Many of the children in our schools are growing up exposed to greater diversity than ever before, through direct contact with people around them, as well as via the various media channels with which they interact daily. Inner-city schools across the UK boast over 30 different languages spoken by their students, making daily life a rich tapestry of experience, culture, religion and language. Yet, Britain’s Brexit agenda in particular seems to reflect a society that is increasingly polarised, affected by “popularist” messages of intolerance, suspicion and stereotyping.
In Birmingham these past few months, a battle for equality has been raging around the “No Outsiders” curriculum for sex and relationship education. Parent protests against children being taught about LGBT relationships have escalated to such an extent that Birmingham City Council has just won an injunction preventing these from continuing outside the school. While the parents protesting belong mainly to religious Muslim communities and will be no strangers to the suspicion and prejudice that can be a feature of their own daily life, this doesn’t seem to make for a less charged and more compassionate strategy for finding the middle ground.
Justine Greening, the former education secretary and equalities minister, tweeted: “You can’t pick and choose on human rights and equality. Children should understand a modern and diverse Britain they’re growing up in.” But it seems that one person’s understanding of the boundaries of modernity and diversity isn’t identical to another’s, no matter how vibrant and multilayered our communities living side by side may appear to the naked eye.
I am not sure that we as educators even get the extent to which we are apt to uphold the white, cisgender, straight male as the most worthy of wealth, leadership and power in our society, at the expense of just as worthy yet often marginalised people whom we at times concede to “tolerate” yet not include. While on the one hand, we have programmes dedicated to encouraging our girls into stereotypically male disciplines such as Stem subjects, it is clear in reality that women are still fighting for a place around the table in the boardroom and in leadership roles in our schools and multi-academy trusts, despite frequent claims that progress has been made. Even where women are apparently granted entry to roles predominantly occupied by men, we see that the gender pay gap is embarrassingly present in all walks of life. Unless we change the bias that both men and women are socialised to, and which damages both, we will never change.
This bias takes many forms, and there are many groups in society that are exposed to anything from indifference and subtle, structural forms of discrimination through to out-and-out obstruction, hostility and abuse. We are all complicit in this unless we take steps to actively learn about how bias works, and to combat it through a journey of iterative learning and a commitment to changing our practice, structures, curriculum and communication. We should be doing this as people directly affected by bias, and as allies to marginalised fellow humans.
It’s not all doom and gloom in the education sector as there will always be those who are ready to get up and get moving, sweeping others along with them.
The BAMEedNetwork, a grassroots organisation founded in 2017, has been working towards this goal in earnest, and has made some headway in moving the issue further up on the agenda for the Department for Education and for school leaders, governors, MAT leaders and practitioners themselves. As well as inputting into policy and thought leadership on the issue, the BAMEed Network has a deeply practical approach to supporting BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) teachers and leaders and their non-BAME colleagues nationwide to understand and act to reduce systemic racism in our sector.
The WomenEd movement has also been instrumental over several years in simultaneously encouraging women educators to be 10 per cent braver while calling out sexism in all its forms and building a gently growing body of male HeForShe allies.
The most recently formed LGBTEd movement is a national network empowering LGBT+ educators to be authentic in schools, colleges and universities, to support students and to be an advocate for increasing LGBT+ visibility in our education system. These three groups can be seen together on the same stage, recognising the intersectionality of those they advocate for and working together as allies at one of the “Great places to work” sessions at the Sheffield Hallam Festival of Education.
It seems it is not enough to live side by side. We need to engage compassionately with the human experience of our fellow citizens. We need to build a future together that includes as much diversity of experience and thought as possible to be able to find creative and humane solutions to the problems in the world. In the words of the inimitable Barack Obama: “Yes we can!”
Penny Rabiger is a chair of governors and a MAT board trustee. She is a steering group member for the BAMEedNetwork and part of the WomenEd network, while working as director of engagement at the Finnish-British education organisation Lyfta.
The Sheffield Hallam Festival of Education will take place on Saturday 15 June. For more details, click here
