With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts. Eleanor Roosevelt

Hello

Welcome back. I say that as much for my own benefit as to welcome you. I haven’t written a blog post for ages! I hope that you’ve had a good break and managed to enjoy some of the sunshine that we had over the last couple of months.

Whilst I didn’t do everything that I had planned over the summer, I did pull together our achievements from the last academic year. This is something that I do at the end of every year. I think it is really important. It is so easy to forget the successes, particularly those achieved at the start of the year. Reflecting supports continuous learning. It helps identify areas for improvement, as well as those we can build on to scale up our successes. A summary publication will be published on our website, hopefully early October. What can be found up there now though is our brand new, on-line inclusion calendar. We’ve worked with a company called “Diversiton” to produce it. It has a wide range of dates to help our staff and students keep track of key festivals and occasions, plus some fabulous photos promoting #TeamGlos. You can check it out here.

As the new academic year begins, our attention turns to delivering our equality and inclusion priorities. This year, we’re really focussed on embedding equality and inclusion. We’ve aligned our equality priorities more closely with other strategic priorities for the University. This includes our Access and Participation Plan, our Gender Pay Gap action plan, our Student Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy and our Internationalisation Strategy. We will be looking at every aspect of our students’ experiences at the University, from recruitment through to employment.

We are continuing to grow our Reciprocal Mentoring Programme. If you’ve read any of our previous posts you will be quite familiar with this Programme. Just in case you’re new, this Programme sees our home black and ethnic minority students partnered with a senior leader. It creates a space for our students to educate senior leaders by sharing their stories of life at the University. Our senior leaders are enabled to “walk in their shoes”, and experience life from a very different perspective. In return our students access the benefits of traditional mentoring, hence the reciprocity.

Other priorities for this year include delivering the Live Smart events. These celebrate student/community collaborations for the Global Sustainability Goals, and a programme of events and activities for students in halls to develop a stronger sense of community. We have a much greater emphasis on mental health and wellbeing for staff and students and increasing our awareness of cultural diversity.

Obviously, there will be so much more going on. You can read about it here or follow us on twitter @UoGEquality. We are also hopeful that we can resume our podcast, “Talking Inclusion with Anna and Clare”. Unfortunately, our amazing student producer from last year is unable to produce us this year. Fingers crossed we can find another willing, student volunteer.