Equality & Diversity

Summary: General information about Equality & Diversity at James Watt College, our policies and other related information.

James Watt College is committed to Equality and Diversity

Welcome to the Equality and Diversity web pages.

This has been a year of significant change across the equality and diversity landscape with the introduction of the Equality Act 2010. The purpose of this legislation is to harmonise and strengthen the legacy equality laws under one single piece of legislation.

The Equality Act has also introduced a new term ‘protected characteristic’ to replace the previous ‘equality strand’ definition. The purpose of the term protected characteristic is to move a way from a group definition of equality to a definition which recognises that everyone is protected from discrimination whether a person is at work or receiving a service.

The protected characteristics are: age, disability, gender, marital/civil partnership status, pregnancy or maternity, race, religion or belief, sexual orientation and transgender.

Legislation against discrimination has been very important in raising the profile of equality and diversity issues; it has helped to establish the public value of eliminating prejudice and unfairness, given representation and voice to different groups and ultimately made a difference to people’s behaviour and lives.

This importance for equality, fairness and human rights is recognised by James Watt College and we are committed to making a significant contribution through all of our stakeholders be they staff, students and partners.

We will aim to embed equality and diversity into our key decisions, strategic direction and day to day operations.

To that end we have set up an Equality and Diversity Steering Group whose remit will be to ensure that the College is able to meet the statutory duties on all of the equality protected characteristics through a process of scrutiny, performance management, consultation and engagement.

Whilst legislation is important on its own it is not enough; our approach within James Watt College must be to empower our stakeholders to promote equality and diversity in ways which are aligned to the reputation and aspirations of the College and is based on shared rights and responsibilities within the strategic college framework of “its all about learning”.