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Student Experience Directorate
  1. Student Experience
  2. Intranet
  3. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)

Welcome to our Staff EDI Intranet Page, a dedicated space for fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion across our directorate.

Here, you’ll find tools and resources to support your learning and development, along with updates on key actions from staff surveys and our EDI action plans.

This platform also features the Staff EDI and Wellbeing Form, offering a confidential avenue to share your feedback, experiences, and best practices. Together, we aim to create an inclusive, supportive environment where every voice is valued.

2024-25 plan

The Student Experience EDI Action Plan 24-25 [PDF 242KB] has been developed in collaboration with the directorate’s EDI Committee, reinforcing our ongoing commitment to advancing Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI).

We remain dedicated to supporting our staff through the development and implementation of this second EDI Action Plan for the directorate. Robust processes are in place to ensure the tracking, monitoring, and reporting of each action’s outcomes within the Plan.

Updates are shared with the EDI Committee and all our staff through regular all-staff Update Meetings and on this page:

Progress Report (March 2025) 

Bullying and Harassment Toolkit

HR are in the process of developing a new Bullying and Harassment Toolkit for managers, with planned launch date in March/April. The resource is designed to provide guidance to managers on how they can prevent and respond effectively to bullying and harassment, with three main sections:

  • Setting clear behavioural expectations
  • Encouraging recognition of bullying, harassment and sexual harassment
  • Addressing bullying, harassment and sexual harassment when an incident is raised

 

EDI Specific Interview Questions

A suggestion from the Student Experience EDI Committee concerning setting EDI questions for interviews has been proposed for managers to include an EDI-related question in interviews that is tailored to the specific role, rather than using a set of pre-defined questions. Managers will consult with the local EDI representative to ensure the question(s) are appropriate, before incorporating them into the interview process.

Equality Impact Assessments

The Senior Leadership Team has now identified suitable activities/processes for individual departmental Equality Impact Assessments to be undertaken on. These include:

  • Library Services – Interfiling Teaching Collection book stock (Completed November 2024)
  • Registry Services – Timetabling Policy
  • Careers & Enterprise – The Appointments Policy
  • Student Wellbeing – Reasonable Adjustment Policy & Disabled Students Commitment.
  • General - Extenuating Circumstances and Student Learning Engagement policies.

 

Review of Student Experience HR Data

One of the key outputs of the EDI Action Plan was to identify priority areas related to staff progression, with an annual publication of these priorities.  A process is now in place to request a data report from HR which provides the number of staff who have progressed through grade increases on an annual basis for review.

2023-24 plan

The Student Experience Directorate prioritises embedding EDI across all activities. To support staff, we developed the Student Experience EDI Action Plan 23-24 [PDF 175KB] with the EDI committee and Chris Shelley, tracking progress on agreed outputs listed below:

  • Establish a directorate Exit Interview process to enable sharing of learnings.
  • Promote Aurora development programme to our staff who identify as women and support applications to increase the number of places given to SE staff.
  • Promote the Parents and Carers Network to staff in this category and support their involvement in attendance at this forum.
  • Promote other women’s professional development programmes available e.g. Springboard, Carer’s Development Fund.
  • Work with the HR team to ensure our roles are advertised to attract the widest pool of candidates.
  • Set up directorate EDI Committee and support their development as individuals and a group, support communication with staff to identify issues and ideas and provide administrative support for projects they wish to lead or monitor.
  • Agree with EDI Committee a plan for engaging with staff on EDI issues, e.g. web form submissions, regular forums, drop-ins with senior staff.
  • Report progress on this Action Plan through the directorate EDI Committee.
  • Student Experience Directorate roles to be advertised with additional focus on flexibility to ensure applicants understand the flexible working options available.

The Student Experience Directorate EDI and Wellbeing Feedback Form is a permanent tool for all staff in the directorate to use to send in suggestions for things we could do to better support you, comments on activities we have run or raise general issues of concern if you are unsure of how else to do that.

It will enable you to communicate feedback of your experiences with the Director and, where appropriate, the directorate EDI Committee and you have that choice within the form. The form will be open all year round so can be used at any time.

This isn't a reporting form for incidents that require investigation - for that please use Report and Support - but if there are general issues of concern you wish to raise then that can be done through this form. The form can be submitted anonymously or not, it is up to you.

The form includes questions relating to EDI data for collection purposes only which would be used to identify trends and patterns and would not be used to identify you in any way. You can submit the form without providing this data if you prefer to.

We've put together a document outlining the Role of an EDI Committee member [DOC 22KB] and their key responsibilities. If you would like to find out more, or are interesting in joining, please get in touch for an informal chat.

You can also view our EDI Committee Terms of reference [PDF 511KB] or contact our committee members directly:

Join the Student Experience EDI Network Teams Site which has been established to help create a community where we can connect and post EDI related thoughts, discuss issues affecting us and share best practice.

Managers’ tools: Addressing Bullying and Harassment

This is a recently launched resource (published May 2024); the OPD Team will be working with local leaders to establish a way to ensure managers find the toolkit accessible and easy to navigate.

 

Staff guidance: Bullying and Harassment Overview

 

Equality Impact Analysis

  • Equality Analysis is a core aspect of our organisational Values and strategic ambitions to be the most inclusive university of our kind, anywhere.
  • Our day-to-day decisions, overarching policies and associated processes all affect individual students, members of staff and visitors, often significantly and in variable ways.
  • Equality analysis helps to ensure that the decisions and changes that are made across Queen Mary actively consider equality, diversity and inclusion. 
  • Read the New approach to Equality Analysis at QM [PDF 584KB] presentation and enrol on the Equality Impact Analysis E-Learning module [DOC 26KB].

The section below is updated monthly to share relevant local news, events and positive impacts that we can see happening across our directorate.

We are pleased to share our EDI Committee Directorate Update March 2025 [PDF 440KB] which summarises our recent work and upcoming activities.

At Queen Mary we mark and celebrate a number of equality, diversity and inclusion events throughout the year. The Awareness and Inclusion Calendar 2024/25 contains some notable dates in the EDI calendar - printed versions are available from the EDI team. 

If you are organising an equality, diversity and inclusion related event at Queen Mary and would like to see it appear on the EDI Calendar web page, please email the EDI team to let them know.

The EDI committee have recently:

  • Introduced a feedback process on Equality Impact Assessments for the Senior Leadership Team and line managers.

  • Had two members represent QM for the first time at the Stellar HE programme, which aims to enhance the leadership skills of Black, Asian, and ethnically diverse Academic and Professional staff,  to address their under-representation in senior positions.

  • Supported EDI Action Plan activities i.e. supporting with procurement and recruitment of Stellar HE candidates and supporting discussions around equitable recruitment practices and training.

  • Welcomed new Co-Chair Kavita Jaidev from the Student Wellbeing team.

  • Launched this EDI Intranet Page for our Directorate.

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