Law firm Browne Jacobson and the University of Nottingham are launching a ground-breaking two and a half year Knowledge Transfer Partnership which aims to develop and embed long-lasting equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) principles and learnings into the firm’s practices and processes, amongst its key client-bases and the national legal sector.
Law firm Browne Jacobson and the University of Nottingham are launching a ground-breaking two and a half year Knowledge Transfer Partnership which aims to develop and embed long-lasting equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) principles and learnings into the firm’s practices and processes, amongst its key client-bases and the national legal sector.
It is the first Knowledge Transfer Partnership Browne Jacobson has entered into with a leading UK university and is part funded by Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency.
Browne Jacobson will work with the University of Nottingham’s leading business unit, Linguistic Profiling for Professionals, in the Centre for Research in Applied Linguistics (CRAL), along with a graduate associate to analyse, review and change the way it uses written, spoken and digital language to ensure it is more diverse and inclusive as an employer. The project will be overseen by Louise Mullany, Professor in Sociolinguistics at the University of Nottingham.
Browne Jacobson is currently ranked as the UK’s leading employer in the Social Mobility Employer Index, the leading authority on social mobility workplace best practice in the UK.
Declan Vaughan, People Director, said:
“We believe this collaboration is truly ground-breaking. It provides us with a unique opportunity to address the language of exclusion in the workplace. It will help us to better understand and shape how we, our clients and the wider legal profession can improve the way we all communicate to create a more inclusive and diverse working environment.”
Claire Stripp, Head of Talent & Knowledge at Browne Jacobson, added:
“Research shows using language in the workplace that is outdated can have a detrimental effect on an organisation’s ability to attract and retain top talent, drive commercial success and innovate.
“We are passionately inclusive, and we believe that understanding how language can be unintentionally but significantly exclusive, and learning how to communicate truly inclusively, is ground-breaking and will help us to attract and retain the best talent and enable everyone to thrive with us.”
Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs) is Europe’s leading programme helping businesses to improve their competitiveness by enabling companies to work with higher education or research and technology organisations to obtain knowledge, technology or skills which they consider to be of strategic competitive importance. The UK-wide programme is overseen by Innovate UK and supported by 16 other public sector funding organisations. Projects typically last between 12 months and 3 years.
Professor Louise Mullany, Lead Academic and Knowledge Base Supervisor at the University of Nottingham, said:
“We are delighted that the KTP application has been successful. It will enable us to engage in critically important diversity and inclusion work over a sustained period of time, bringing long-lasting value to the firm and its clients.
“We are looking forward to applying our inclusive communication solutions package with the business and know that the knowledge we gain in return will deeply inform our research and practices in this area for many years to come.”
There’s been little evidence of interventions or financial management reviews this year and it appears the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) has re-focussed on financial delivery. It’s also telling that there were no discernible changes to the reporting of financial irregularities in the Academies Trust Handbook 2022.
The Children’s Commissioner, Rachel De Souza, has recently published a report “Beyond the labels: a SEND system which works for every child, every time”, which she intends to sit alongside the DfE’s SEND Review (2019) and SEND Green Paper (2022) and which she hopes will put children’s voices at the heart of the government’s review of SEND system.
There’s greater opportunity than ever for parents, carers and guardians to voice any concerns they have relating to their child’s education and for their concerns to be heard and to be taken seriously. While most staff in schools and academies are conscious of their legal duties relating to complaints management, many are struggling to cope with such a significant increase in the volume of complaints they must manage.
We’re pleased to collaborate with Lloyds Bank, who recently asked us and audit and risk specialists Crowe UK to offer guidance that academy trusts would find helpful when considering setting up a trading subsidiary.
The DfE has published new guidance and opened the application process for window two of the Trust Capacity Fund (TCaF) for 2022/2023, with a fund of £86m in trust capacity funding focused particularly on education investment areas.
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse was established in March 2015. We now have its report. As you would expect with such a broad scope, the report is long and makes a number of far-reaching recommendations. In this article, Dai Durbridge highlights seven of the 20 recommendations, sets out how they could impact on schools and suggests what steps to take now.
Browne Jacobson’s education team has been named as winner of the ‘Legal Advisors to Education Institutions’ category at the Education Investor Awards 2022 for a record sixth time.
Since the new Suspensions and Exclusions Statutory Guidance was published, we have received a lot of questions about the use of managed moves. For the first time, the Statutory Guidance does explain what a managed move is, but in relatively broad terms and does not cover the mechanics of how a managed move should operate.
Over 3000 young people from across the UK and Ireland took part in a virtual legal careers insight event, aimed at making the legal profession more diverse.
Holly Quirk, an associate barrister in Browne Jacobson’s Manchester office, was awarded the Legal Professional of the Year Award at this year’s Manchester Young Talent Awards.
The risk of assault against staff is, sadly, something that all schools need to consider carefully. Here one legal expert explains what they can do to protect staff and ensure they fulfil their duty of care.
Browne Jacobson’s education team has again been confirmed as a national powerhouse after securing five Tier 1 rankings relating to Education in the latest edition of Legal 500 and maintaining a Band 1 UK-wide ranking for Education in Chambers & Partners UK 2023.
Created at the end of the Brexit transition period, Retained EU Law is a category of domestic law that consists of EU-derived legislation retained in our domestic legal framework by the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. This was never intended to be a permanent arrangement as parliament promised to deal with retained EU law through the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill (the “Bill”).
In this article we set out the criteria, expectations and support schools should consider if notified they fall within this new category.
