Racism in higher education isn’t a glitch; it unfortunately remains part of the operating system. The UK’s persistent awarding gap, where racially minoritised students are less likely to receive a good degree than their white peers, has proved stubborn precisely because it is structural, baked into curricula, assessment, culture and everyday practice.
Disappointingly equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives such as those highlighted by Professor Irene Tracey, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, in her start of academic year address, are met with ridicule by the media and commentators and seen as “woke” and a waste of time and money.
But at Leeds Trinity University, we are fully aware of the importance of initiatives that create a welcoming and inclusive environment and how they can impact on student outcomes.
We created an anti-racist training toolkit based on lived experience was designed to confront that systemic structural issues that impact on racially minoritised students head-on. Re:Tension is not another awareness session; it is an immersive, co-created intervention that links critical scholarship to concrete institutional change.
Re:Tension has worked to shift behaviours, policies and expectations in ways that plausibly drive the numbers: compulsory engagement for all staff and students; curriculum redesign through our Curriculum for Social Justice; student-staff co-creation projects; and the embedding of race equity within our Race Equality Charter work.
These initiatives along with others at LTU, are delivering significant impact. Our university’s awarding gap has moved from 13.1% in 2023 to 9.4% in 2024. While no single initiative leads to sector-level change, this correlation matters.
The power of Re:Tension lies in its design logic: using theoretical frameworks about race to foreground how racism operates at interpersonal, institutional and societal levels, and then asking, “What are we going to do about it?”
At the centre is the short film Re:Tension, co-created with students and local actors and produced by Associate Professor and filmmaker Ricardo Barker. It is followed by anonymised testimonies from scholars of colour, original poetry, and facilitated dialogue that borrows from Theatre of the Oppressed – a participatory art form applied as an empowering and liberating practice.
“I would just like to express how grateful I am for today's lecture. Not only was it very insightful but it hit very close to home. No one has ever seen the racism many mixed-race people experience as valid, and I'm glad you gave us a platform to express our feelings and experiences.’’ (Level 4 student at Leeds Trinity University)
This multimodal approach might sound arty and worthy to some. But it does three things.
First, it humanises the data: for every percentage point, there is a person and a story, reducing the sector’s tendency to hide behind dashboards.
Second, it reduces defensive backlash by calling people in to the conversation, building solidarity and empowering folks to take action, instead of separating or isolating certain groups, showing why dismantling racism benefits everyone.
And third, it takes words, conversation and commitments into real action, whether that be how we support our students in the classroom, our teaching and assessment practice, ensuring students have fair and equitable placement experiences, empowering students to seek support and providing our students with diversity informed and anti –racist interventions.
Crucially, Re:Tension avoids what Herbert Marcuse called “repressive tolerance”, the polite shelving of radical ideas as optional extras. We ensured student participation at Levels 3 and 4 and for staff, resourced it properly, and it is embedded in institution strategy such as our Access and Participation Plan, our Race Equality Charter (REC), the Equity Social Justice and Belonging Strategy and our Learning, Teaching and Academic Experience strategy. That institutional spine has been decisive. Culture shifts when expectations, incentives and accountability change.
We’ve also learned that anti-racist work cannot be a one-off event. It has to be a spiral: learn, test, embed, evaluate, and iterate. That is why Re:Tension seeded co-creation projects, informed Mind the Gap, a new film focused on degree outcomes and based on academic and student research, and catalysed programme-level curriculum reviews. It is also why we have built a growing community of practice across the sector, delivering workshops and follow-ups at other universities that ask for mentoring on policy alignment, staff development and student partnership.
“The film and toolkit have taught me that as an institution we need to think about race by looking at the individual and what they need. Labelling students and staff is contentious and discussing how it is a wider problem helps with breaking down these labels.” (Salford University’s executive team member)
What other universities can consider:
- Make it core, not optional. Tie participation to induction, progression and CPD. Anti-racism can’t compete with diaries; it must structure them.
- Pair numbers with narratives. Use institutional awarding-gap data alongside lived-experience media (film, audio, poetry). This combination shifts hearts, not just minds.
- Co-create with students. Fund student partners to analyse data, audit modules, redesign assessments and co-deliver training. Ownership beats compliance.
- Embed in curricula and governance. Connect workshop insights to assessment regulations, moderation, placement policies and course validation, where inequities actually reproduce.
- Adopt a “call-in” pedagogy. Expect challenge and discomfort, but frame them as thresholds for learning, not reasons to retreat.
- Evaluate like you mean it. Track module-level attainment, progression and continuation; collect qualitative reflections; review actions termly; iterate. Publish the learning.
- Invest leadership capital. Senior sponsorship protects momentum and signals that this is mission-critical, not reputational housekeeping.
Re:Tension does not pretend to be a silver bullet. It is a method for reading our institution against the grain and acting on what we find. The early gains at Leeds Trinity, narrowed gaps, redesigned curricula, and staff and student testimony about changed practice signal that, when anti-racism is immersive, mandatory, co-created and structurally embedded, it can move beyond rhetoric to results.
72% of students indicated that they felt comfortable being their authentic selves at Leeds Trinity (2023 REC survey).
The sector has spent years diagnosing the problem. Re:Tension offers opportunities to tell the truth, build with students, hard-wire the work into strategy and quality, measure what matters, and keep going. If we want different outcomes, we must design different systems. The awarding gap is not inevitable. It is engineered. And what is engineered can be re-engineered—together.
Dr Syra Shakir is an Associate Professor in Learning and Teaching and Race Equity Lead at Leeds Trinity University.
Dr Sean Walton is a Senior Lecturer in Academic Development at Leeds Trinity University.