Improving equality, diversity and inclusion in our qualifications – an update

Published: Wednesday 27 Oct 2021

It’s almost a year since we published our commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion in our qualifications, so we wanted to update you on our progress.

Over the past year, we’ve carried out a comprehensive review of equality, diversity and inclusion across all our qualifications to look at how they can best represent the diversity of knowledge and human experience we value – as well as reflecting all the different communities of students we serve.

We know we don’t have all the answers ourselves, and that it’s really important to engage with, and learn from, expert stakeholders. So our subject experts have been working with a wide range of people and organisations. These include teachers, examiners, other education experts and many different equality, diversity and inclusion specialists.

We’re continuing to work with stakeholders and have established an equality, diversity and inclusion expert group to consider representation in the curriculum and assessment – and to ensure that decisions are informed by people who represent the full diversity of society.

We’ve started making some changes to our qualifications. You might have already seen how we’ve added Marcus Rashford’s campaigning to our GCSE Media Studies course – and we’re also choosing a more diverse range of artists for our preliminary material in Art and Design.

We’ll soon be announcing some exciting changes to our Drama qualifications too.

We’ll be making more changes to our qualifications over the coming months and years. We don’t want to rush this as it’s important to make sure that the changes we make truly lead to greater equality, diversity and inclusion, are right for teachers and students and are accessible to all.

We also know that changing the content of our qualifications won’t create greater equality, diversity and inclusion in the curriculum by itself. That’s why we’re going beyond that and working on a range of other initiatives, including:

• using gender-neutral language in future exam papers and mark schemes
• setting up teacher forums to explore equality, diversity and inclusion with subject teachers
• reviewing and improving our resources to support the teaching of diverse themes and issues
• training for the staff and examiners who work on our qualifications
• using our research expertise to gain a deep understanding of the issues and inform our action.

Throughout November we’ll be publishing a series of blogs from our subject experts, where they’ll be telling you more about all the work they’re doing in this important area.

See all updates