Expanding on Equity and Inclusion

The Focus in Schools

Schools have been addressing issues of equity and inclusion for many years by making accommodations based on a variety of different needs related to aspects of a student’s identity. These include accommodating physical differences and neurodiversity of various kinds as well as additional language needs through a range of different forms of learning support. In independent schools, it can include financial assistance for students and families who are not able to meet the monetary commitments required for entry and continued education.

In addition, as further examples, schools have recognised the need to take additional action to encourage more girls to pursue STEM-based subjects and to ensure that transgender students have appropriate access to washrooms and changing rooms.

The principle behind equity is to level the playing field to ensure that the additional challenges that people may have as a result of their identities are mitigated as much as possible. A key element of the approach is to ensure that teachers and leaders are aware of the privileges and challenges that people with different identity profiles face and are able to recognise the implicit bias that may exist in individuals and organisations.

The more differentiated voices that have stories to tell, the more we learn, and the more we learn, the better we are.”

The Focus at Mulgrave

We have had a growing focus on equity and inclusion at Mulgrave, assessing systems and implementing measures to support students with varied dimensions of diversity. A few examples include:

• Expanding our Learning Support provision, including increasing the number of Learning Support teachers and appointing Literacy and Math Coordinators in the Junior School

• Providing Persian tutoring for our students from Afghanistan so they can take their DP language exam in their mother tongue

• Putting significant emphasis on building up our Financial Assistance funds so we can increase access to a Mulgrave education for local students whose families do not have the resources to meet our full fee levels

• Expanding access to gender-neutral washrooms

• Developing support/affinity groups for Upper School students with marginalised aspects of their identity, for example, mixed race students

• Focussing on equity in our hiring processes to remove bias and reflect broader diversity in our faculty and staff

In addition, we are increasingly adapting our education so that our students, at an age appropriate level, understand equity issues and the advantages/disadvantages that aspects of identity have presented to people in the past and in the present day. This includes looking at prejudice and discrimination related to Indigenous Peoples, racial groups, and religious and gender groups.

Mulgrave’s Financial Assistance Programme offers tuition relief for incoming students in Grades 7 and up whose families would otherwise not be able to access our school. It also provides short-term support for current Mulgrave families who face unexpected hardship. The programme is funded by the generosity of our community and we are working to grow our related endowment fund to provide sustainable and predictable support for this important programme.

In a largely socio-economically privileged community like Mulgrave, it can be easy to forget that ‘access’ to our school goes beyond tuition relief. For students from varied socioeconomic backgrounds to feel belonging, we must provide additional support. As such, we have recently updated our Financial Assistance Programme to include additional items such as uniforms, computers, trips, bus service, and more - all of which are scalable depending on the amount of tuition relief offered to a family.