Equality and Diversity
Our Commitment to Equality and Diversity: Making Stormont House School an unbiased environment for staff, students, families, and the wider community
Staff and Governor commitment:
In March 2022, we held two training sessions for staff on unconscious/ unchecked bias, its impact, and steps we could consider taking to ensure that we reduce the risk of acting on assumptions without checking them. These sessions were led by Orlene Badu, the Hackney Education Lead on the Young Black Boys Project. As always, staff were engaged and positive, and the level of trust allowed some difficult experiences to be shared. All staff were invited to share any further ideas or suggestions.
The staff team identified steps we could take to ensure our school becomes a place where we systematically check for unconscious bias, and these were discussed with Governors in May and June 2022. The input from the team has been collated and the common themes emerging are that we want:
- a culture where staff are encouraged to reflect and check their own biases, and where staff have a common language and approach to safely challenging bias when they see it in others.
- to start every interaction with the mindset ‘all behaviour is communication’
- more opportunities to share and celebrate; our similar experiences as well as our differences.
- to see greater representation of diversity across all levels of the school, including senior leadership and governors. We want internal and external recruitment to attract a wider range of diversity in applicants.
- to make sure every child sees themselves in the curriculum, and we want to celebrate aspirational figures who better represent our diverse school community
- greater depth of analysis when it comes to data; using that analysis to check our biases
- to build trusting relationships with our parents and our community; we want our interactions to start from a positive place
These aims will inform our specific Equality and Diversity action plan, as well as being guiding principles for other action plans linked to the School Development Plan.
Our Equality and Diversity Action Plans fall under the Staff Wellbeing priority of our School Development. The impact of the plans is monitored and evaluated by Governors Resources Committee and the School Health, Safety & Wellbeing Committee, which includes the Trades Union H&S Rep and the Staff Governor.
Katie Foster
Deputy Head, Learning & Development
Please click on the link below to access our Equality & Diversity Policy
Headteacher commitment/ A commitment from Hackney headteachers
Hackney headteachers, at their conference on 18 March 2022, and in follow up discussion, produced this core statement in response to wider issues raised by the Child Q incident. We are taking this forward in discussions in our school and settings.
I was pleased to be able to contribute the bullet points for action in the statement from headteachers.
As Hackney Headteachers, we jointly affirm our full commitment and continued action to the best possible safeguarding of every child in our care, ensuring a safeguarding first approach always applies.
We know that we have already been doing work to eliminate racism in our schools but recognise that there is much work to be done. We recognise that Black and Global Majority children face racism in Hackney and beyond: we are committed to and will act on taking forward anti-racist practice.
In Hackney we are ambitious, caring and inclusive in working for every child. As educationalists we will work jointly, with our children, their families, our staff and with other professionals, particularly with our Black and Global Majority stakeholders, in building on the strong work already in our schools, towards being a beacon of excellence in inclusion and anti-racism.
We are committed to revisiting staff training and guidance to ensure that all staff:
feel confident that their duty to safeguard the children in our care comes above any other need, understand, and are able to counteract, any assumptions or actions that may lead to children being treated unfairly or unjustly are able to act to protect children in crisis as if they were our own, seeking senior leader support if needed.
We are committed to supporting and challenging each other to ensure this happens.
Kevin McDonnell,
Headteacher
Public Sector Equalities Duty and Equalities Objectives (updated February 2024)
The downloadable document below gives a high-level explanation of the Public Sector Equalities Duty; our equalities objectives; how this relates to our school vision, context, school development plan and how we use targeted grants such as the Pupil Premium and Covid Recovery Grants. It then reports on progress towards our current equalities objectives, the next steps we will take and where these feature in our School Development Plan (SDP)
Our current equalities objectives:
Objective 1
To ensure that all students make the best possible progress in both English and Maths, with the ambition of meeting or exceeding ambitious flightpaths in both subjects. Our strategy will be to secure baseline assessments, provide high quality teaching, intervention and support strategies, all of which will be internally and externally quality assured.
Objective 2
To review our curriculum to further improve post-16 progression for all students.
The Public Sector Equalities Duty
The Equality Act 2010 requires all public organisations, including schools, to comply with the Public Sector Equality Duty, which has three broad aims:
- Eliminating unlawful discrimination, harassment, and victimisation.
- Advancing equality of opportunity between different groups.
- Fostering good relations between different groups.
The Public Sector Equality Duty also ensures that we continue to tackle issues of disadvantage and underachievement of different groups by breaking down barriers to learning, and increasing life choices for all students, which underpin our vision and whole-school priorities.
