Leading Inclusion Through Hard Choices

Higher education leaders are making harder choices, more often, and with less room for error.

Financial constraint, regulatory scrutiny, technological change and contested public debate are reshaping institutional priorities. Leadership decisions increasingly have clear consequences for who can access, succeed and belong in higher education.

This means inclusion cannot sit apart from institutional leadership, transformation, or business model design. It has to shape the way decisions are made.

Nicola Dandridge recently challenged the sector to define “good” leadership of equality, diversity and inclusion, and to place it at the heart of institutional strategy. Most institutions have made substantial commitments to inclusion, but do we have the leadership, governance and efficient structures in place to sustain them under pressure?

Inclusion and institutional risk

Efficiency programmes are now a central part of institutional life. Few HEIs can avoid difficult choices about cost, capacity and focus. But those choices are never neutral.

A portfolio review may affect which students see a place for themselves in an institution. A workforce change programme may have uneven impacts on different staff groups. AI-enabled transformation may increase efficiency while also amplifying existing bias if inclusion is absent from design and oversight. Changes to student support may affect continuation, belonging and outcomes in ways that only become visible later. We may reduce cost in one place while increasing regulatory, reputational, cultural or performance risk elsewhere.

This is a core leadership issue. Registrars, chief operating officers, university secretaries, directors of people, finance, planning, estates, digital and student services all shape the systems through which inclusion either becomes embedded or disappears from view.

From visible roles to shared accountability

Over the past decade, many institutions created senior roles focused on EDI. These roles have brought visibility, coherence and leadership attention. In some institutions they also helped connect fragmented activity across staff, student, governance and civic agendas.

That leadership architecture is now changing. Executive portfolios are being consolidated. Management layers are being reduced. Some EDI-labelled roles are being broadened into wider people, student experience or civic portfolios. Others are being reduced or removed.

Although these changes may be unavoidable, they risk creating a leadership vacuum. That is not inevitable. Inclusion can become more deeply embedded in broader portfolios where expectations, evidence, specialist support and accountability remain clear. Without intentional ownership, however, it risks becoming symbolic and performative.

Ultimately, the practical test is whether inclusion influences financial choices, transformation, governance, student outcomes and workforce planning.

What embedding really means

Embedding inclusion requires more than a strategy, a senior champion and an annual report.

A more robust approach makes inclusion visible in institutional strategy and outcomes. Leaders need to understand the barriers affecting staff, students and stakeholders, direct limited resources towards strategic priorities, and consider inclusion proportionately from the outset.

In this context, inclusive leadership and EDI expertise must evolve. Leaders need to champion institutional values and priorities, invite challenge, and uphold freedom of speech and academic freedom. This ensures not only engagement across the full range of viewpoints and lived experiences within every one of our institutions, but also enables momentum and accountability even where there is lawful, robust disagreement.

Mainstreaming should not mean the quiet loss of specialist capacity. Expertise remains essential, but it should inform cross-institutional leadership, governance and transformation rather than delivering on siloed action plans, often on the periphery of institutional activity.

Done well, this can improve impact and create significant efficiencies. Advance HE recently identified more than 50 inclusion-related charters or similar external commitments operating across the sector.  The opportunity is to consolidate action plans and better reflect the reality that many of the most significant inclusion decisions are already made outside traditional EDI structures.

A framework for whole-institution coherence

This reality is why Advance HE developed the Inclusive Institutions Framework.

The value of the IIF as a whole-institution approach is that it helps institutions connect what they already know about inclusion to the places where decisions are actually made. The Framework can cover the full breadth of inclusion work from the perspective of your institutional mission, supporting institutions to develop a modern infrastructure, identify priorities and reduce fragmentation.

Early feedback from the IIF has been encouraging. Institutions have particularly valued the self-assessment tools, one-to-one advisory support and the opportunity to learn with peers. The aim is to help institutions maintain momentum over time: testing whether priorities remain live, how evidence is being acted on, whether responsibility is clear, and if activity is translating into expected impact.

Several institutions from the first IIF cohort have joined at moments of strategic review, organisational change or renewed institutional focus on inclusion. For AHUA members, those moments will feel familiar. They are often the points at which professional service leaders are asked to create efficiency and coherence, manage risk and support institutional change.

In a period of hard choices, inclusion will not be sustained by goodwill or lip service. It needs to be built into the way institutions decide what matters most.

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Author: David Bass, Director for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at Advance HE

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