For us at Kaplan, embracing, celebrating, and encouraging diversity is extremely important for our values. Whether this relates to accounting and finance professionals, the workplace, or in the classroom - we want everyone to feel welcome.
Founded on the principles of education for all, our mission to provide equal access to education and opportunities to people of all backgrounds is deeply rooted in everything we do. This is why we’re delighted to have been recognised for several awards due to our dedication to promoting equality, diversity and inclusivity (EDI).
In just the first half of 2024, we are finalists or winners of the following awards relating to our efforts when championing EDI:
- PQ Magazine Awards 2024 - Winner of Private Sector College of the Year
- Multicultural Apprenticeship Awards 2024 - Finalist for Learning Provider of the Year (winners to be announced in November 2024)
- AAT Awards 2024 - Finalist for Large Training Provider of the Year
- FE Week and AELP AAC Apprenticeship Awards 2024 - Finalist for Apprenticeship Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Provider Recognition Award.
“The much-coveted Private Sector College of the Year award went to Kaplan, who ensures ‘the success of every learner is at the heart of our business. “
Promoting diversity in the finance sector - what does this mean?
In the UK, the accounting and finance industry has traditionally needed more diversity. This has been especially noticeable in senior roles. Whilst we can’t fix this on our own, we are in a position where we can help challenge those traditions.
We actively work to champion EDI by setting targets to drive positive change. We’re committed to developing a learning community that is fully inclusive by recruiting, retaining and meeting the needs of all learners and candidates from across all sectors of society. From our early patronage of the Multicultural Apprenticeship Alliance to our dedicated inclusion team and programme content on ‘Embracing our Diversity,’ every learner matters to us.
Providing ‘education for all’
No two learners are the same. Some of our learners come to us from more disadvantaged backgrounds, influenced by their home life, education, the discrimination they’ve faced, and other factors.
When it comes to studying, each of our learners will have a way of learning or working that is suitable for them. So we must appreciate everyone’s differences, and start by understanding what needs must be met. By collecting and analysing the EDI data of our learner population, we are continuing to become more inclusive and keep EDI at the forefront of our work.
“It’s not enough to simply offer the same things to every student, not least as not everyone starts from the same place.”
Acknowledging how the lack of diversity can be approached
We’ve taken several approaches at Kaplan to promote and improve EDI. We hope that this encourages others to embrace diversity, and strengthens the feelings of safety and security when training with us.
Here are just five of the ways we have worked to improve equality, diversity and inclusion for our learners:
1. Inclusive experiences
We consider how to make our centres even more inclusive, including increasing reflection spaces for prayer, providing prayer mats, and addressing period poverty through discretely provided sanitary products. We also have templates for our online courses to improve accessibility, and we continue to work on creating engaging online content that is accessible to all learners.
Through a linguistic diversity policy, we ensure our communications and content are inclusive.
2. Improving outcomes
We are continuing our mission for equity in education and outcomes. As part of this, we launched a personal life-coaching programme for apprentices and recruited two coaches to pilot this. This involves free life-coaching for apprentices from disadvantaged postcode areas, and over 24s.
3. Communication, representation, and raising awareness
Our learners told us: “you can’t be what you can’t see.” Therefore, visibility is a huge part of our journey.
We consulted our interns through the 10,000 Black Interns initiative for their input on our messaging to reflect a representative community. Using their feedback, we adjusted our information and social media.
When it comes to representation, it is often the learners’ voices that have the most power. We aim to champion the achievements of diverse apprentices as role models and encourage multicultural apprentices to speak at events. We’ve also produced an EDI promotional video, available to watch on the Equality, diversity, and inclusion page and produced several blog articles, email campaigns, podcast episodes, and episodes of our new YouTube web series, Career Goals, that refer to the topic of EDI.
4. Internships and mentoring
Understanding the importance of positive early initiatives, we have partnered with initiatives, charities and organisations such as Career Ready, Multicultural Apprenticeship Alliance, 10,000 Black Interns, RefuAid, and Rareqol to offer internship and mentoring programmes.
5. Client engagement
We work closely with inclusivity charities to expand diverse recruitment through regular ‘best practice’ employer roundtables. Examples of the topics discussed include:
- embedding EDI strategy through recruitment and retention
- supporting older learners
- working with faith groups
- supporting neuro-diversity in apprentices and learners.
By encouraging and informing clients, together we can better support their entire organisations. In addition to this, resources have been created to support and educate SME line managers about where learners may need additional learning support in the workplace.
We’re here to support you
If you’re a learner and have any thoughts about how we can work better and be more inclusive, please get in touch. You can also contact edi@kaplan.co.uk if you need any support.