If you walk around Bradford, you will see billboards featuring photographs taken by some of our English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) students aged between 16 and 18. These beautiful and thought-provoking pictures are part of the Through Our Lens project, in which photographer Carolyn Mendelsohn collaborated with teenagers across the district to capture images of their lives in lockdown.

The achievements of our black, Asian and/or minority ethnic (BAME) students and staff are clear for all to see. We serve a young, vibrant and multicultural area that is changing all the time. In 2019 Bradford was named by PwC and think tank Demos as the UK’s most improved city in terms of job growth, skills and work-life balance. In January, it was also named the second most entrepreneurial city in the UK. We want every student to have the chance to be part of the city’s future with no barriers to achieving their potential.

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To help us meet this objective, there are lots of actions we are taking: embedding equality into our curriculum activities, tutorials and training; engaging staff and students in community support activities; and providing multi-faith spaces.

Championing equality and diversity in colleges

Throughout the year, we hold a programme of student-led activity that recognises and celebrates our diverse community. In October 2020, we put in place activities focused around Black History Month and National Hate Crime Awareness Week, including online workshops, screenings and talks by external speakers and campaigners.

The aim of this was to promote positive conversations and debates among students and staff about the changes they could make in their daily lives to create a safer and more equal world. As a result of this activity, the student support services team was shortlisted for the Worldskills UK Diversity and Inclusion Heroes Awards in January.

The team is devoted to ensuring that the work, which includes posters, leaflets and online resources for students, represents everybody and, in their words, “nobody ever feels excluded.”

In January Marvina Newton, campaigner and co-founder of Black Lives Matter Leeds, was elected president of the Bradford College Students’ Union. Marvina has urged everyone at the college to use their unique skills to share the message around racial quality and social justice. As she said during an excellent talk on Black Lives Matter in October: “If you want to make a change, we can do this together.”

Marvina makes an important point about promoting equality: everybody has a part to play. Our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Committee monitors and reports on all matters concerning EDI relating to students, curriculum, staffing, the college environment and external community relations.

We recognise that we can always do better to ensure equality for all. We constantly monitor the achievement rates of our students to make sure everyone from every ethnic group has equal opportunity to succeed. To make sure our workforce reflects the diversity of the student body, we seek to improve our recruitment and talent processes so there are no barriers to promotion and development.

Over the past year, a group of refugees have used skills they were taught by Bradford College to support some of the most vulnerable members of the community. As part of the Welcome Café project, the students gained certificates to run their own catering businesses and ran a popular café in the city.

Unfortunately, Covid meant that the café could no longer serve customers at the premises. However, the students volunteered throughout lockdown to design nutritious meals, which were provided to the city’s asylum seekers, refugees and other vulnerable people. With the college’s support, they were able to create better futures for themselves and others, too. This highlights one of the reasons why it is so important to support BAME students from all backgrounds: everybody in the community benefits.

Chris Webb is chief executive of Bradford College