What's the RR Crowd project?

It's a crowd sourced review of the resources needed by and available to all kinds of education and training organisations to help meet the Public Sector Equality^definition Duty (2010).

The review will be tightly focused, time-limited, and practically useful, which means it should make your life easier and help you improve your practice. Crowd sourcing means you can play a big part in making sure it's a project that really makes a difference for the sector, its staff and learners.

The Skills Funding Agency has invested in a wide-range of equality and diversity resources and now wants to ensure that providers have easy access to good quality materials to help them develop better practice. They are therefore funding the RRCrowd project to identify:

• What equality and diversity resources the sector (in all its diversity) wants in order to improve practice and meet the Public Sector Equality Duty (2010)
• Criteria for effective resources
• Your preferred solutions for finding the resources you need when you need them
• Effective ways of promoting the content and availability of the many existing Open Source resources
• A method for sharing resources that are in-development at any given time
• Real gaps in what is available/wanted
• A sector-led plan that will help bring closer the aspiration of a sector that genuinely embeds equality and diversity in everything we do

What will the end product look like? We don't know. Not until we complete the review together, but we can tell you that as it develops you will be able to see it unfold here on the equalities toolkit website. That means that you will know about and can comment on what's happening as it happens. 

There are  some things that we can confidently say this review will not be doing. It isn't:

• Limited to Agency funded resources and/or things on the Excellence Gateway
• About reproducing  information and resources that are already published and freely available from other organisations (like the Equality and Human Rights Commission and  Government Equalities Office) for the sector
• Going to re-invent the wheel or duplicate what's already been produced or will be produced in the future by providers, sector membership bodies, the NUS, trade unions, Ofsted, the Forum for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, FBFE, AFAN and the Equalities Challenge Unit
• Going to involve lots of meetings
• Going to result in a fixed or permanent group or a wish-list that will never get granted