Westminster City Council: Equalities and Diversity Training

Equality Works was commissioned by Westminster City Council to develop and conduct equalities and diversity training for 2 separate groups of staff:

• Team Leaders, Supervisors and Professional Practitioners; and
• Operational Managers, Senior Technical/Specialist Roles and Divisional Heads.

The overall aims of both training programmes were:

• To provide a framework of learning which assists in giving all employees with an understanding of diversity and equalities, the legislative regulations and the impact that this has on their working environment and service;
• To provide a clear understanding of individual responsibilities relating to diversity and equalities;
• To assist the Council in reaching the corporate objective of attaining level 3 of the equality standards for local government;
• To assist the Council in meeting the requirements as set out by the Best Value Performance Indicators endorsed by the Audit Commission; and
• To assist the Council in meeting the corporate objectives as set out in the Corporate Equality Plan.

We initially spent some time on a literature review. This involved reading and reflecting on organisational policies, procedures and other pertinent documents (Race Equality Scheme, Equality & Diversity Policy, Equality Objectives etc) to enhance our understanding of Westminster City Council.

We then carried out a training needs analysis involving interviews with managers/supervisors and other specialist staff who were going to attend the training, in order to ensure that our materials reflected their needs. We used our wide experience of designing and using questionnaires and interview techniques to enable us to assess existing understanding of equalities and diversity as well as identifying training needs. We also used the questionnaires post-training, as part of the evaluation to assess the impact of the training on managers’ understanding.

We designed and tailored 2 different programmes for the 2 groups. Although at the core of both sessions was an analysis of institutional discrimination, the focus and the activities of each session differed due to the different needs of delegates. The content of the course reflected the issues surfaced through the training needs analysis stage, and the course content outlined within the tender document.

By the end of the training, managers in both groups:

• Have discussed a range of good practice examples on equalities;
• Understand the importance of equalities and diversity within the Council’s and the service priorities;
• Are able to use the managers’ equalities tool-kit;
• Can integrate equalities into some aspects of service practice;
• Are familiar with the legal context and its application to their work;
• Have more confidence in handling issues of equalities and diversity with their teams.

In addition to evaluation sheets completed by delegates on the programmes we also held regular project meetings between Equality Works and the client to share feedback. Similarly, we collected organisational points from each course and took responsibility for feeding them back to the client organisation.

The success of the training triggered other projects with Westminster City Council including some special Equality Impact Asessment workshops for various services and some Equality and Diversity training for Protection Managers.