Public Sector Equality Duty

Public bodies, including schools, have a duty, under the 2010 Equality Act, to ensure that they promote equality within their organisation and this statement sets out how we try to achieve this at Blackheath Primary School.  We fundamentally believe that it is the right of every person to be treated with equal dignity and respect which is integral to our school ethos and underpins all that we do.

The Equality Act 2010 (“the Act”) provides a modern, single legal framework with three broad duties:

• to eliminate unlawful discrimination, harassment and victimisation and other conduct under the Act
• to advance equality of opportunity between people who share a protected characteristic and those who do not
• to foster good relations between people who have a shared characteristic and those who do not

The Senior Leadership Team and Governors at Blackheath Primary School will annually review how well we achieve these aims with regard to the protected groups under the Equality Act (race, disability, gender, gender re-assignment, age, pregnancy and maternity, marital status, sexual orientation, religion and belief and sexual orientation.)

Blackheath Primary fully understands the principle of the Act and the work needed to ensure that those with protected characteristics are not discriminated against and are given equality of opportunity.

A protected characteristic under the act covers the groups listed below:

• Age;
• Disability;
• Race, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin;
• Sex (including transgender);
• Gender reassignment;
• Maternity and pregnancy;
• Religion and belief;
• Sexual orientation; and
• Marriage and civil partnership (for employees).

In order to meet our general duties, listed above, the law requires us to do some specific duties to demonstrate how we meet the general duties.

These are to:

• Publish equality information – to demonstrate compliance with the general duty across its functions – We will not publish any information that can specifically identify any child.
• Prepare and publish equality objectives – to do this we will collect data related to the protected characteristics above and analyse this data to determine our focus for our equality objectives. The data will be assessed across our core provisions as a Blackheath Primary. This will include the following functions:
• Admissions;
• Attendance;
• Attainment;
• Exclusions; and
• Prejudice related incidents.

Our objectives will detail how we will ensure equality is applied to the services listed above however; where we find evidence that other functions have a significant impact on any particular group we will include work in this area.

We also welcome our duty under the Education and Inspections Act 2006 to promote community cohesion.

We recognise that these duties reflect international human rights standards as expressed in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, and the Human Rights Act 1998.