From 1 February 2023, you will see some small changes to the diversity monitoring questions on SuccessFactors – below we’ve outlined why we collect this information and what changes to expect.

Why does the University collect this information?

When we talk about 'diversity monitoring' we mean your personal and protected characteristics (as defined by the Equality Act), such as disability, race, religion, and sexual orientation.

We ask for this information:

• So we can be proactive on inclusion – knowing who our community are and what they need will help us prioritise the work we need to do.
• To benchmark ourselves against others and use this to develop actions in response.
• To evaluate our inclusion work and check if we are achieving our goals
• To provide workplace adjustments (find out more about adjustments here).
• To meet our statutory reporting obligations.
• To comply with the Public Sector Equality Duty.

Ensuring your anonymity

Information about personal and protected characteristics is used to generate anonymised and aggregated statistics. We do not publish personal information in a form which would allow individuals to be identified.

All diversity monitoring questions include a 'prefer not to say' option.

Access to this information is tightly controlled - only a limited number of staff in relevant roles (e.g., HR) can view your personal information, only where it is a necessary part of their job, and they will treat it with the strictest confidence.

You can read more about what we collect, why, and how it’s used here.

What is changing?

The University are required to collect and return diversity monitoring data to sector agencies, regulators such as the Office for Students (OfS), and research funding bodies. As such, we have to ensure the information we collect enables us to report as needed.

One of these sector agencies – the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) – have recently amended some of their mandatory reporting questions. We’ve reviewed the information we ask you to share to make sure we can meet our reporting obligations.

The questions you’ll see on SuccessFactors are not all an exact copy of the HESA formats as we’ve made some amendments based on the views and needs of our community. For example, based on previous consultation we’ve changed HESA’s use of ‘impairment’ to ‘disability’. Where adjustments such as this have been made, we have assured ourselves that we are still able to report as required.

Why am I seeing "OPTION NO LONGER AVAILABLE – Please select an alternative"?

There are some instances in which a previous response option no longer exists. For example, instead of selecting ‘two or more disabilities’ (and not being able to specify what those are) you are now able to simply pick more than one response option.

For any questions in which you’ve selected a response option which no longer exists, you will see this message (‘OPTION NO LONGER AVAILABLE – Please select an alternative’). In that case, we ask that you please select a response from the new response options.

We apologise for the inconvenience. Where possible we have mapped your responses to the new options. For example, the old format had two response options ‘Gay man’ and ‘Gay woman/Lesbian’ – anyone who has ticked either of those options will now be showing the new ‘Gay or Lesbian’ response. However, for some response options it was not possible to do this (as in the disability example above) and your manual update is needed.