UK schools have targeted black children for generations – the education system is overdue for a reckoning

We’ve had books on racial biases and punishment for cultural practices since the 1970s. Instead of repeating the same facts, we need educators and the government to tackle these prejudices head-on

Schools are unfairly punishing black students for their hairstyles, wearing bandanas and kissing teeth (Getty)

The penny should have dropped long before now. That it has taken this amount of time is a sign of a much bigger issue: the UK’s unwillingness to accept, once and for all, that black children are exposed to discrimination the minute they enter the education system.

In any case, thanks to efforts from the likes of initiatives like No More Exclusions, and think tanks like the Runnymede Trust, it’s now a fact that will spread beyond the confines of the communities of black people in Britain who have long known this to be true. As The Independent reports today, “schools are unfairly punishing black students for their hairstyles, wearing bandanas and kissing teeth” due to racial bias and a general lack of understanding.

But the inequality doesn’t stop there. As revealed some years ago by the Department for Education, black Caribbean children, in particular, are three and a half times more likely to be excluded than all other children at primary, secondary and special schools. These are disparities that exist not because of any underlying propensity to cause trouble, but probably because educators perceive black children as fundamentally disruptive, hopeless, and inferior, regardless of what they do.

There’s also the question of the role of academies in all of this. According to experts, the rise of free schools and academies (both of which aren’t governed by local authorities) may well be giving way to exactly the kind of behavioural and uniform policies that target black students. In fact, they already have. And the government’s behaviour tsar, Tom Bennett, endorsed such rules (including two-hour detentions for kissing teeth) as recently as October.

These are problems that have persisted in British education for decades. In the 1970s, books like Bernard Coard’s How the West Indian Child is made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System served almost as a how-to guide for black immigrant parents who needed to navigate a system that had either left their children behind, or disproportionately sent them to what was formerly known as “ESN” (educationally subnormal) schools (a whole other kettle of fish in terms of the persistence of eugenics in the education of those with special educational needs and disabilities). By 2005, almost 40 years later, while ESN schools had since become a thing of the past, Brian Richardson’s Tell it like it is brought up many of the same issues, namely that black children were still being excluded or punished at higher rates than their peers. Not much, if anything, had changed. It seems that’s still the case today.

These glaring examples of systemic racism – anti-blackness specifically – aren’t the sort of problems that fade into obscurity as the years go by. They need to be tackled on a governmental as well as interpersonal level. Vitally, black people and the experiences we’ve been screaming from the rooftops for far too long, should be taken seriously. Looking at the way things are now, however, just after Meghan Markle’s announced departure, and a host of public figures doing everything in their power to negate the existence of racism in Britain following that, it’s not exactly surprising.

As devastating as the reality is, I’m ashamed to admit that, at times, I’ve grown almost desensitised to the pervasiveness of anti-blackness in education, accepting it as a fact of life when fighting felt too wearisome. On other occasions, it’s been all I can think about. I’m barely at the stage of even thinking about having kids, but I know that if I do, I’ll have to keep as watchful an eye on the way my potential child is treated in school as my parents had to when I was a pupil. It’s the reason I took up mentoring. Why I’m so protective of little black children who are told, yes even these days, that they’ll never amount to anything.

I knew full well, by the age of 10, that I couldn’t always be sure that I’d receive fair treatment from all of my teachers, that my confidence would often be interpreted as arrogance, rudeness or just plain naughtiness. It took a while to accept, especially when I saw my white classmates rewarded for the same behaviour. But once I did, it swiftly became a fact of life. I’ve seen the look of undue alarm and outrage on teachers’ faces when overhearing a child kissing their teeth in conversation with other kids. I even had a presumably, but now I look back, perhaps not so well-meaning teacher, specifically play the song “Chain Gang” by Sam Cooke for me every time the class sat down to do work. “This is your song!” she’d exclaim, pointing at me. I lapped it up every time, unaware of the undertones of the tradition she’d created.

I grew up watching unfazed at home as my mother, then a governor at my primary school for precisely the reasons outlined above, fought to support other black parents who faced similar issues. “They’re calling her a bad child,” her friends would say. “She’s five, she was just playing, she’s not ‘aggressive’”.

“What could a kid with less than half a decade’s experience on the planet do to get detention, or be suspended?” other black parents would question, knowing the answer, but possibly too heartbroken to say it out loud: they were bringing up black children in a racist system, and there was little in place to protect them from it.

I’ve heard horror stories from black teachers in training about the racism of their course mates and colleagues. Stories of white teachers who barely had any contact with non-white, or working-class children before their placements in diverse inner-city schools, who said openly racist things on a regular basis, but saw no repercussions.

What seems to be lost in all of this is the fact that these are children we’re dealing with. Babies, in my eyes. As easy as it may be for some to say that this is a matter of being too sensitive, those who take that position usually have no idea what it feels like to have your potential contested because of who you are, not anything you’ve done, at every single stage of your life, starting with school. We seem to have the capacity to recognise that childhood experiences, in general, are formative and should be handled sensitively. If we can accept that, we should be able to take the same approach regarding the education of black children in Britain.