Racial Inclusion in the Curriculum Toolkit

We know that there is a significant awarding gap for ethnic minority students nationally. The reasons for this are multifactorial and include poor representation of ethnic minority colleagues amongst medical school faculty and critically a curriculum that does not always reflect student (or patient) populations. An inclusive curriculum has clear benefits for our students and for the patients they will care for in the future. Inclusion and a true sense of community and belonging is what we aspire to as a School for all our students and staff. We hope this toolkit – as a part of wider efforts in the School such as an EDI longitudinal curriculum theme – will help us work together towards this aim, and are also making this toolkit freely available to all medical educators for use in their own setting.

Download the Racial Inclusion in the Curriculum Toolkit (PDF, 6MB), developed by the University of Leicester Medical School. Representative sections can also be viewed online following the links below. 

About the Toolkit

This Toolkit has been co-created by MedRACE students and staff to help guide efforts towards making our medical curriculum more racially inclusive. It draws on student-staff work that began in 2021 in Leicester Medical School (LMS) with three Year 3 Student-Selected Components (SSCs) that explored actively creating a more inclusive learning environment for all our students addressing elements of curricular development, delivery, content and assessment. The recommendations from that work, whilst drawn from inclusion work on specific pre-clinical Units, can be applied and adapted across medical education. This work helped inform the practical suggestions on how we might start to challenge exclusion in our teaching.