Global Education Week: Three WPG projects supporting equity in education

This week, it’s Global Education Week 2024 – a chance for everyone to come together and engage in activities or reflection about how their work can contribute to #sustainability and #inclusion. Global Education Week is organised by the North-South Centre of the Council of Europe, together with the Global Education Network. 

Global Education Week 2024 offers a unique opportunity for occupational psychologists to engage with international perspectives on education, which are directly relevant to our field’s work on equality, diversity and inclusion within educational and professional settings. 

Occupational psychologists think about performance and well-being in the workplace but also about the pathways that lead individuals into work. A core focus of Global Education Week are the social, economic, and cultural factors that influence educational attainment: this provides an important source of insight for business psychologists to better understand how these factors continue to impact a person’s experience at work. We wanted to highlight three different WPG projects, all with a common goal to support fairer, more equitable educational and occupational outcomes.

Exploring strategies to widen access to medical training in the UK

An important UK government policy is to widen access to medical training, supporting the future medical workforce to better represent the communities it serves. 

WPG have partnered with NHS England to explore the different strategies UK medical schools have implemented to achieve this.  Our ongoing research partnership has led to:

• Development of an agreed evaluation framework that can be used to measure the success of different policies or practices designed to widen access to medical training
• Exploration of the strategies implemented by six new UK medical schools to support widening access
• Consideration of the organisation or contextual characteristics that help or hinder medical schools in achieving widening access goals, with learnings that are applicable beyond medicine to other high stakes settings.

Understanding factors that reduce differences in performance during medical training

In addition to considering entry into medical training, we’ve also worked with the General Medical Council in the UK to explore the reasons for differential attainment (DA): the differences in performance across different demographic groups during medical training. We conducted a series of research projects to better understand how to accurately measure DA, what factors might be causing DA, and how medical training providers can take steps to ensure all individuals can achieve their full potential. We identified 10 ‘success factors’ that support more equal attainment across groups in training, which translate directly to ways that people can be supported to achieve in their work.

Supporting ethnic minority candidates through Police recruitment and promotion

Our research to facilitate inclusion and equity at work has also supported other high-stakes occupations, such as policing. We worked with the College of Policing to research factors associated with motivations and opportunity that might impact the success of applicants going through recruitment or promotion processes, particularly those from certain ethnic groups. A practical toolkit was developed containing insights from the research: this toolkit was designed to help the College of Policing and local Forces provide standardised professional support in an accessible way for all applicants, supporting them in meeting strategic goals about workforce diversity outlined in the 2019 Police Uplift Programme.

We’re proud to say that each of these pieces of work were recognized by our business psychology peers at the Association for Business Psychology as examples of excellence in occupational psychology. We believe business psychologists can contribute a huge amount to support sustainable inclusion in education and work, across a wide variety of professions and job roles.

Interested in learning more about these projects? Please get in touch.