Information about this report - Staff Monitoring Report 2023/24

Equality Monitoring Report

This report has been prepared by the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) team as part of the University’s publication requirements under the Equality Act 2010 and Northern Ireland Act 1998, Section 75. An accessible version of the data from this report has been prepared on an Excel spreadsheet and is available to download from our website.

Data covered in this report

  1. Headcount data (the diversity of our staffing population; information on which staff groups are captured in the data can be found below) 
  2. Recruitment data (numbers and proportions of candidates from application, shortlisting to appointment)

Reporting Period

  1. Headcount data is a snapshot taken as of 31st July 2024 (presented as current year, 2023/24)
  2. Previous year refers to a snapshot taken as of 31st July 2023 (presented as 2022/23)
  3. Recruitment data reporting period runs from 1st August 2023 to 31st July 2024 (presented as academic year 2023/24)

Please note that the EDI team only provide data for annual compliance monitoring and do not provide ad-hoc data requests. All staff data requests must be submitted through People Services. If you have a question about this report, please contact us at [email protected] 

Included in the data

Academic Staff: Associate Lecturers, Central Academic Staff, Regional Academic Staff (also known as Staff Tutors), and Research Staff 

Professional and Support Staff: Academic-Related Staff (AR7-AR9), and Support Staff (GR3-GR6)

Not included in the data

  1. Open University subsidiaries: OU Worldwide, Open University Student Association (OUSA), Mulberry Bear
  2. Contingency staff: temp/agency workers, contractors/consultants, visitors etc

Counting method

All data looks at the unique count of individual employees. Employees with more than one appointment are not double counted.

Employee groups

Employee Group: in this report, ‘Employee Group’ refers to two types of employee groups: Academic Staff and Professional and Support Staff 

Employee Subgroup: this is a breakdown of the Employee Group, displaying the different types of Academic and Professional and Support staff – e.g. Associate Lecturers, Central Academic, Regional Academic (also known as Staff Tutors); Academic-Related and Support Staff

Senior Staff / Senior Level

Senior Staff refers to employees in senior grade roles (SS0-SS5) or professor bands (PB1-PB3).

Disclosure Rate

Disclosure rate refers to the number of people who have reported information about a protected characteristic. For example, the number of people who have disclosed information about their ethnicity, religion, or Disability(ies). ‘Prefer not to say’ is not included in the disclosure rate because when we refer to disclosure rate in EDI, we mean the revealing of an identity of a protected characteristic.

Equality Scheme Targets

The full Equality Scheme can be found in The Open University Equality Scheme 2022-2026. The Equality Scheme Staff KPIs are presented in the next page of this report.