Focus resources on key equality areas, says ECU

If further progress is to be made on ensuring equality and diversity throughout the higher education sector during a time of uncertain funding, higher education institutions must prioritise their efforts to focus on the key challenges ahead, say Equality Challenge Unit.

The higher education equality body made these comments at the launch of Equality in higher education: statistical report 2010 during ECU's national conference Accelerating Equality in Higher Education, held this week (17-18 November 2010) in London.

The report provides a national picture of the progress made so far on equality, enabling individual institutions to benchmark their own progress against the rest of the sector, but also importantly allows them to identify areas where they need to focus the resources available for equality work.

David Ruebain, Chief Executive of Equality Challenge Unit, said:

'This year's report shows us that there has been progress in equality over the past year. Institutions are continuing to provide an environment where more and more staff and students feel they can declare a disability, for example. The degree attainment gap between white and black and minority ethnic (BME) students is slowly beginning to reduce.

However, there are clearly areas where we need to focus our efforts to effect any change. The number of UK-national BME staff in academic roles has been steadily increasing from 5.8% of all academic staff in 2004/05 up to 6.7% in 2008/09. But, the percentage of those BME academics who are in professorial roles is unacceptably low - only 4% of BME academics are professors, when 11% of white academics have reached that level. Overall, we find that only 0.4% of all professors are black.

The statistics also show that there is still a high disparity in levels of pay for male and female staff. The median salary for women is £28,839, while men receive on average £35,469. This gives an overall pay gap of 18.7%.

In the current financial climate, it is now more necessary than ever for institutions to identify their individual challenges and fully analyse where to target their resources to ensure efficient and effective progress on equality for staff and students. Our statistics report, and the online analysis tools that accompany it, should assist institutions with this prioritisation. ECU will continue to provide a central source of expertise, research and advice, supporting the sector to negotiate the challenges of promoting equality and diversity in a dramatically changing economic and funding environment.'

The report is based on analysis of data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency staff and student records covering 2004/05 to 2008/09. Online tools to accompany the report have been developed by ECU and HESA, and are available on HESA's heidi equality system.

Download the 2010 report

• Equality in higher education:statistical report 2010