5 July 2023
Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future, and renders the present inaccessible.
Maya Angelou
Like many communities around the globe, Brighton & Hove residents were deeply impacted by the racist murder of George Floyd in May 2020.
Educators, young people, parents and carers across the city raised the issue of racism in education with Councillors and the need for a strategic, well-informed and consistent approach was identified.
The anti-racist education strategy 2021 to 2026 supports the council’s 2020 pledge to become an anti-racist city.
The council is deeply grateful to the wide range of people who contributed to the development of the strategy including local education experts, education workers from all phases, parents and carers, young people, community organisations and community representatives.
The council is especially grateful for the time and energy Black and racially minoritised educators and young people have given, sharing their experiences, insights and visions.
This strategy supports the development of anti-racist practice in early years, primary, secondary, special schools, sixth-form colleges and alternative educational provision.
Through implementing this strategy, we aim to achieve the following vision:
Creating a community of anti-racist education settings where the complexities of our diverse interwoven histories are acknowledged, where every child can learn and thrive, where everyone feels safe, equal and we all have a strong sense of identity and belonging.
Because racism is not like jealousy or selfishness, it is not a primal urge or a basic instinct, it is a 400-year-old political and economic system that has infected our institutions, our culture and even our thinking.
David Olusoga
The strategy identifies seven areas where we aim to nurture change in anti-racist education settings. These are:
If we do not know how to meaningfully talk about racism, our actions will move in misleading directions.
Angela Y. Davis
All adults in education settings are skilled and confident to support and educate in a way that enables rather than harms and that is informed by a strong understanding of anti-racist practice and intersectional social justice.
I think the wider training of staff will have a big impact within school. I agree that a lot of staff feel cautious or ill equipped to tackle issues around racism because they don’t want to get it wrong or say the wrong thing and any additional training will help build staff’s confidence and understanding.
Education worker
To help achieve this outcome we will:
We want to develop a structured programme of CPD that:
Racism is man’s gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.
Abraham Heschel
Black and racially minoritised families are supported, their unique identities are recognised and celebrated, and they are valued and equal members of their school/nursery/college community.
Looking at the racial make-up of my predominantly white-staffed school, I think trying to promote awareness among support staff, admin and cleaners could be beneficial. A black child might not meet a black face here until the cleaners come in, which doesn’t feel representative of Brighton now. I would like to speak to kids about race and their experiences, and how I can make their time here better from that perspective, but don’t feel qualified.
Education worker
To help achieve this outcome we will:
If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.
Lilla Watson
Incidents are reported because the setting is trusted to consistently identify, record and respond in a way that recognises the harm caused by racism and seeks resolutions that support justice, learning, relationships, and wellbeing.
Teachers should know how to deal with situations - not invalidate someone’s experience, know how to comfort them, and know how to teach racists not to be racist.
Pupil
To help achieve this outcome we will:
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
James Baldwin
Children and young people have empathy, understanding, care and support for each other that is informed by a developing knowledge of historical and contemporary racisms.
They need to teach everyone about racism… and the history… but I don’t know if the teachers know… so how can they teach it?
Pupil
To help achieve this outcome we will:
The very notion of Great Britain’s ‘greatness’ is bound up with empire. Euro-scepticism and Little Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood and rotted English teeth.
Stuart Hall
Challenging and changing the established Eurocentric curriculum so that we tell and hear stories from different perspectives, not just the coloniser's version.
(Teachers) ignore the fact that Black people discovered many things. They degrade Black people. They need to teach about other cultures and appreciate them.
Pupil
In history they only talk about Black people as slaves - they don’t say anything good about Black people. And then other pupils think they can call us slave.
Pupil
When they talk about Islam or India or racism in lessons - the teacher asks me. But how am I supposed to know? I’m a child at school.
Pupil
To help achieve this outcome we will:
Had I known the proximity of African stories to British stories, of black people to British people, of Blackness to whiteness, it might have changed the way I saw myself. I have kept a diary since I was eight years old. Even the earliest entries record a constant consciousness of feeling at odds with my surroundings, of being defined by my skin, hair, name and a murky background from a place synonymous with barbarity and wretchedness.
Afua Hirsch
Anti-racist education is integrated into every policy and put into practice. It is felt, experienced, seen and heard in every aspect of nursery or school or college life shifting the experience of all pupils, families and staff.
Many of the Black girls shared incidents where they had been told to modify or change their hairstyles. They felt strongly that the school’s hair policies were discriminatory to Black girls in particular.
Education worker
To help achieve this outcome we will:
You cannot be what you cannot see.
Dr Ronx
There is diversity on all governing bodies and staffing groups, including the leadership, to reflect the city’s population and the local community.
I have read the (draft) Anti-Racist Schools Strategy and think a strength is the realisation that this is a long-term project to ensure sustainability. I think it will be more powerful to focus on the systemic nature of racism and what underpins it to change attitudes and beliefs, rather than firefight incidents.
Education worker
To help achieve this outcome we will:
Why are there not more teachers of colour? Why are all the teachers white? I think we would feel more understood at school if there were more teachers of colour.
Pupil
There is no such thing as race. None. There is just the human race - scientifically, anthropologically.
Toni Morrison
There is much discussion about which language best describes groups harmed by racism and there is no consensus. It is expected that discussion around language will continue throughout the delivery of this strategy and that the terms used will change in consultation with communities.
The term ‘Black and racially minoritised’ has been adopted by the council and is used throughout this strategy with the acknowledgement that there is no agreed terminology to discuss race.
While the strategy uses these umbrella terms, it also recognises that differently racialised groups have different experiences in education.
This strategy aims to prevent and respond to a broad range of racisms and intersecting oppressions. Over the course of the strategy focused attention will be given to differently racialised communities including but not limited to: