This year I was struck by the need to discuss the Black Lives Matter movement and the death of George Floyd with my P5 class. I felt that, as a teacher, it was my responsibility to tackle these subjects.

I also felt that by not addressing it, when it was all over the news and social media, with my class made up of 70 per cent black, Asian and/or minority ethnic (BAME) children, I would be letting them and their families down. I refused to be silent and therefore complicit - I knew that the conversations that might make me feel uncomfortable were the most necessary ones.

I gathered the class in a Google Meet and presented a simple PowerPoint to them. I spent time making sure that my lesson was appropriate for the age group, and that it was not biased or overly political. I asked like-minded teachers to review the PowerPoint with a critical eye - I’m lucky to have a small group of colleagues who share my social justice values.

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News editor’s take: Without BAME teachers, all we have is tokenism

I sought to highlight the issues and inform the children of facts and statistics with the hope that they would draw their own conclusions and ask their own questions. The lesson raised some interesting questions (“But can black people also be racist to white people?”, “Are all police bad?”, “When did racism begin?” and “Were cavemen racist?”).

Black Lives Matter: Confronting racism through education

The black children in the class had clearly been engaging in conversations already at home. The white and minority ethnic children were asking questions, eager to learn more. There was a sense of outrage and a yearning for change. This seemed promising. I felt inspired by these children. I felt hope for the future.

This bubble of hope was burst the next day when I opened my emails to a complaint from a parent. The email began by telling me that her son does not “see race” and will “play with anyone”, and ended in her asking for him to be removed from future lessons on the topic of BLM/police brutality/white privilege.

She considered the inclusion of tweets by Donald Trump to be “political bias” on my part and she labelled me as a “leftist brainwasher”. I felt crushed to receive this email and my first response was to feel shame and regret over teaching the lesson in the first place.

My shame soon turned into anger. I felt angry that a parent would respond in this way to a lesson based on basic human rights. I replied to her in detail and addressed each of her points. I quoted the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS), Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence and Education Scotland amongst others to vindicate myself and to illustrate how problematic her protests were.

As a teacher of only a few years, I have been conditioned to bow down to parents; to fear them, to base my worth as a teacher on, and to unfailingly respect, parental views and opinions. That email was a real turning point for me and although my hands were shaking as I typed, I knew that, in this instance, I was irrefutably on the right side of history. Just because this email was from a parent of a child in my class, they were not absolved of their outdated and privileged opinions.

I made a promise to myself that day. I vowed for that single lesson not to be the only one I teach about BLM and for that email not to put me off tackling this subject again in the future. The Curriculum for Excellence is so wide, ambiguous at times and open to interpretation - but that cannot become an excuse not to bring these conversations into our classrooms.

When there is a discussion of curriculum rationale, I’ll be the one to insist on the inclusion of Scotland’s involvement in colonialism and slavery and for black history not to be pigeonholed into one month of the year. Our school libraries need resources to be diverse and reflect the demographics of our classrooms, and teachers need to be aware of their responsibility and their privilege.

As a new teacher, I would like more CPD opportunities and training to be given to staff on how to deal with incidents of racism and for discussions of race to become as central to our classrooms as maths and literacy. I would like for BAME children, parents and families to feel safe and understood.

It is my view that there is a distinct lack of primary-aged resources for teachers to use. If I did not have to make up and defend my own PowerPoint, and if I had been given resources by the school, my reply to the parent would have been much simpler. There is also a need for support from senior management but, in my experience, headteachers do not want to rock the boat. It is easier not to teach these subjects or have these uncomfortable conversations, but there is complicity in comfort, an exercise of privilege. 

We must ask ourselves: who is it easier for? Who is most comfortable when these topics are ignored by schools and teachers?

It certainly is not the BAME children and families. We surely cannot be “getting it right for every child” if we continue with a colour/culture/ethnicity-blind approach and, by default, focus on the majority groups, which in this context would be white children.

This an edited version of a blog post that first appeared on the website of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Education for Racial Equality in Scotland. The teacher wishes to remain anonymous.