Diversity training

Diversity is a major issue for the public sector and for Stroud with a population that is 99% white and Christian, the particular challenge for the Council has been to inform staff about those areas of diversity with which they may not have been naturally familiar.

The 'Respect for People' programme, which won awards for Stroud, was rolled out to all the Council's 400 staff and every councillor. Everyone went through the workbook before taking the twelve question interactive test over the phone - as a new councillor I've just spent the morning reading the work book and taking the test - pleased to get the 12 questions right but they were pretty basic. Inequalities, unfair treatment and exclusion thrive in situations where we lack knowledge about cultural differences and the confidence to relate to people from other backgrounds. It is great that the Council is making moves to tackle some of these problems.

The workbook covered many aspects including gender, sexual orientation, disability and race.

Clearly there are few of us who would not wish to be considerate and would not wish our humour or language to offend or embarass others - or for that matter reinforce negative stereotypes. Being sensitive to the needs of others means that we need to be careful that we use language in ways that help people feel included in the communication process and not excluded.

One aspect of this is 'Political correctness' - only touched on in the training. The term PC clearly does have problems - read more at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness

However I've occasionally heard people too readily dismiss something as being just PC when there is really much more to it - we cannot ignore the fact that giving something the label of PC does not make it invalid. If we decide that we should not change our language/behaviour to show respect for others then we are finding excuses for not facing up to the consequences of our actions. Just because something was commonly used and accepted in the past does not necessarily mean that they were appreciated by those on the receiving end.