CLC’s People and Skills Network HE Guidance Report Published

A NEW guidance report examining the diversity of students entering higher education to study construction-related subjects has been published by the Construction Leadership Council (CLC).

The report titled CLC Skills Plan Priority 2: Routes into Industry – HE concludes “much still needs to be done” to attract women and ethnic minorities.

HE Guidance Report

The CLC’s People and Skills Network published the report to provide guidance for higher education (HE) providers to attract and support a diverse and inclusive student body.

The report finds that HE and the Office for Students have had a long-standing commitment to attracting a diverse student body and much investment has gone into supporting HE students through a series of initiatives. There has been detailed monitoring of the outcomes and ambitious target setting.

However, attracting and supporting HE construction students involves stubborn key challenges, such as gender parity and attracting ethnic minorities, with opportunities for further action.

The report compares current HE data on protected characteristics with that collected a decade ago. While there was little change in the gender balance of entrants – e.g. 83% of engineering, technology and computing entrants are male, compared to 86% a decade ago – other characteristics such as disability, family deprivation, and care leavers have all seen some improvement.

Specific data on construction courses is hard to come by, the report notes. HE providers consider the data confidential and the CLC agrees that such data could “potentially be dangerous and lead to misinterpretations and bad publicity should they be read out of context. It could create an opportunity for malicious manipulating of figures by not so well intended members of the press for example”.

To tackle barriers facing women and ethnic minorities and others, the report makes recommendation aimed at:

• Schools (e.g., embedding diversity and inclusion into the construction curriculum);
• Universities (e.g., making school -level data available to allow school to take targeted action); and
• External Stakeholders (e.g., professional bodies helping to drive changes through their accreditation process).

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