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Office of the President and Provost (Equality, Diversity & Inclusion)

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Equity and Inclusion Plan 2020-21

NB. A new EDI Strategy will be developed to link to UCL Strategic Plan 2022-27 once launched.

Vision

We aim to acknowledge, understand, and tackle structural inequities and unjust social power imbalances that affect our communities across the institution. This means recognising how we got here and what needs to be done to ensure equity, inclusion and belonging for those who are not systemically privileged by our society.

Introduction
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In the 2020-21 academic year, everyone at UCL will continue to be affected by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the measures that UCL is having to take in response to it, but each person is affected differently. For many in the UCL community, the detrimental impact of the pandemic will be situational, marginal, and temporary. For others, the disadvantage caused by COVID-19 is being layered on top of existing structural and historical inequalities; it may be multi-dimensional and cumulative.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a high level of uncertainty for our students and staff and UCL has had to rapidly alter how we deliver education, undertake research and keep the university operating smoothly, with more of our community now unavoidably dispersed globally across different continents and time-zones and working in many varied circumstances.

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This plan sets out the institutional equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) priorities for 2020-21. It maintains and adapts long-term UCL strategies for advancing equity and inclusion while also proactively working to ensure that marginalised and already disadvantaged members of the UCL community are not further challenged by the pandemic. It aims to help us focus on what is important in this period of rapid change.

An overarching theme that is foremost in this plan is responding to and supporting the calls for change from our students and staff as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. We take incredibly seriously our responsibility to be race-conscious, anti-racist and to challenge anti-blackness and we will put in financial resources to support this work. 

Due to the expansive remit of the EDI agenda, the plan should not be seen as an exhaustive list of aims but rather as an umbrella plan to complement other current strategies and initiatives, building on what already exists and guiding what we need to do differently or in an enhanced way over 12 months.