Education is full of complex language. We’re here to change that!
The Language Accessibility Promise
By making the Language Accessibility Promise, your organisation commits to using clear and simple language in student-facing documents and embedding this principle in the way you communicate.
By signing up to the Language Accessibility Promise, an organisation promises:
- To communicate directly, clearly and honestly.
- To assume no prior knowledge - avoid acronyms, initialisms and abbreviations.
- To offer a range of communication formats.
- To use technical terms only when necessary.
- To show compassion, consideration and understanding of students' needs and experiences in our approach to communication.
By signing this promise, you commit to reviewing 20% of policies and student-facing documents against these criteria within two years, and 50% within five years.
We have worked on an assumption that every document will be updated at least once every ten years and therefore this can be done as business as usual. The idea is that this 'light touch' approach just becomes something all staff do as standard.
Benefits to your organisation
Implementing the Promise will:
- Improve access to education
- Enhance the quality of the student experience
- Improve students' sense of belonging.
Sign the Language Accessibility Promise
To sign the Language Accessibility Promise, please use your organisation’s approval process or for any questions about the Language Accessibility Promise email info@step.ac.uk.
Organisations that have already signed up include:
- Borders College
- The Open University in Scotland
- UHI Inverness
- UHI Orkney
- UHI Perth
Project History
The original concept for the project was to try and make organisations more accessible for multi-lingual speakers and international students. However, it rapidly became clear that large numbers of students find that the language used by organisations, particularly in formal documents such as policies, can be very inaccessible. This led to a broadening of the project and the creation of the Language Accessibility Promise.