Race Equality Charter Silver Award

Leeds Trinity University secured the prestigious Race Equality Charter (REC) Silver Award in November 2025, marking a significant milestone in its ongoing journey toward racial justice, equity, and institutional transformation. The award recognises sustained and evidenced progress in tackling structural racial inequalities affecting students and staff, including efforts to close awarding and progression gaps, diversify leadership, strengthen governance, and embed lived experience in decision-making. Achieving Silver signals not only that meaningful change has taken place, but that such change is systemic, data-driven, and co-produced in partnership with communities most affected by inequity. It reflects a shift from awareness-raising to accountability, from policy to practice, and from reactive compliance to strategic, anti-racist leadership. For Leeds Trinity, the Silver Award stands as both an acknowledgement of the depth of work already undertaken and a commitment to continued transformation, transparency, and racial equity across the institution.

As a university committed to Social Justice and Solidarity, we have made sure that race equity and racial justice underpin these. Our Anti-Racist statement expects colleagues to embody this through demonstrable commitment to supporting the institutional approach to structural change. This requirement forms part of our Values and Behaviour Framework.

We remain extremely proud to be the first University in Yorkshire awarded the REC Silver, which comes with responsibility to our community but also the sector. We are mindful that our practice must reflect our rhetoric and we have confidence to become more ambitious in our intent. Our Silver Action Plan harnesses that ambition and builds on the solid foundations we have embedded.

Whilst the work that we have undertaken is sector leading, there is still significant work to do, therefore we cannot be complacent. The felt experiences of our staff and students demonstrates to us that our commitment to belonging still requires work, and whilst we have developed strategy to support cultural change, we are still waiting to see the true impact of this work.

Our approach to next steps is clearly outlined in our Silver action plan to support our own institution and the sector in developing an anti-racist approach to addressing intersectional inequalities. At the heart of our work, is our strategy for Equity, Social Justice and Belonging (2022-2026), fundamental to our strategic vision and embeds intersectional approaches to promoting equity through active listening opportunities with colleagues and students. We remain committed to placing co-creation and colleague and student voice at the heart of this work.

Leeds Trinity's Silver Action Plan will run until 2030 and forms the foundation of its "Big 5" institutional measures for inclusive growth: engaging in staff development to support race literacy; data literacy to understand where racial disparities are evident; development and implementation of the Curriculum for Social Justice; implementation and evaluation of the assessment review; and development and implementation of the transition framework.