People should understand what positive action means

Just a thought regarding Naomi Feinstein’s comment in your ‘no whites’ news story (Personnel Today, 10 January). Positive action does not only apply to training. It applies to a whole host of other HR factors, such as:

• Where job opportunities are advertised.
  
• Visiting schools and minority support groups to ‘reach out’ to communities which are under-represented in particular organisations.
  
• Adjusting criteria for recruitment, retention and promotion (for example, educational qualifications), particularly where it can be demonstrated that under-represented groups do not have equality of opportunity in education.
  
• Other developmental opportunities, such as shadowing, mentoring, secondments and so on.

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It is about time people understood what was meant by ‘positive action’  – it has been with us since 1975.

Louise Chambers
Equality and diversity manager
HM Courts Service, London