The year 2019 marks 20 years since the publication of the Macpherson report (1999). The Macpherson report was published as a result of an inquiry on the tragic murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. Macpherson defined institutional racism as follows:

The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.

Current scholarship on race in UK higher education consistently highlights the pervasiveness of institutional racism, which persists despite the presence of equality and diversity policies and the 2010 Equalities Act. Institutional racism works in overt and covert ways. More...

To put this section in the context of my background, I am a white employee of a UK university. In 2018, I led the University’s Race Equality Charter mark preparations, and I lead the development and delivery of our education strategy, which has a reduction of the gap in award outcomes between BME and white students as a primary goal. More...

As the dust settles on this year’s undergraduate recruitment round, vice-chancellors, directors of recruitment and finance directos will be reflecting on how many students their institution has been able to attract. Since the marketisation in England, brought about by the reforms introduced for the 2012/13 academic year, most universities have been aiming to grow or at least maintain their existing numbers. Most analysis and comment has therefore been about volume – at the sector level and for individual universities. More...