Widening Access and Contextual Admissions

The Leeds programme has focused on increasing the diversity of people conducting short-listing and in interview panels. We retain our commitment to the Disability Confident scheme (opens in new window). We reserve the right to take Positive Action within the scope of s159 of the Equality Act 2010, where appropriate, to ensure that we continue to respond to the requirements of our commissioners to ensure inclusivity and diversity through our selection processes.

Our programme is considering developing contextual recruitment processes. This is based on evidence that contextualising individuals’ achievements using additional information about their educational, social and economic background can lead to fairer and more inclusive selection processes. In particular, this information could help us to recognise individuals with strong potential for success at doctoral level and within the profession, who otherwise might not have been identified.

The Clearing House will circulate a survey to collect Contextual Admissions data separately from the application form. The Group of Trainers in Clinical Psychology have agreed the questions in this survey, which have evidence for improving the inclusivity and equity of recruitment processes. Completion of this survey is optional, however, if you are able to answer any of the questions which provide some additional background about you, and you are happy to provide this to us via the Clearing House, then we would encourage you to do so.

We will in due course provide further details on our website about how we will use the data collected in the survey e.g. as part of our selection processes; for audit/research purposes to consider developments to selection processes in future years; to create reports for external agencies such as Health Education England (which commissions many of the training programmes) etc.