Professor Rachel Oliver FREng, Chair of the Academy’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Committee, reflects on the first four years of the Academy’s Diversity Impact Programme to inspire change in university engineering departments so all students succeed and engineers from diverse backgrounds continue to enhance the profession.
It seems appropriate, at the start of UK Black History Month, to pause and reflect on an Academy EDI programme that was set up to create more inclusive cultures at a particularly critical stage of training for aspiring engineering who are at university.
The Academy has a responsibility to provide progressive leadership for engineering and technology, and EDI is central to this. We are all acutely aware of the global and societal challenges facing us today, from climate change to the implications of artificial intelligence. To tackle these challenges, we need increasingly innovative—and fair—solutions, and engineering is uniquely placed to respond.
But to innovate effectively and ensure fairness in engineering outcomes, the profession must evolve to become more equitable, diverse and inclusive. Fundamentally, teams that better reflect our society, in all its diversity, make better business decisions and do better engineering.
Unfortunately, the inequality of lived experience and outcomes for engineering students and graduates from underrepresented groups is longstanding in the UK and will persist if we do not work collectively to drive positive change.
Launched in October 2021 with funding from what was then the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (now DSIT), the Diversity Impact Programme aims to inspire change in university engineering departments so that all students succeed and the profession benefits from the unique perspectives and experiences of engineers from diverse backgrounds.
At the time, Academy CEO Dr Hayaatun Sillem CBE, said: “It is vital that we seek innovative and creative ways to accelerate the pace of change rather than accepting that incremental improvement is all that is possible”, and noted that although there was extensive evidence supporting the benefits of diverse teams working in inclusive cultures, there was still a way to go in understanding how to deliver the culture of inclusion that unlocks the power of diversity.
Six months later, the programme awarded its first 11 grants of up to £100k each to universities from across the UK with ideas about how to overcome their own particular diversity challenges. Interventions proposed varied from mentoring and work-based projects to closing attainment gaps and the development of peer networks. Among the 11 projects in this first cohort were those that focused on socioeconomic background and neurodiversity—two areas that are underserved by research and where available data suggests career progression and sense of belonging within engineering is weak. Several projects explored the impact an inclusive culture can have on the outcomes of students from diverse and underrepresented groups; others focused specifically on disability, gender, race and ethnicity.
Over the past four years, we have awarded almost two million pounds in grants to 20 universities, for 22 projects that address unequal outcomes experienced by students from underrepresented groups. As many as 2,700 students have benefited, and among the positive outcomes reported by participating universities are:
- significantly increased student confidence and leadership skills;
- improved academic attainment through targeted tutoring—sometimes resulting in dramatic test score improvements;
- more inclusive environments that enhance a sense of belonging, evidenced by high engagement rates and positive satisfaction scores;
- more robust connections between academia and industry, equipping students with both practical skills and real-world experience.
A key strength across the projects is their emphasis on legacy and sustainability and after funding the large-scale projects, we took a new tack and sought to maximise their impact and how they could be replicated in other settings.
We awarded additional funding to previously awarded universities to produce ‘how-to’ guides on delivering their interventions so that their insights and experience can be shared across the HE community and we can work collectively to drive positive change. These are now available to view via a dedicated page on the Academy’s website, and I would encourage anyone in higher education, at any level, to investigate these to see if there are approaches with promise for tackling local equity, diversity and inclusion challenges.
I am also pleased to report that not only have all those participating in the Diversity Impact Programme demonstrated a commitment to transformative change, but they have joined and are contributing to an engaged community of practice that is facilitating learning among awardees, with aspirations to extend this across the wider engineering higher education sector.
Of course, it is fantastic to be able to report on the success of programmes like this, but it is also important to share the challenges the programme has faced—delays due to organisational issues, scheduling conflicts and recruitment hurdles. All these underscored where there was room for improvement in planning, timings and resourcing.
I am pleased to say that the Academy is applying an engineering mindset to these problems and is making adjustments to the programme. Next year we plan to put out a new call for grant proposals that we believe will lead to the sort of long-term systemic change needed for engineering departments to embed EDI in their culture and practice.
We will provide multi-year funding for project proposals that focus on the institution more than on the student intake, build in learning and sharing of good practice, and introduce more consistency in identifying and measuring outputs and outcomes—the requirements for the projects will include clearer expectations for monitoring and evaluation.
Overall, the lessons and insight gained from the first four years of the Diversity Impact Programme have helped to develop a promising roadmap for scaling up successful interventions. The approach taken in the development of this programme is one that the Academy hopes to adopt more widely under the auspices of the Skills Centre , a new Academy initiative to develop disruptive solutions to longstanding and growing shortfalls in the UK’s national engineering skills capacity. Over the coming months, the Academy will be sharing news of the Skill Centre’s planned multifaceted approach to collaborating with partners across the profession to help build a world-leading engineering skills base and engineering community fit for the future.
More detail about each project funded by the Diversity Impact Programme can be found on the Academy’s website. The awardees how-to guides are published today.