Our FY24 Modern Slavery Statement launches today

Our Modern Slavery Statement is an important step in educating our communities on Human Rights and Modern Slavery – and holding ourselves accountable to our responsibilities in this area as an educator, an employer, and a global citizen.

What is modern slavery?

Modern slavery refers to institutional slavery that continues to exist in present day society. Modern slavery refers to situations where one person has taken away another person’s freedom so they can be exploited. Freedom is taken away using threats, violence, coercion, abuse of power and/or deception, resulting in a person being unable to refuse or leave the situation. Modern slavery is one of the most serious violations of human rights.

What is a modern slavery statement?

A modern Slavery Statement is a document that identifies and addresses the risks of modern slavery practices in an organisation’s operations and supply chain. In the international education industry, there are several points in a student’s journey where they could become vulnerable to modern slavery or human trafficking. Publishing a statement is a legislated requirement in the UK and Australia.

Why is a modern slavery statement important for Navitas?

Human Rights and Modern Slavery is one of our twelve priority Impact areas. Our Impact initiative drives forward our ESG (Environment, Social, and Governance) policies at Navitas, and is aligned to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We look at our impact through three lenses: as an educator, an employer, and a global citizen. Within these three lenses are our twelve priority Impact areas. Our goal is to understand, measure, and improve the impact we create in our changing world. We take our responsibilities as an educator, an employer, and a global citizen seriously.

When it comes to modern slavery prevention and eradication, our commitment is to actively identify and mitigate potential modern slavery risks to students, our supply chain, the workforce and our partnerships; to comply with all relevant laws; and, to educate our communities.

What have we done so far?

Improved our assessment of risk areas

In producing our first Modern Slavery reports, we identified risks in our supply chain and to our students. This year, committed to research and better understanding our responsibilities, we reviewed our risk areas and aligned them to our new findings. Our FY24 statement includes an additional risk area related to the risks our students face while studying our programs.

Established a Modern Slavery working group

The working group is made up of representatives from across our global divisions to consider and mitigate potential modern slavery risks facing our students. To date, the working group has:

• conducted a gap analysis on modern slavery resources across our colleges and campuses
• developed a reporting tool integrated into our current Wellbeing Health & Safety (WHS) incident reporting system, soon to be available on external channels, and,
• developed specific resources to inform students about modern slavery.

Launched staff awareness training

This year we launched essential staff awareness training on modern slavery risks in our supply chain. The training was completed by more than 700 of our frontline staff and included information to raise awareness, guidance on how to identify potential incidents of modern slavery and instructions on what to do in those instances.

Supported modern slavery prevention through Navitas Education Trust partners

In FY24 we were proud to support work related to Modern Slavery and Human Rights through the Navitas Education Trust (NET)’s partnership with Adara Group in Nepal. Adara’s NET-supported program brings more education opportunities to communities and decreases the risk of trafficking and modern slavery by keeping kids in school and educating the community on the risks of modern slavery.