Gender Awareness Training and The LEP Good Practice Guidelines

Gender Awareness Training

As part of the commitment to the LEP, all our fieldworkers were required to attend UKRC Gender awareness training. This was also offered to colleagues in academia and our partner organisations. This promoted understanding of the issues affecting women and girls in STEM and the positive actions that can be taken to address them.

The LEP fieldworkers and academics has developed a set of Gender & Cultural Guidelines to help focus on their outreach work on the project. These Guidelines were adopted as part of the review process called "DRIVE" to ensure that their work was gender and culturally inclusive.

The LEP Good Practice Guidelines

The following 10 good practice guidelines have emerged over the first two and a half years of the project: 

1. Plan and advertise activities in schools at least one term in advance of schools to sign up: have a modest high quality menu of activties for the schools to choose from. 

2. Aim to achieve a differentiated learning outcome for every participant. 

3. Have a progression curriculum for the year and between years. Each interaction should build on the last and prepare for the next. Target students carefully so those with capacity for higher education and engagement with STEM receive the maximum number of interactions. 

4. Embed the schools programme within an engineering higher education department so that students and academic staff interact regularly. 

5. Use appropriate (black, minority, ethnic (BME) and female) role models for every interaction. 

6.Train every staff member in equality and inclusion (E&I).  Have high expectations for the E&I attributes of every interaction and insist that these expectations are met. 

7. Use funding in higher education departments to accelerate the pace of change that would happen anyway in ideal conditions: look for locally generated solutions to local problems. 

8.Improve the university student experience through evolution of existing courses and through new curricula. 

9. Engage with employers and be responsive to their needs. 

10. Utilise LEP resources specifically and selectively, directly targeting its audiences: women, BME students and students from lower socio-economic groups.

To see practical examples of these guidelines, gender awareness training and the DRIVE process, please click here.

The following case studies are also supporting these guidelines and can be downloaded at the end of this page.

• Gender and Cultural awareness in engineering outreach - an approach to changing perceptions
• Getting girls into engineering ..... a practical guide

Academic colleagues at LSBU also developed a similar set of guidelines to promote the delivery of inclusive engineering teaching and learning. They have produced the following paper which is a wonderful example of these guidelines and can be downloaded from here.

• Delivering Inclusive Engineering: A practical tool to promote best practice when developing and enhancing engineering courses

The evaluation of this approach can be found on LEP Evaluation Report December 2009 - Pages 19-20 and LEP Evaluation Report  Appendices - Appendix H.