Equity or equality? Universities need to say which and what it means

This blog is kindly authored by Dr Fatema S. Alhalwachi, Honorary Research Fellow, Birkbeck, University of London. Twitter/X: @dr_falhalwachi

No one objects to a wheelchair ramp offered to a wheelchair user but not everyone else. Many people do object, eventually, to a promotion handed to one candidate over a better-qualified one because of a characteristic they share with an under-represented group. Both are commonly described as ‘equity’. The gap between them is exactly the space a number of UK universities have quietly wandered into – and it’s worth being precise about before it causes real harm.

A quiet swap

An analysis by the Committee for Academic Freedom found that, since around 2025, at least 20 UK universities have edited “Equality, Diversity and Inclusion” to “Equity, Diversity and Inclusion” in policy documents, while keeping the same EDI acronym. Keele University’s own access and participation plan states that the institution strives for “equal outcomes” and commits to providing “resources, opportunities, and support in an equitable way, to support members of our community to be successful”.

That’s a substantive claim, not a stylistic one. The Equality Act 2010 protects equality of opportunity, not equal outcomes. If ‘equity’ means allocating resources to engineer equal outcomes between groups, some universities may be writing commitments into their own policies that sit uneasily with the law they operate under.

This isn’t confined to policy wording, either. It’s live right now in a formal regulatory process: universities without an approved access and participation plan for 2027-28 must submit new ones from spring 2026, under a scheme the Office for Students explicitly frames around ‘equality of opportunity’. Yet the plans themselves set hard numerical outcome targets – the University of York’s, for instance, commits to cutting the awarding gap between Black and White students from 17 percentage points to 8.6 by 2028/29. That’s the same equity-shaped commitment as Keele’s, running through the sector’s official access regime under the more legally cautious label of ‘equality’.

What this actually does to people

Two real cases show exactly where the line sits, and what happens to real people on either side of it.

Abrahart v University of Bristol is the case for taking ‘equity’ seriously. A student with social anxiety wasn’t given alternative assessment arrangements; the High Court found the university had a duty to anticipate and remove barriers even without an explicit request, and had failed in that duty, with devastating consequences. The problem there was an institution that treated ‘equality’ as identical treatment for everyone, when identical treatment was exactly what failed her.

Turner-Robson v Chief Constable of Thames Valley (2024) sits on the other side of the same line. A police force moved a candidate into a promoted role without any competition, to address under-representation. Three white officers who were never given the chance to apply brought a discrimination claim – and won. The tribunal found the force had gone beyond the Act’s narrow ‘tie-break’ provision, which only permits favouring an under-represented candidate where candidates are equally qualified, not simply to correct an imbalance.

Get the ‘equality’ reading too literal, and a vulnerable student is failed by an institution that never adjusted anything for her. Get the ‘equity’ reading too loose, and colleagues who did nothing wrong are passed over for reasons a tribunal will later call unlawful. Both are real people, and both outcomes trace back to how an institution understood one word in its own policy.

This isn’t a two-case problem either. The same undefined word governs decisions affecting retired academics whose emeritus status was withheld amid cuts, career-break returners, disabled staff, and anyone whose case doesn’t fit neatly into ‘equal treatment’ or ‘equal outcome’. Every one of them is currently governed by a term no university has had to spell out.

The policy fix is simple and cheap

This isn’t an argument for abandoning either word, and it isn’t a reason to retreat from EDI commitments. It’s an argument that neither word should be allowed to do unexamined work in a policy document. Research on how framing shapes perception shows that ‘equity’ and ‘equality’ are received very differently even when meant to express identical values – so leaving the term undefined doesn’t avoid the argument, it just moves the argument to whichever tribunal or journalist notices first. There’s also a slower pattern worth naming: contested terms tend to need periodic replacement as they absorb the negative associations of what they describe – ‘diversity’ and ‘DEI’ have already been through that cycle in the US. ‘Equity’ may simply be a few years behind on the same treadmill.

The fix costs nothing and requires no legal change: every university that uses ‘equity’ in its EDI policy should publish, in the same document, one paragraph stating what that word licenses in an actual admissions, hiring, or promotion decision. Not an aspiration. A decision rule. That’s exactly the kind of question an EDI audit – of the sort the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) is currently running – should be asking every institution it reviews. If the word changes nothing in practice, say so, and it’s safe. If it does change something, staff, applicants, and the university’s own legal team deserve to know exactly what, before a tribunal decides it for them.