Teaching equality

Does awareness training create the right environment for recruiting a workforce from varied racial, religious and ability backgrounds, or does having such a workforce make awareness training relevant?

When it comes to changing attitudes, awareness training is largely a waste of time. It doesn’t matter how interesting the material, how engaging the facilitator or how persuasive the arguments - people rarely change their attitudes to race, gender, disability, sexuality, faith or age as a result of a two-day course.

A sympathetic audience will no doubt gain some insights and be more sensitive to some situations. However, it’s typical for some staff to come away from such a course and dismiss large sections of it because ‘we don’t have any black staff in our team/office and there are no ethnic minority communities in our locality’. Another typical response: ‘I still don’t know enough about Islam to feel confident about working with the Muslim community. Isn’t it better to leave this to those who speak the language and are from the same culture?’

This misses the point of awareness training, which aims to encourage participants to see people as individuals, to recognise stereotypes and challenge myths irrespective of whether the issue is race, faith, sexuality or disability.

But this response does highlight the importance of relevance to changing attitudes. It is much harder to be wary of the physical or behvioural differences of people with a learning disability once they have a name and a personality: ‘Oh yes well, Andrew is different.’

You could put staff through weeks of awareness training about disability, you could present statistics and case examples, explain the duties of an employer under human rights legislation, you could make a powerful moral case for treating people fairly, but what would change people’s views is working alongside people like ‘Andrew’.

The implications of this for organisations with mixed workforces will be more effective in challenging and changing attitudes than any awareness training.

Of course, the Andrews of this world need to be supported in the work environment, not just thrown in on the assumption that simply being there will change things for the better. But it will make any subsequent awareness training both more relevant and more effective.

Blair McPherson is director of community services at Lancashire County Council, and the author of Unlearning Management

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