GTC launches new equality scheme
Tue, 10 Apr 2007 01:00:00
The General Teaching Council for England (GTC) has today published new plans for promoting equality through all its work. The GTC’s Equality and Diversity Scheme has been launched to coincide with the new Gender Equality Duty coming in to force in this month and shows how the GTC will ensure equality of opportunity as an employer and in working with teachers and others.
Judy Moorhouse, Chair of the GTC, welcomed the scheme:
'Equality of opportunity has always been a high priority for Council Members. The first GTC equality scheme, which focused on race equality, was published in 2002 and in 2005 we launched our Disabled Teacher Taskforce to tackle the barriers to disabled people joining and progressing through the teaching profession. We are delighted now to be building on this work – not simply to address our legal responsibilities, but to do everything we can to ensure fairness and equal treatment in all we do.'
Keith Bartley, Chief Executive of the GTC, commented further:
'We know from our work with teachers that equality is high in their priorities. Our Achieve network supports teachers promoting race equality in schools; we are currently working with other national organisations to develop a joint approach to supporting schools to meet the requirements of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act and we will now be taking a similar approach to the new disability and gender duties. The education community must ensure that schools and teachers get the support they need to ensure all pupils have the opportunity to reach their potential.'
The Scheme was approved by Council members at their March Council meeting (28 March 2007), and has been introduced to recognise additional responsibilities relating to gender equality arising from the Equality Act 2006 and to disability equality from the Disability Discrimination Act 2005. The Scheme sets out how the GTC will fulfil its duties under the race, disability and gender equality duties through the services it provides, and how as an employer the GTC will ensure that it is acting according to equality requirements relating to race, disability, gender, sexual orientation, age and religion or belief. The GTC will approach equalities issues positively and proactively, rather than simply in the spirit of meeting the legislative requirements.
The Scheme received an overwhelmingly positive response from a widespread consultation carried out by the GTC among national education organisations, Council members and teachers.
The GTC has already begun to implement actions across six areas; registration, regulation, its statutory duty to advise government, finance and administration, communications and employment. These include further improvements to ethnicity and disability data held on the GTC register of qualified teachers, advising government and others on better support for schools to meet their own responsibilities under the equality duties and improving accessibility to the GTC website. The GTC also wants to encourage wider public access to information about the organisation, for example through the addition of new pages for parents, launched last month.
