Building culturally competent access and outreach activity with racialised minorities: a decolonised approach

This project is a collaboration with Leeds Trinity University’s Race Institute (LTU RI) and Go Higher West Yorkshire (GHWY). LTU’s RI emerged from our innovative race equity work which enabled LTU to become the first University in Yorkshire to achieve the Race Equality Charter award and the need to keep race and racism on the national agenda to enable sustained transformational change.   

GHWY is a partnership of 13 HE providers in West Yorkshire, bringing together HE-in-FE providers of varying size and scope, universities across all HE mission groups, and a conservatoire, with the aim of reducing student lifecycle inequalities. Our collaboration works to address common issues, with learning across different institutional contexts. 

Inequalities for racially-minoritised students exist at all lifecycle stages, and HE attendance decisions in particular are influenced by cultural and religious factors. Detailed understanding of this – or the opportunity to implement it – can be missing from outreach/access teams, who can be drawn to the work from an interest in helping others but are not always representative of the groups they are trying to reach. Activity can take a colonial perspective influenced by long-standing unequal power dynamics with hierarchies of knowledge creators/holders versus learners, which does not always take account of learners’ wider lives and experiences.  

Cultural competence is defined as “a set of congruent behaviours, attitudes, and policies that come together in a system, agency, or among professionals and enables that system, agency, or those professionals to work effectively in cross-cultural situations” (Cross et al., 1989, p.4). Cultural competence focusses on making changes at the individual, organisational and policy level (Bennett & Keating, 2008). Therefore, cultural competence has the potential to make a real difference to the HE sector to meet the needs of racially minoritised students.