Embracing the vibrant spirit of Pride Month!

As a charity that aims to provide equal opportunities for all young people, we want to champion equity in education. With every tutoring session, and all our practices, we aim to create a supportive space where everyone can thrive and be their authentic selves. In this article, we want to share how we’re supporting Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (ED&I) for our tutors, tutees, and core staff team during Pride Month and throughout the year.

For our tutors and learners

To promote ED&I in tuition, we’ve curated some English, Maths, and Science lesson packs and resources that highlight examples of queer figures in core subjects. Moreover, we’ve recently launched our Literature Lit Up programme for Secondary schools, a series of KS3 English Literature sessions that develops cross-curricular literacy and encourages reading for pleasure, covering texts from a diverse range of authors, cultures, and backgrounds. If you’re a Tutor Trust tutor looking to plan your next sessions, you can access all the above, plus more in our ED&I resource bank, on Thinqi today.

For our core staff team

As a reflective organisation, we’re always seeking opportunities to improve our practices. In the charity’s core staff team, Will Simms, our University Partnerships Manager, has led a social justice-themed reading group. Every fortnight, a host of colleagues meet to discuss a range of texts concerning social justice to better understand our aims as an organisation and to ensure we live up to our values. This work runs in tandem with our Poverty and Place slow-research project, with academic partners at The University of Manchester. For Will, “texts concerning LGBTQIA+ history and struggles have been a core aspect of our reading as we strive to ensure an inclusive workspace for all employees”.

In addition to our reading group that focuses on more academic texts, we’ve launched a book club where our colleagues come together monthly to discuss a diverse range of books. To celebrate Pride Month, our book club asked the Queer Lit bookshop down the road from our Manchester office to ask for recommendations for our monthly read. We chose ‘On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous’ by Ocean Vuong. We supported the local, independent business by flocking to buy our own copies.

Our commitment to ED&I

We’re always open to suggestions on furthering our ED&I initiatives, to make our organisation more inclusive and accessible to all. You can always put forward your feedback and suggestions by getting in touch with Ellie Cross, our Tutor Engagement Manager. We’ll then discuss your comments in our internal ED&I group.

Being inclusive is a core value of our charity, and our commitment to ED&I is not restricted to a single month: it runs through everything that we do.