Black Lives Matter News

A message of solidarity.

Date: 02 June 2020

London Met stands in solidarity with the Black community and everyone facing inequality, racism and oppression. We actively oppose racism and aspire to our community being one where everyone feels welcome, valued and respected. Black Lives Matter.

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Student Voice

This is not Black people's fight alone. It's a fight for all of us by Adebukola Fadipe (Journalism, Film and Television Studies BA)

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How we're addressing racial inequality within our University

• We’re working to change the racial diversity of our Board of Governors.
• We provide mandatory and continual inclusive leadership training for all senior managers, which includes training on understanding institutional racism.
• We’ve implemented the recommendations of the McGregor-Smith Race in the Workplace Review in relation to recruitment and selection, including rejecting non-diverse shortlists, requiring all candidates to submit a diversity statement and detailing their previous work in inclusion.
• We’ve established a Centre for Equity within the Vice-Chancellor’s Office to drive change across our institution.
• We’ve created a senior leadership role with responsibility for addressing differential student outcomes and also addressing inequality amongst our staffing group. The post holder is an unapologetic anti-racism academic activist.
• We’ve appointed a Race Equity Officer who joins us in July to drive a progressive campaign focusing on ensuring an inclusive workplace culture for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic staff and that staff representation reflects the racial diversity of London.
• We're working to significantly reduce the degree-awarding gap for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic students, as well as the gap relating progression to highly-skilled employment or further study through improved staff training, curriculum change and student partnership working.
• We’ve adopted a new curriculum strategy, the Education for Social Justice Framework, developed with students, which delivers an inclusive curriculum and will support addressing the degree-awarding gap. It ensures critical race theory will be embedded into all our degrees.
• We’re providing culturally appropriate counselling for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic students.
• Over the next few weeks we are holding a series of Openspace webinars for our Black students to speak about their experiences of trauma and the psychological violence caused by social media in a space of safety.
• As part of our University strategy we will meet relevant standards in relation to the Race Equality Charter to facilitate diversity in our community and ensure that everyone at London Met is valued and included.

These are just some of the highlights. There is more in the pipeline and we will not stop until we deliver racial justice for our community.