An investigation into universities’ organisational commitments to inclusion in the UK higher education sector

Project overview

Universities in the UK increasingly participate in equality charters and schemes with the formal mission of supporting inclusion among traditionally underrepresented students and staff. However, little is known about how these organisational commitments shape the pursuit of inclusion in the UK higher education (HE) sector. This project will be a first in mapping universities’ organisational commitments to inclusion by analysing aggregate data on universities’ membership in equality charters in conjunction with publicly available student and staff inclusion statistics. Additional mining of textual data from the inclusion-oriented webpages of each university and from the webpages of the external organisations managing the most popular equality charters will be utilised to achieve a deeper understanding of how inclusion is conceptualised in the process. The project will address the need for systematic research into how external forces shape the pursuit of inclusion in universities, while informing inclusion policies in the UK HE sector.