This weeks seminar will focus on EDI related issues around socio-economic background and how this impacts access to further education. In particular, we will focus on how we can change the pipeline to make university education and academia in general more inclusive to different backgrounds. This includes addressing intersectional factors such as race, ethnicity and disability. We will be joined by two external speakers, Alex Whitton, CEO of Universify Education, a charity that supports students from non-selective state schools to achieve their potential in further education, and Prof Gail Preston, who has been involved in a recent study of “Inequalities in Doctoral Study in the Life Sciences” and chairs the management group of the Oxford UNIQ+ access programme that supports people from under-represented backgrounds into postgraduate study.

The session will consist of two short talks and then plenty of time for open conversation. We welcome you to use this as an opportunity to talk about how these issues have affected you personally, if that is something you would like to share. Further we hope to identify specific actions we can take or support to address issues of under-representation and access across the pipeline.