UK’s NHS Trust Invites White Staff To Take £250 Course On Becoming ‘Disruptors’ Of Racism

An NHS hospital group in southwest England has pitched its staff a £250 anti-racism course meant for “individuals who are white and live in the world as white people,” as part of its Black History Month offerings.

The course, From Allies to Disruptors, is run by the Birmingham equality charity brap and consists of six half-day online workshops running from November until April 2027. It appeared in a staff newsletter sent to employees of Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in Swindon, The Telegraph reported. The newsletter came from the equality, diversity and inclusion team at the Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire (BSW) Hospitals Group, which also runs the hospitals in Bath and Salisbury.

“By understanding more about racialised dynamics, the programme will help you become a more confident disruptor of racism,” the newsletter says. The course’s tagline says it “invites you to disrupt injustice – not just around you, but within you.” It is aimed at NHS leaders but open to anyone interested.

The trust told the Telegraph that staff could apply for funding and time off to attend, but that neither was guaranteed, and that no one is required to take part.

Other suggestions in the same newsletter included a “race aware workshop,” a presentation on “125 years of black music in Britain” and a visit to a “Georgian people of colour exhibition” in Bath.

This isn’t brap’s first program for white NHS staff. The charity’s own site lists an earlier NHS “white allies” program among the courses whose graduates can go on to its “White work” sessions for “white-presenting leaders,” at £1,800 a head. In an open letter to the health secretary in July, brap’s Joy Warmington and co-author Roger Kline wrote that the NHS and government must “name plainly” what they called “a crisis of racism in health and care.”

Critics say the course does the opposite of what it promises. Dr. Alka Sehgal Cuthbert of Don’t Divide Us, a group that opposes racial identity politics, said it was “time to call enough on schemes like this,” arguing that the beliefs it promotes, including that white people need to be more effective “disruptors of racism,” “actively sow grievance, division, entitlement and make solidarity more difficult.”

Ministers have been here before. In October 2023, then-Health Secretary Steve Barclay told NHS bodies to stop hiring standalone diversity roles, writing: “I do not consider that this represents value for money.” Labour’s Wes Streeting, health secretary at the time, said in February 2025 that “there are sometimes some really daft things being done in equality, diversity and inclusion,” adding: “The ideological hobby horses need to go.”

Britain’s public sector has a record of this. As we’ve reported, UK police have been made to undergo training on accepting their “white privilege,” and students have been ordered to take it too.

The Swindon course runs until April 2027 – and the trust says it will consider paying for staff who sign up.