Inclusive Policies & Race Relations in the UK Higher Education Sector

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Introduction

Policies adopted in the education setting can be assumed to mean texts that have the potential to alter educational practices and learning outcomes. Although various policies have been used to influence the future direction of the sector and, by extension, social and national agendas (Bartram, 2021), not much effort has been made to understand the weaknesses of current systems, or how their evolution and adoption have helped to achieve their intended objectives, or not. Particularly, this observation is true for policies that have been developed to promote equality and inclusion in schools. For example, the UK Equality Act 2010, which was introduced as a substitute of the Race Relations Act 1976 was designed to prohibit all forms of discrimination based on people’s nationality, ethnicity, and color of their skin, but the same practices exist today (Educational Institute of Scotland, 2021). Race Relations Order 1997 also had a similar objective (AHE, 2021), but minimal efforts have been made to understand their impact, especially in the higher education sector.

This study is a research proposal aimed at understanding the efficacy of inclusive policies in promoting race relations in the UK higher education sector. The study is important because it will highlight the relationship and efficacy of national policies on higher education practices. By doing so, observers and students will understand the underlying intentions and motives of formulating policies aimed at promoting inclusion and diversity in schools. As suggested by Stephen (1993), these attempts at reconciliation will give education stakeholders a glimpse into the mind of policymakers. This way, students will be able to have an in-depth understanding of problems that affect their learning environment and how they could best address them. Broadly, the findings that will be formulated from the proposed research will be useful in providing important feedback needed to improve future education policies.

Background and Context of Study

The changing social, economic, and political environment around the world has been primarily brought by globalization and technological changes. In its wake is the growth of a revolutionary mindset that has emerged not only in political spheres but in the industry and education sectors as well (Welcomer, Haggerty and Sama, 2021; Bruff, 2021). It has prompted people to think of better ways of addressing contemporary social and educational problems. However, higher learning institutions in the UK are having a difficult time preparing their students to live in a race-neutral learning environment (UK Commission for Racial Equality, 2016). Nonetheless, to keep up with changing attitudes about race relations, higher education institutions must prepare students to compete in a race-neutral world.

Literature Review

The lasting impact of race and racism on societies has been well documented. However, in this literature review, the problem is presented from a structural analysis perspective with the UK higher education sector being the main context of analysis. It is used to highlight the link between race relations and education reform to support future policy improvements in the sector.

The link between Race Relations and Education Reform

Racism is a complex term, but it is commonly associated with biased behaviors aimed at groups of people based on the color of their skin (Educational Institute of Scotland, 2021). This practice has gone on for a long time and succeeded in dividing populations into various groups and categories that have eventually morphed into hierarchies that dominate society today (Bassel et al., 2021). The higher education sector has played a key role in promoting or propagating some of these ideas, particularly through the false notion of “race science” (AHE, 2021). Consequently, there is a growing push to overhaul existing systems and processes to have better outcomes.

Current developments about race relations in major western democracies are not a new phenomenon as countries have dealt with the problem in the past (Nurein and Iqbal, 2021). An article by Keating (2021) indicates that three major converging forces always conspire to create an environment where societies have to address this problem and he lists them as changes in demographic trends, emerging skill gaps, and economic shifts. Cumulatively, they can create conditions where groups of people hold on to their fundamental beliefs, regardless of what other people think, thereby threatening social cohesion.

Understanding Structural Racism in UK Higher Education

It is difficult to understand how racism operates in the higher education sector because the terminology is perceived from various legal, cultural, and social lenses. However, there is a growing consensus among educators and policymakers that the vice is a social construct perpetuated by society (Loftsdóttir, 2021). There is also a growing consensus among the same professionals that racism exists in UK society at a macro level (AHE, 2021). Based on logical reasoning, this realization would mean that the vice also exists in higher education institutions to some degree. This assumption is plausible because educational institutions are not immune from the vices of societies that support them in the first place (Sharma et al., 2021). This is why AHE (2021) says that “universities are institutionally racist spaces that have had a historic role in producing the knowledge that racism is based on” (p. 6). Consequently, it appears that education institutions are part of a social network that propagates the practice.

Racial inequalities have been reported to affect people through their experiences and outcomes. For example, in the educations sector, it has been reported in the allocation of awards and degrees, progression to post-graduate research, hate crime, underrepresentation of minorities in the school staff as well as curriculum development (Strand and Lindorff, 2021; Nurein and Iqbal, 2021). Existing practices that foster inequalities in higher education can be traced to the intersectionality of these factors through structures of dominance and inequality. Therefore, there is a need to unpack them and identify techniques of making existing policies more effective in addressing the problem.

Summary

This review shows that efforts have been made to improve race relations at a policy level but few researchers have bothered to understand the extent that existing policy structures have impacted the same relations. Particularly, the literature is almost silent on the impact that current policies have played in improving or worsening race relations today. This gap in the literature informs the current quest to understand the efficacy of inclusive policies in promoting race relations in the UK higher education sector.

Research Questions

Have policies on race relations impacted segments of the school population differently?
What aspects of race relations have been unaddressed by current policies?
What key assumptions underlie race relations in the UK higher education sector?

Research Design and Methodology

To recap, the objective of the proposed study is to understand the efficacy of inclusive policies in promoting race relations in the UK higher education sector. Data will be collected through a mixture of primary and secondary sources of information within a broader mixed methods analysis framework. The model is selected for use in the proposed study because the research topic contains qualitative and quantitative aspects of the investigation. For example, race relations is a subjective and emotive issue, thereby necessitating a qualitative assessment, while its effects are perceived quantitatively (Blaikie and Priest, 2018). Therefore, the framework of the mixed methods will allow the researcher to have a historical understanding of the cause and effect of existing policies on current race relations.

Method

As part of the mixed methods design, secondary research data will be obtained through a review of published materials for purposes of answering the research questions. The keywords used will be “policies,” “inclusive education,” “laws,” United Kingdom, and “Higher education.” The secondary research method is chosen for the proposed study because of the emphasis on policy. It will help the researcher to understand the historical background of various educational policies and their effects on the student population (Patten & Newhart, 2017). Therefore, this type of analysis will allow for a retroactive analysis of the research issue. Articles that will be included in the investigation are those that have been published within the past five years – from 2016 to 2021. Therefore, those that will not fall within this publication framework will be excluded from the investigation. Emphasis will be made to include credible sources of information, including books, journals, government publications, industry reports, and credible websites. These sources of information will be sourced virtually via reputable databases, including Emerald Insight, Research Gate, Sage Publications, and Springer.

Primary data will be collected using interviews as the main tool of data collection. This type of information will be obtained from the deans of various schools in the university because of their knowledge of school policies and education performance. Eight respondents will be recruited through a purposeful sampling method to give their views on the research issue. This sampling method will be employed because of the limited number of respondents who fit the profile described above (Gentles et al., 2016). Furthermore, the views of only a select few respondents will be sought because Stokes (2017), Sekaran and Bougie (2016) affirm that interviews should ideally sample the views of few people to obtain quality data.

Method of Analysis

“What is the Problem Presented” (WPR) will be used as the main data analysis technique. It stems from qualitative inquiry and promotes a post-structural understanding of the effects of laws and policies on organizations (Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016). The data analysis tool will be used in the proposed study because it offers the researcher an opportunity to engage in theorizing the main issues affecting the implementation of educational policies and their effects on the learning environment (Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016). This competency will help in advancing the analytical task of making politics visible in the educational setting. The data analysis method will also be instrumental in understanding how policies are presented and produced. The WPR approach will be employed in the proposed study by prompting the research to answer fundamental questions regarding the data collected, including evaluating what the problem is presented to be, the underlying assumptions supporting its existence, effects of its representation, and how its content or influence is reproduced over time. One of the major limitations of this study is that the policy analyzed may not perfectly reflect the reality in the school setting.

Ethical Issues

The proposed study will involve the collection of both primary and secondary data. This dual technique of data collection has several ethical implications for the study. For example, the use of published data will require that the researcher properly attribute the sources to their original authors to avoid plagiarism (Kara, 2016). Additionally, emphasis will be made to only include research materials that can be freely available online to avoid infringing on copyrighted materials that do not grant permission for public use of their content. The use of human subjects in the collection of primary data will require that the information they give is presented anonymously and confidentially, as recommended by Robson and McCartan (2016). Similarly, the participants who will take part in the study will be allowed to do so voluntarily.

Research Timeline

Given that the proposed study will have both qualitative and quantitative elements in data collection, it is expected to take up to nine weeks to complete the research process and present its findings. In the first week, the researcher will undertake preliminary research to understand key variables that need to be addressed in the investigation. This process will pave the way for the collection of data, which will happen in the second week while synthesizing the same information will be undertaken in the subsequent two weeks to allow for the formulation of the final report and a presentation of the findings which will happen in the last six weeks of the study. The various stages of data processing are outlined in Table 1 below.

Table 1. Gantt Chart (Source: Developed by Author)

Activity	Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Week 4	Week 5	Week 6	Week 7	Week 8	Week 9
Preliminary Research
Data Collection
Data Synthesis
Formulation of the final report
Presentation of findings

Reference List

AHE. (2021). Understanding structural racism in UK higher education: an introduction. Web.

Bacchi, C. and Goodwin, S. (2016) Poststructural policy analysis. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bartram, D. (2021) ‘Does the UK ‘citizenship process’ lead immigrants to reject British identity? A panel data analysis’, Ethnicities, 21(2), pp. 375-394.

Bassel, L. et al. (2021) ‘Naturalization policies, citizenship regimes, and the regulation of belonging in anxious societies’, Ethnicities, 21(2), pp. 259-270.

Blaikie, N. and Priest, J. (2018) Designing social research: the logic of anticipation. London: Polity.

Bruff, I. (2021) ‘Moving to new generational beats: lived experiences of capitalism, student-led (re)makings of knowledge, and the evolution of critical research agendas’, Capital and Class, 7(2), 659-677.

Educational Institute of Scotland. (2021) Anti-racist policy guidelines. Web.

Gentles, S. J. et al. (2016) Reviewing the research methods literature: principles and strategies illustrated by a systematic overview of sampling in qualitative research. Systematic Reviews, 5(172), pp. 1-12.

Kara, H. (2016) Creative research methods in the social sciences: a practical guide. New York, NY: Policy Press.

Keating, A. (2021) ‘Mobility for me but not for others: the contradictory cosmopolitan practices of contemporary white British youth’, Sociology, 4(2), pp. 1-11.

Loftsdóttir, K. (2021) ‘An alternative world: a perspective from the North on racism and migration’, Race and Class, 62(4), pp. 38-52.

Nurein, S. A. and Iqbal, H. (2021) ‘Identifying a space for young black Muslim women in contemporary Britain’, Ethnicities, 7(2), pp. 128-139.

Patten, M. L. and Newhart, M. (2017) Understanding research methods: an overview of the essentials. London: Taylor and Francis.

Robson, C. and McCartan, K. (2016) Real-world research. 4th edn. London: Wiley.

Sekaran, U. and Bougie, R. (2016) Research methods for business: a skill-building approach. 7th edn. London: John Wiley and Sons.

Sharma, G. et al. (2021) ‘A paradox approach to societal tensions during the pandemic crisis’, Journal of Management Inquiry, 30(2), pp. 121-137.

Stephen J. B. (1993) ‘What is policy? Texts, trajectories and toolboxes’, The Australian Journal of Education Studies, 13(2), pp. 10-17.

Stokes, P. (2017) Research methods. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Strand, S. and Lindorff, A. (2021) ‘Ethnic disproportionality in the identification of high-incidence special educational needs: a national longitudinal study ages 5 to 11’, Exceptional Children, 87(3), pp. 344-368.

UK Commission for Racial Equality. (2016) Framework for a race equality policy for schools. Web.

Welcomer, S. A., Haggerty, M. E. and Sama, L. M. (2021) ‘Management education in a “post-truth” world: critical theory’s contribution to addressing disruptions to learning and communication’, Journal of Management Education. 9(2), pp. 320-345.

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