Labour Day: celebrating workers, strengthening inclusion and embedding EDI

Earlier this week was the early May bank holiday. For many, this is Labour Day - a moment to celebrate workers’ rights, recognise the value of labour and reflect on the conditions that enable people to thrive at work. It’s also a timely reminder that fairness and inclusion don’t happen by accident; they are created through choices, structures, and everyday practice.

Since launching our 2024-2030 strategy, EAUC has committed to centring social justice, equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in everything we do. This is not an “add-on” to our work: it is fundamental to our purpose, our values, and the impact we want to have across post-16 education.

Moving beyond “working groups” to embedding EDI into how we operate

We are keen to ensure EDI work is never side-lined or treated as separate from our core priorities. With that in mind, we disbanded our EDI working group. Instead, we are embedding EDI across our formal structures including board meetings, team meetings, staff objectives, and appraisal processes.

We track and report progress on EDI initiatives through regular staff and board updates, participation in the and transparent sharing of both progress and setbacks. This is important because EDI requires sustained attention and accountability, not just good intentions or tokenistic commitments.

And we’re proud of our results. Last year, all respondents (and we achieved a 100% response rate) expressed at least some sense of belonging, with 87% saying the statement was ‘mostly’ or ‘very much’ like them. Including those who responded ‘somewhat like me’, 100% reported some level of belonging. But we’re not resting on our laurels – there’s lots of areas where we know, and the team tell us, there’s room for improvement.

Building EDI capability across our team

Embedding EDI into structures only works if people feel confident and supported to deliver it in practice. That’s why we’re investing in ongoing learning and development for our staff team, strengthening shared understanding, building skills, and creating space for reflection and challenge. This includes training that helps us improve inclusive practice in recruitment, line management, communications, programme design and partnership working, and discussion spaces where we talk about what we’ve learned and how we can change our working practices so EDI is something we actively deliver rather than simply reference.

Setting expectations for inclusion in our spaces

Events are a core part of how we convene, support, and connect the sustainability community. To help ensure our events are welcoming, safe and accessible, we introduced a clear code of conduct for delegates and participants. This makes explicit what we expect from everyone attending, and reinforces our commitment to creating inclusive environments for all. We also work with venues to ensure that we’ve got the spaces people need – for health, faith, caring or neurodiversity reasons – so everyone can participate. We’ve also activated accessibility functions on the platforms we use for our online meetings, and are working to make our website accessible too.

Inclusive recruitment, and being honest about where we are

We want our team to be a diverse and representative one. We are committed to this and therefore when we recruit, we particularly encourage applications from people who are currently under-represented. We have an opt-in guaranteed interview scheme for candidates from these under-represented groups, where they meet the essential criteria for the role.

This is part of our wider approach to inclusive recruitment: reducing barriers, increasing transparency and making it clear that we want people from marginalised groups to see EAUC as a place where they can belong and progress.

But recruitment is only part of the picture.

Progression and opportunity

One of the clearest areas for improvement identified through our RACE Report relates to progression. Some colleagues told us they have felt overlooked for promotion, or that they may need to leave EAUC to progress their careers.

In a small organisation, there are structural challenges: we have a relatively flat structure, limited management layers, and fewer opportunities for formal promotion than larger institutions. But we are clear that this cannot become a barrier to people feeling valued, developed or able to grow.

We also recognise that perceptions of being overlooked are not just about the number of roles available, but about how transparent, fair and inclusive our processes feel in practice.

In response, we are focusing on what we can influence. This includes investment in training, developing clearer progression pathways, strengthening how we talk about development and career goals in regular conversations, and being more transparent about how opportunities - whether projects, acting-up roles or leadership responsibilities - are shared.

This is an area where we know we need to do more, and where we will continue to listen, test approaches and improve.

Strengthening diversity across governance

We also recognise our board is currently under-representative of people of colour, young people and disabled people. Despite changes to our recruitment processes, we are still not where we want to be.

That’s why we are actively analysing what further steps are needed to enhance diversity throughout our governance structures, ensuring our leadership better reflects the communities and members we serve, and brings a wider range of lived experience into decision-making.

Labour Day is also about working conditions: what people experience day to day, how they are treated, and whether work is sustainable - practically and emotionally.

EAUC is a fully remote organisation. But remote doesn’t mean disconnected. We work hard to create a positive, flexible and connected environment, aiming for a “high performance, high wellbeing” culture where people feel trusted, supported and able to do their best work.

Many of our team also travel regularly (in line with our sustainable travel policy) to meet members and partners, speak at events, and engage in networks.

Even though we don’t see each other face-to-face often, we prioritise connection through:

• Regular virtual catch-ups and informal check-ins
• “Get to Know You” activities in team meetings
• An open and engaged culture – encouraged by regular conversations and co-created expectations of how things should be done.

We also make space for staff voice. Through regular team conversations and structured feedback points, colleagues can shape our strategy and day-to-day decision-making, raise ideas and concerns, and contribute to changes that affect them. We won’t always get it right for everyone, but we aim to listen openly, communicate clearly, and act with integrity in line with our values.

Our commitment to fair pay and employment practice

Fair work includes fair pay. At EAUC, this means transparent pay scales, incremental spine point rises, and annual percentage increases. We are also an accredited Living Wage and Living Pension Employer.

We also recognise that fair work is about opportunity and access. That’s why we do not offer unpaid or non-credit-bearing placement opportunities or work experience. or professional pro-bono support. We are considering how we can go further by offering returnships and employing apprentices.

Time to rest makes a real difference to wellbeing and sustainable performance, so we recently standardised our annual leave offer so that everyone is on one consistent framework, with entitlements recorded in hours to work fairly across part-time, compressed-hours and other non-standard patterns. This removes grade-based differences in access to time off, supports a more inclusive culture, and reduces unnecessary complexity in how leave is applied and understood.

Benefits that support wellbeing, flexibility and inclusion

We want our benefits to reflect our values and to support people through different life circumstances. Our staff benefits are extensive and include access to an employee assistance programme which supports colleagues with physical and mental health as well as financial and legal wellbeing. As a pre-cursor to a full HR policy review, we’ve also strengthened our family-friendly offer, increasing paternity leave, so that colleagues have more support at key moments in life outside work.

Alongside this, we’ve established mental health first aiders to help strengthen peer support and signposting. This sits alongside our wider wellbeing offer and reinforces our expectation that colleagues plan and take leave with managers to protect capacity, support resilience, and enable sustainable delivery.

We also see training and development as part of fair work. Alongside funded CPD and mentoring, we’re building EDI learning into our team development approach supporting staff to apply inclusive practice confidently in day-to-day decision-making, delivery and leadership.

Strengthening the sector’s understanding of EDI in sustainability

As a sector body, our responsibility goes beyond our own organisation. We’re also working to better understand how EDI is currently experienced and prioritised within sustainability roles and functions across post-16 education including where progress is being made, where barriers persist, and what support is most needed. Through our research, we’re building a clearer evidence base on representation, culture, and the conditions that enable inclusive sustainability leadership.

Just as importantly, we want to support our members to lean into this space with confidence, and are seeking to enable this by offering guidance, convening peer learning, sharing practice, and encouraging sustainability teams to see EDI as integral to impact, rather than separate from it.

What’s next: continuing to build and improve

Each year we review our progress, listen carefully, and plan what we’ll do next, so we can build on our work and do better.

In 2026, we are committed to:

• developing new assets for our members on social sustainability
• a full review of our human resources policies to ensure they’re fit-for-purpose and aligned with our goals and values
• strengthening board ownership and accountability for EDI
• developing clearer progression pathways for our team
• strengthening how we talk about development and career goals in regular conversations
• being more transparent about how opportunities - whether projects, acting-up roles or leadership responsibilities - are shared.

These priorities reflect what colleagues told us through the RACE Report survey, and our members told us through our research, about the changes they most want to see.

At EAUC, we believe that sustainability and social justice are inseparable. And we believe that fair, inclusive workplaces are essential - not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because it strengthens our work, our partnerships, and our impact.

On Labour Day, we want to recognise our team, our members, and the wider education workforce and recommit ourselves to building the structures, culture and practice that help people thrive.

We also know that lasting change requires collective effort, which is why we’re committed not only to improving our own practice, but to supporting the sector to build more inclusive and representative sustainability leadership.

We’re proud of the progress we’ve made since launching our strategy and we are equally committed to being honest about the work still ahead.