As liberation officers we have noticed that the level of education within the university, both staff and students, towards minorities is lacking. It has been found to result in bullying and in students feeling unsafe in class, thus directly affecting the education they pay for. (LGBT Foundation, 2017).

It is our understanding that students and staff have no workshops or training sessions on minority sensitivity training, and students in particular are not made aware of how seriously the university takes hate crime. Although you would assume this would be common knowledge and is in the university handbook, many students do not read the handbook and many students are not educated on the subjects enough to know what classes as hate speech.

In order to tackle hate speech and to ensure that every minority feels safe in this university, we believe that staff should have to go through some form of minority sensitivity training where they are given guidelines on how to handle situations of bullying and how to help minorities in their lecture groups. We also believe that mandatory diversity talks should be included in all induction weeks throughout the university for students in order to educate them. We believe these workshops/talks/training should be inclusive of all minority groups, (LGBT+, ethnicity, gender and sexual assault consent training, and disability).

Staff in this instance is inclusive of all staff, including SU workers and university employed workers who aren’t lecturers, for example café workers, and that we want this training across all campuses.