At The Harpur Trust we understand the powerful impact we have on our communities, and we are committed to playing a role in helping Bedford to become, in the words of our vision, a community where everyone can thrive.
Our commitment to inclusion
We have made a public commitment to address issues of exclusion, where people can be disadvantaged because of their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, disability, or for any other aspect of their identity or circumstances. Our Board of Trustees is committed to hold itself to account to identify and tackle any biased, inequitable or preferential treatment.
We created our long-term strategy, Together for Bedford, through consultation and learning from members of our different communities in Bedford, as well as from a range of stakeholders, staff and pupils. This led us to create the Accelerator Programme, which aims to accelerate the attainment of underserved children aged 0-11, and to support the creation of Bedford Giving which aims to create a brighter future for our next generation, based on a shared understanding of the needs of children and young people in Bedford.
Our approach to inclusion issues is to seek the input of our communities to identify where we need to improve, where we are strong and where we need to focus to improve.
As part of this, we run staff surveys with Truthsayers, who have developed an innovative approach that aims to help us really understand colleague attitudes. Some schools also run pupil inclusion surveys, undertaken by a company called Flair.
Collectively, this feedback enables each school and the Harpur Trust Office to keep updated plans to address diversity and inclusion issues. Our schools have each nominated Inclusion Leads, who help coordinate all the diversity and inclusion related activities in our schools, share knowledge and support each other in this area.
A priority for development has been our governance, which we have reviewed. We have streamlined and clarified the role of trustees to make it easier for a wider range of people to join our governance, and we now recruit all our new trustees and committee members openly and transparently via public advertisement, social media and we may use the support of an external agency.
Our Board and committee development priorities include ensuring that all members feel as included as possible, and increasing the gender diversity of our governance.
An inclusion initiative is never complete. Although the knowledge we have gathered to date found significant strengths, we continue to identify gaps where we need to focus our energies and we expect to continue to find ways we need to improve into the future. We are always open to feedback on how we can improve further from all our communities.
We will continue to focus on inclusion in all we do so that we can be welcoming to all and truly reflective of the communities we serve.
