Equality and Diversity Training: What UK Employers Must Do in 2026

There is no standalone legal requirement to provide equality and diversity training in the UK. But the Equality Act 2010 makes employers liable for discrimination and harassment by their staff, and since 26 October 2024 employers have a legal duty to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment. Training is the step the EHRC expects first.

Equality and diversity training teaches staff what the law protects, what discrimination and harassment look like in practice, and what to do when they encounter either. For years the honest answer to whether it was legally required was no, with a strong practical argument for doing it anyway. That answer changed in October 2024, and it changes again on 30 October 2026.

Equality and diversity training tends to produce one of two reactions in smaller business owners. Either it feels like something large organisations do with their HR teams and annual training budgets, or it feels like an administrative obligation to be ticked off, filed, and forgotten. Neither instinct is quite right, and both now carry more risk than they did two years ago.

This guide covers what the Equality Act requires, the preventative duty that came into force in 2024, what changes in October 2026, who needs training and at what depth, what a course should cover, how often it should be refreshed, and how to evidence it. For the wider picture, read our guide to compliance training for UK small businesses.

This guide provides general information, not legal advice. Employment law in this area is changing quickly, and if you have specific concerns you should take advice from an employment solicitor.

Is equality and diversity training a legal requirement?

Partly, and more so than it used to be. The answer has three layers, and most guidance still only covers the first.

The first layer is the Equality Act 2010, which prohibits discrimination, harassment, and victimisation based on nine protected characteristics: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation. The Act does not require employers to run equality and diversity training. What it does is create a liability for discriminatory behaviour in the workplace and then offer a defence against it. Under section 109, an employer is vicariously liable for the discriminatory acts of its employees unless it can show it took all reasonable steps to prevent those acts from occurring.

Tribunals assess what counts as reasonable steps case by case. The factors they consider consistently include whether the employer had a clear equality policy, whether staff were trained on it, whether training was properly documented, and whether there was a genuine mechanism for raising concerns. A business that cannot point to any of those things is unlikely to succeed with the defence, regardless of its good intentions.

The second and third layers, which follow, are where the position has moved.

The preventative duty, in force 26 October, 2024

The Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Act 2023 created a duty on employers to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment of their workers, including by third parties such as customers. Three consequences worth stating plainly:

• The EHRC can take enforcement action without anyone bringing a claim
• An employment tribunal can uplift compensation by up to 25% where the duty was breached
• EHRC guidance names training, with refreshers, as a core reasonable step — and case law has held that stale or tick-box training does not satisfy the test

The distinction matters more than the wording suggests. The section 109 defence is reactive: something happens, and you produce evidence to defend yourself. The preventative duty is anticipatory. Employers are expected to identify where harassment might occur and act to prevent it, rather than waiting for an incident or a complaint. It applies to every employer regardless of size and regardless of whether any complaint has ever been made.

Where an employment tribunal upholds a sexual harassment claim, it must consider whether the employer met the preventative duty, and it can increase compensation by up to 25 per cent where the duty was not met. There is no standalone claim for breach of the duty itself, so the practical exposure is the uplift and the regulatory interest rather than a separate action.

One point deserves emphasis because it cuts against how compliance training is usually sold. Equality and Human Rights Commission technical guidance is clear that having an anti-harassment policy and providing training on it is not sufficient on its own, and that an employer is unlikely to meet the preventative duty without carrying out a risk assessment. Training is one reasonable step among several. Treating a completed course as the whole answer is precisely the box-ticking posture the duty was designed to displace.

What changes on 30 October 2026

The Employment Rights Act 2025 makes two further changes to this area, both taking effect on 30 October 2026.

The preventative duty is strengthened from taking reasonable steps to taking all reasonable steps. The single added word raises the threshold considerably. Under an all reasonable steps standard, an employer is likely to have difficulty if there was one preventative measure it would have been reasonable to take and it did not take it, whereas the current standard allows more room for a proportionate overall approach.

Second, employers become liable where they permit a third party to harass an employee. A third party here means someone who is neither the employer nor one of its employees: customers, clients, contractors, suppliers, patients, service users, and members of the public. An employer permits the harassment where it failed to take all reasonable steps to prevent it. This regime is broader than sexual harassment and covers harassment related to protected characteristics generally, and a single incident is enough, where the previous third-party provisions required prior occasions.

For any business whose staff deal with the public, and that includes most retail, hospitality, care, and service businesses, this is the more significant of the two changes. It extends your responsibility to the behaviour of people you do not employ and cannot discipline, which means the reasonable steps available to you are things like signage, staff training on escalation, a clear policy that customers are subject to, and a recorded process for handling incidents.

A related change is already in force. Since 6 April 2026, a report of sexual harassment counts automatically as a protected disclosure for whistleblowing purposes, so a worker raising one is protected from detriment without having to frame the complaint as a legal or health and safety matter.

Nine weeks is not long to put a policy, a risk assessment, and a training record in place from a standing start, which is the practical reason to treat this as a September task rather than a November one.

Training	Legal Position	Who needs it	Refresh
Equality and diversity	Not mandated, but employers are liable for staff discrimination	All employers	Every 2 years
Sexual harassment prevention	Preventative duty since 26 Oct 2024	All employers, no exemptions	Annually, with refreshers
Bullying and harassment	Not mandated; evidences the "reasonable steps" defence	All employers	Every 2 years
Unconscious bias	Not mandated	Managers and recruiters	Every 2 years
Recruitment and selection	Not mandated; reduces discrimination-claim risk	Anyone hiring	Every 2 years

 

Who needs equality and diversity training?

Everyone, at a baseline level, and some roles at greater depth. The risk is not evenly distributed, and training everybody identically tends to be both wasteful and insufficient at the same time.

All employees need to understand what the protected characteristics are, what discrimination and harassment look like in practice, and how to raise a concern. This is short and does not need to be technical.

Managers carry more. They make recruitment and promotion decisions, they handle reasonable adjustments for disabled employees, and they are usually the first person a complaint reaches. Manager-level training should cover how to handle a complaint without making the position worse, since a badly handled complaint is frequently what converts an incident into a tribunal claim.

Recruiters and anyone involved in hiring need training on selection criteria, interview conduct, and adjustments during the recruitment process, since discrimination claims from unsuccessful candidates do not require any period of service.

Customer-facing staff move up the priority list from October 2026, given the third-party liability described above. They need to know what to do when a customer, client, or contractor behaves in a way that would be harassment if a colleague did it, and they need to know the organisation will support them in acting on it.

What equality and diversity training should cover

Effective equality and diversity training is not about awareness-raising in the abstract. It should give employees a practical understanding of:

• The nine protected characteristics and what protection means in practice, with concrete examples rather than legal definitions alone.
• The difference between direct discrimination, indirect discrimination, harassment, and victimisation, since employees often conflate them and the distinctions matter legally.
• How to recognise behaviour that crosses the line, including the less obvious forms such as exclusionary banter, assumptions about capability, or patterns of behaviour that individually seem minor.
• Sexual harassment specifically, including third-party conduct, given the preventative duty and the October 2026 changes.
• The reporting process available to them if they witness or experience something, and the assurance that raising a concern will not result in retaliation.
• For managers: their additional responsibilities around recruitment decisions, reasonable adjustments for disabled employees, and handling complaints fairly.

Training is one part of a set. On its own it will not discharge the preventative duty, and an organisation relying on a completed course alone is in a weaker position than it thinks. The accompanying pieces are a written anti-harassment policy that covers third parties, a documented risk assessment identifying where harassment is most likely to arise in your particular workplace, a reporting route people will actually use, and a record showing you reviewed all of it periodically.

SkillsCircle includes a CPD-certified equality and diversity training pathway as part of its pre-loaded compliance catalogue. Staff can complete it on day one, and completion is recorded automatically. Browse the compliance course catalogue.

How often should equality and diversity training be refreshed?

There is no statutory refresh interval. The standard adopted by most employment law advisers and HR practitioners is every one to two years, with additional training triggered by changes to legislation, significant changes to the workforce, or a complaint or incident.

Annual refresh is the safer default for a smaller business that wants a straightforward approach. It aligns naturally with an annual review of the equality policy itself, and it gives a clear, defensible answer if a tribunal ever asks when training last took place.

New starters should complete training at induction regardless of where they fall in the cycle. Managers taking on direct reports for the first time should receive the manager-level content at that point rather than waiting for the next cycle. And the October 2026 changes are themselves a trigger: a workforce last trained before then has been trained on a framework that no longer describes the employer’s duties.

Evidencing completion: the piece most organisations skip

Running training is necessary. Being able to prove it happened is equally necessary, and the two are not the same thing.

If a tribunal is examining whether an employer met the preventative duty or took all reasonable steps, it will want evidence of training rather than assurances that it took place. That means dated completion records at the individual level, showing who completed what and when. It means being able to confirm that a specific employee had completed the training before the incident in question, not that the business generally runs training at induction.

For a business managing this through email confirmations, attendance sheets, or a shared spreadsheet, producing that evidence under pressure is harder than it sounds. Records go missing, training completed three years ago under a previous manager is difficult to trace, and renewal dates slip without a system to flag them.

The minimum reliable record is who completed training, which training they completed, when they completed it, and when renewal is due. Any system that produces and retains that consistently is fit for purpose. Alongside it, keep the policy version and the risk assessment, because from October those are the other half of what you would be asked to produce.

Equality and diversity training for small businesses: why the risk is asymmetric

Employment tribunal claims for discrimination are uncapped. A claimant can be awarded injury to feelings, loss of earnings, and in some cases aggravated damages, with no upper limit. For a business with fifteen or fifty employees, a single successful discrimination claim can cause serious financial damage, quite apart from the reputational impact and the management time involved in defending it.

Large organisations have HR teams, employment solicitors on retainer, and documented training records going back years. Smaller businesses often have none of those things, which means the cost of a claim falls disproportionately on them, and the risk of being unable to evidence reasonable steps is higher.

The asymmetry widens under the all reasonable steps standard arriving in October 2026, because that standard rewards thoroughness and documentation, both of which are easier to produce with dedicated staff. It also lengthens from October 2026, when the time limit for bringing most tribunal claims rises from three months to six, giving claimants more time to decide to act.

The practical response is not to replicate everything a large employer does. It is to do a small number of things well and to document them: a policy, a risk assessment, training with records, and a reporting route.

Equality and diversity training for SMEs without an HR function

The duties described here do not scale with headcount. A business of thirty people carries the same preventative duty as a business of three thousand. What differs is who owns the work.

In an SME the work is usually distributed across people who have other full-time jobs, which produces a predictable pattern. Induction training happens reliably because it attaches to a process that already exists. Refresh training has no trigger and quietly stops. The policy is written once and never reviewed. And nobody notices a legislative change until a client, an insurer, or a solicitor mentions it, which for the October 2026 changes will be too late to be comfortable.

These are administrative problems rather than educational ones, which is why the answer is usually a system rather than more training. What the system needs to do is modest: hold the courses, record completions against named individuals, flag renewals before they lapse, and produce evidence on demand.

How SkillsCircle helps

SkillsCircle is a ready-made LMS designed specifically for businesses with fewer than 200 employees. It comes pre-loaded with CPD-certified equality and diversity training alongside the full range of compliance courses your business needs, from health and safety to data protection and cyber security awareness. Staff are enrolled in minutes, completion is tracked automatically, and certificates are generated without any manual administration.

Automatic recertification can be set up for anyone on an organisational subscription and monitored on the Compliance Dashboard, making it straightforward to track and manage a team’s completion. This also provides an automatic audit trail, which is the part that matters if you are ever asked to evidence what training a particular employee had completed on a particular date.

Pricing starts from £8 per user per month with no setup costs.

Equality and diversity, and sexual harassment prevention are both included in the SkillsCircle library - browse the compliance course catalogue

Need to assign this across your team and evidence completion? See our compliance LMS for small businesses.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is equality and diversity training a legal requirement in the UK?

No single law requires it by name. But the Equality Act 2010 makes an employer liable for discrimination and harassment committed by its staff, and the only defence is showing you took all reasonable steps to prevent it. Training is the main way employers demonstrate that. Since October 2024 there is also a specific duty to take reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment.

What does the Equality Act 2010 require employers to do?

The Act protects nine characteristics, including age, disability, race, religion, sex and sexual orientation. Employers must not discriminate directly or indirectly, harass or victimise, and are legally responsible for their employees' conduct at work. An employer can avoid liability only by proving it took all reasonable steps to prevent the behaviour. Public bodies carry an additional public sector equality duty.

Do small businesses have to provide equality and diversity training?

Yes, in effect. The Equality Act applies to every employer regardless of size, and no employer is exempt from the duty to prevent sexual harassment. What counts as reasonable does scale with size and resources, so a ten-person business is not held to the same standard as a multinational. But doing nothing is not a defence at any size.

How often should equality and diversity training be repeated?

There is no statutory interval. Most UK employers run it at induction and refresh every one to two years. The EHRC expects training to be regular and meaningful, and tribunals have found that training which is old or treated as a tick-box exercise does not count as a reasonable step. Refresh after any significant legal change as well.