability obviously to see where she is going, to manage people extremely well and her staff who feel that she is with them. The other important element is the whole business of ethnic minorities and ensuring that all the matters that are required of us, over matters of the Racial Act, the Disability Act, are all interpreted so that they actually work in the school. Not just policies on bits of paper, but they actually do work. She is a very practical person.

The other thing is that she is a very, if I may use this term, hands-on’ in that she will, in her work, go into classes to ensure that the teaching is up to standard, and so on. All the usual things that heads are expected to do these days.

I think Rehana has got insights as a Muslim. I think she can feel for the families and the children. For instance, she has a very wide breadth of experience, particularly in the Church of England schools which she was at before she came here.

Recruitment of staff: it goes, interestingly, in waves. We have been very fortunate, and I think it’s probably something to do with Rehana again. Most staff will come from the Bristol area when I say area that includes of course Bath and includes across from Wales. And they will know of her, and the way she runs the school, so that’s an important element. They also will know fully what is expected of them in this type of school, and they must know what type of school it is.

The recruitment of staff is done basically within the city itself to start with; it goes on the Local Authority’s bulletin with our requirements. It would also go to those authorities which abut onto Bristol Gloucestershire, Somerset and also into Wales, which is just across the bridge. So that is quite a wide sphere of recruitment. It would also, not necessarily, go into the Church papers because I think we feel on the whole, as long as we’re stating precisely what our requirements are regarding Church of England school, diverse faiths, and all that, as long as we state that, they know what they’re coming to.

The advertising isn’t terribly sophisticated at the moment. We obviously send out to ethnic groups who would get anything we put out to the Local Authority. And therefore, perhaps by word of mouth and the knowledge that Rehana was the headteacher, and has a reputation in this city because she’s now a consultant, so to speak. She goes round telling, well not telling but advising, other headteachers on best practice and so on. So, her reputation in the educational world, which is not all that big really, they would know the kind of school that she ran.

My name is Dorothy Smith and I am currently Director of School Improvement for Education Leeds.Equality and diversity to me is about ensuring that all children, young people and their families can access the range of opportunities and provision that’s available to them, to ensure they realise their full potential, and achieve and attain the highest possible educational standards that they can. In terms of diversity, I welcome the fact that Leeds is a very diverse city.

When I moved to Batley to be a headteacher, I moved from a multi-racial school in the West Midlands and moved to Batley, which was predominantly a Muslim school. I would say at the time sort of seventy per cent Muslim intake; and the rest of the pupils were from the white indigenous community. But what struck me most of all was the fact that the staff at all levels were of the white indigenous community.

In Leeds, one of our biggest issues is around community cohesion. Obviously, we’re a city where we have new arrivals, international new arrivals, coming in not just from Black and Asian backgrounds but also Eastern Europeans. Then, of course, we have had incidents not quite like the Stephen Lawrence incident but there have been situations in the city that we do need to address within neighbourhoods and communities. So we have a standard called the Stephen Lawrence Standard, which schools are encouraged to work towards. This is a whole-school strategy that looks at ethos, it looks at your curriculum, it looks at diversifying the workforce, it looks at working with parents, it looks at working with the communities; but it’s built very much on those principles of respect and tolerance, and all the things you would expect. We have over fifty per cent of our schools have actually achieved that Standard, and many more are working towards that Standard.

All our schools have a duty to promote race in education and so all our schools have policies, all our schools have action plans. And what that gives them is that they’ve got clear evidence of the impact of the work that they’re doing, and the impact that the work is having on their behaviours, attitudes and perceptions of the children; in particular the families that they’re working with.

There is a process by which schools are encouraged to send in their returns in relation to racial incidents, that they monitor throughout the year. And all this data is collected and looked at. Individual schools will work with staff within our services if they’re concerned about changes in the community or things that they feel could have an impact in terms of community tensions or issues. Then there are services, not just within education but across all our services that are dedicated to supporting schools and their neighbourhoods. The data is very important, so that we can actually target our resources and our support.

I think it’s really important that people do understand the legislation, and that the legislation is used. I think at the time when that experience happened to me, that’s going back over twenty years. And I think as a young teacher, I wouldn’t have known the detail of that legislation. As I’ve moved into local authority work, then yes, I remind people of the legislation, particularly when we’re supporting governing bodies on the recruitment of staff, we point out all of those things.

I think it is important to have targeted support and continuous professional development. Within Education Leeds there’s a lot of training and development around the Stephen Lawrence Standard. We have lots of programmes aimed at raising attainment of specific groups. For example, we’ve got a programme called PACE, which is focused on pupils of African-Caribbean heritage raising their attainment. So the schools that are targeted for that: there is a training programme, there is support with developing materials. And we’ve got specific programmes around other groups. So we very much target our support, target our resources around specific programmes and with that always, there is training and development. And then networks are set up for teachers to share and disseminate best practice.

I think sometimes in local authorities when you have members of staff with a responsibility for ethnic minority achievement or equality and diversity, which we have in Leeds. We have a Director for Equalities and Entitlement and we have a Head of Service who takes lead responsibility for that. There is a danger, if you’re not careful, that that sort of area of work is left very much to those people. But what we’ve really worked hard on the last three to four years in Education Leeds is to work with staff teams and work with the services to ensure that they see the issues of equality and diversity as very much everyone’s responsibility.

There are some costs associated with implementing equality and diversity policies, but I don’t consider them to be major costs. I mean it depends on your approach. In some authorities like ours, we have members of staff who have a leadership role, so that there are costs there. We have particular programmes that we promote with our schools, targeted at particular schools, where often the costs are minimal. When I was a headteacher, the cost was about giving over time to actually develop understanding through our continuing professional development programme, rather than employing people. So for me it isn’t about the amount of money that is spent, it’s more about being absolutely clear about the values and what it is you are trying to achieve, and being clear about the outcome.

I think the main point for me, and I think that’s how I feel personally, I feel that if all those barriers are broken down and if equality and diversity is being implemented appropriately then the main benefit is that people achieve, children will attain, and everybody will feel happy, safe and successful.