50 years ago I was involved in a grassroots group called the Westminster Group for Multiracial Education. The group arose from community concerns about education in North Paddington and involved parents, teachers, school students, social workers, workers from the local Commission for Racial Equality and a young lawyer from the nearby Law Centre who went on to become the MP for Brent East.
Concerns included racism in schools, racist remarks by teachers, low expectations of Black pupils and discrimination in their access to examination streams, the lack of books and other resources relevant to Black people and their history, and the disproportionate number of Black pupils labelled ESN* (Educationally Sub-normal in the language of the times.) More widely the impact of the SUS law (Stop and Search on Suspicion) and immigration laws on young people was a big issue locally.
In nearby Brent Council adopted a Policy Statement on Multicultural Education on October 21st 1981. the statement recognised and welcomed the community as multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-religious and multi-lingual and stated:
The Council is committed to a fundamental and significant change to a multi-cultural education based on a concept of cultural pluralism. The recongition that all people and cultures are inherently equal must be a constant from which all educational practices will be developed.
The education system must be one which affords equality of opportunity to all children. we shall develop a plan and strategy to make the means of achievement consistent with the aims.
Reflecting community concerns Brent Council asked the Black educationalist Jocelyn Barrow to head an inquiry into the pattern of secondary school examination results that showed schools in the south of the borough 'performing markedly less well than the north'. They were to:
1. Assess the standards achieved in secondary schools
2. Assess parental concerns
3. Assess whether these concerns were justified
4. To advise on remedial action
There was opposition from some teachers to the inquiry and schools were often reluctant to release data. The inquiry was accused of usurping the role of the school inspectorate.
The report was published as 'Two Kingdoms: Standards and Concerns, Parents and Schools. An Independent Investigation into Secondary Schools in Brent 1981-1984'
Following the report Brent Council set up the Development Programme for Education, Attainment and Racial Equality (DPEARE) that sent advisory techers into schools to address achievement issues. A Daily Mail article denounced the teachers as 'Race spies' causing considerable conflict. Brent Community Relations Council reacted with a statement:
The allegation that DPEARE teachers are merely 'race spies' is beneath contempt. They are quality and experienced professionals seeking to bring about a process of educational change that will help to raise the attainment of all children.
The HMI reporting in Spring 1988 concluded:
The programme is developing satisfactorily and most work is of sound quality and adddresses the needs of Ethnic Minority pupils within the normal curriculum.
The importance of statistics (data) was underlined by the Home Office DPEARE Monitoring Panel:
A Queen's Park Community School Staff Newsletter reports a positive visit by the Monitoring team.
In 2005 the issues were revisited in a collection of essays in 'Tell it like it is: How our schools fail black children' was published with a launch discussion at Harlesden Library.
An Institute of Race Relations (IRR) review includes the following:
According to Brian Richardson, the editor of Tell it Like it is, ‘Black kids may not be labelled as “educationally subnormal” these days, but they are disproportionately excluded from school, dumped in pupil referral units and sent into the world with fewer qualifications than their peers.’
In 2004, Black boys were three times as likely to be excluded from school as White boys and the percentage of Black Caribbean pupils getting five or more grades A* to C at GCSE and equivalent was 36 per cent compared to 52.3 per cent of White children.
And, in 2005, the cocktail of excuses served up to wash down such unpalatable facts is still of the 1970s flavour. Both major parties and the mainstream media still focus on the supposed shortcomings within the Black community: the lack of ‘academic focus’; the supposed dearth of strong and positive role models created by living in fragmented families and now the influence of ‘ghetto fabulous’ culture. Despite the evidence accumulated over the last three decades which highlights the institutional racism at the heart of ‘underachievement’, there are still plenty of schemes addressing cultural confusion, negative self-esteem, alienation and bad behaviour among Caribbean youth and their parents.
Fast forward to yesterday evening's Scrutiny Committee (Video) where I made the following presentation:
The problem of under-achievement, particularly of boys of Black Caribbean heritage has persisted. In 2018 the Community and Wellbeing Scrutiny Committee expressed concern at the gap between Black Caribbean boys and other groups.
The 2018 standards report had shown that at the end of Key Stage 2 the attainment of boys of Black Caribbean heritage had increased by four percentage points but the gap with the national average for all pupils had widened to 23 points below the national average.
A Specialist Centre for Black Caribbean Boys’Achievement headed by Chalkhill Primary School was set up with Black Caribbean Boys Achievement champions in each school.
Detailed analysis of ethnic achievement data
was provided to the Schools Forum and some schools’ reluctance to provide
details on Black Caribbean Boys was noted. That data is still on the Council
website LINK but hasn’t been updated.
Now we come to this evening’s report:
3.12.6 notes:
The previous focus to improve the attainment of Boys of Black Caribbean Heritage continues to be monitored. However, this data is not in the public domain and is therefore provided as a confidential attachment.
I ask Why not in the public domain?
3.12.8 notes:
The Brent Schools Race Equality Programme was launched on December 6th, 2024. It is a free offer available to all Brent schools. Only 29 out of 63 primary schools have taken it up)
One of its aims is to:
To significantly increase the attainment of underperforming ethnic groups
7.4 notes that disappointing outcomes for Black Caribbean Boys persist and says:. Brent continue to implement plans to mitigate these outcomes the data indicates that there it more collaborative work required to improve outcomes and ensure this cohort does not continue to be left behind.
So Brent Council is stating that the data shows that there is a problem but the public, the community concerned, parents and others interested people are not allowed to see the data and assess the extent of the problem and success of the initiatives. This is not accountability and transparency and could give rise to the lack of trust in the system found by Jocelyn Barrow back in the 1980s. There is of course a need to assess value for money.
I ask that the Committee recommend that the data referred to in 3.12.6 be made public.
A further concern is that not all Brent school age children are in school and thus not included in the data. So there is missing context.
I ask that the Committee make request for ethnic information on the following issues.
Absence Rates
Exclusions
Number of pupils being home-schooled
The extent (if any) of off-rolling **
Impact of Covid
The number of NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training) in the borough
Responding, Shirley Parks, Director of Education Partnerships and Strategy said;
With regards to Martin's point about the data being publicly available. The DfE does not publish the data to this level of granularity so we have access to that to use internally, but we can't publish the national comparators. We would obviously also want to talk to schools [to see] if they are happy for us to publish our data alone. That would not make so much sense unless we could publish national comparators, which is why we are treating it as confidential data.
The fundamental trend which is what Martin actually covered was that we've known for years this cohort of children has not performed as well as we would want them to, which is why we've had a number of initiatives including the previous project that included champions in each school and also the current work that we are doing with the Race Equality programme. We've done three different initiatives to support this cohort of children....This year we are taking that one step further and we are funding an anti-racist programme working with the Leeds Becket University around an anti-racist kite mark award for schools to again make sure were are doing all we possibly can.
Ms Parks said the trend had gone up and down with different age cohorts but 'we're still not achieving what we want to achieve.' She pointed out that the LA was not doing as well as they would hope but 'we are making achievements as children go through the system.'
Cllr Kathleen Fraser (Chalkhill ward) said:
I'm listening to everybody thinking, nothing has really changed siince I was young and particularly when I was on the Council 1986-90 when we introduced anti-racist strategies and all sorts. I myself was the product of one intervention with regards to setting up courses for black people to get into higher education. It was successful but a pity that we had to do it...
I follow what Cllr Clinton was saying: with everything you say is happening, it just seems nothing is improving as regards to Afro-Caribbean young people... I'm not saying that there isn't some good stuff going on but we sat here last year and we didn't have certain figures. This year we've got them and we are glad, but how does SEND and Pupil Premium factor in? We talk about disadvantage, the pandemic, we can go on and on, but still we're failing certain children. Certain children are failing because we haven't grasped what exactly is going on.
Cllr Fraser in a further intervention at the end of the agenda item said:
We need to do more of a deep dive into this so we are not sitting in this situation next year with regard to standards. With the gap widening rather than reducing with regard to the Attainment of young people from Black Adrican Caribbean and Somali communities. I think with the resources that are being pumped in, we owe it to our residents to take a deep dive into this. Perhaps we can set up a Task Group to look at it.
The Committee did not adopt either of my requests.
* ‘How the West Indian Child is made
Educationally Subnormal in the British School System’ was first
published in 1971. Written by Bernard Coard, a Grenadian, who worked in
southeast and east London as teacher and youth worker during the 1960s,
the book aimed to expose the endemic levels of racism in Britain’s
education system and to rally communities to resist.
** Off-rolling is the practice of removing a pupil from the school roll without using a permanent exclusion, when the removal is primarily in the best interests of the school, rather than the the best interests of the pupil. This includes pressuring a parent to remove their child from the school roll (Ofsted):
