We spoke to Further Education (FE) and skills sector leaders at the Association of Colleges (AoC) conference about one of our new strategic goals – champion inclusion – and what it means to them.
Here’s what we learned:
Rebecca Taylor, Orbital South Colleges
“One of the things I feel really passionate about is to have lots of voices in a room around decision making. When you have people that agree with each other because they might have a similar background or a similar approach to life you find yourself in a team of people where everyone’s agreeing about everything and that’s a really dangerous position to be in because you’re not seeing the full picture. So you need to make sure, as far as you can, that the people that are making decisions about your students have something in common with your students because they’re the ones that will be experiencing the impact of that.”
Palvinder Singh, Kirklees College
“When you’re thinking about inclusion, you’ve got to be conscious. And most of the time as human beings, we walk around being unconscious and that’s why reflection and CPD is so important and making time, because there is no such thing as a perfect human being that is going to create the perfect conditions of inclusion. But we’ve got to learn. We’re a learning sector, we’re a learning organisation and the leader of that organisation needs to be a person of learning and everyone in leadership needs to demonstrate leadership of learning, so that they’re demonstrating to our students what learning is all about and being a good student.”
