Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No79
Scottish Union for Education – Newsletter No79
Newsletter Theme: 'anti-racist education' in schools
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In the light of recent events in England, we decided to get together and write our first newsletter of the school year on so-called ‘anti-racist’ education. Politicians have been too quick to suggest that curriculum changes in schools might solve the issues of racism and social unrest. We felt a quick response to the widespread demands to crank up ‘anti-racist’ initiatives in schools was a priority.
Children and teachers are not lab rats to be used by politicians looking for a quick-fix solution to social and political crises. We need time, and an open discussion, to understand what happened this summer. The absence of riots in Scotland’s towns and cities does not mean that issues of social cohesion are not our concern, but schools are not the place to address these issues.
SUE believes it would be a mistake to change the curriculum in response to the riots and the unrest. What we teach children and how and when we teach them are serious issues that should be driven by our understanding of child development and teacher experience and expertise, not political crisis. The proposed English lessons in which children hunt for ‘fake news’ are likely to distract teachers’ and children’s attention away from the very significant. IT lessons on disinformation, dodgy statistics and dubious truth claims may seem relevant and innovative, but they are not appropriate for younger pupils, who haven’t yet formulated their own questions. Parents may want to raise, at home, the issues surrounding the riots, but to introduce these activities into any classroom below the S4 level is just as likely to cultivate cynicism and anxiety than critical engagement. We really need to avoid any campaign to politicise the issue of race in schools. Not wanting to be pessimistic, but in the coming year we may need to actively protect our children from any new political initiatives in the same way campaigners have challenged gender ideology in schools. As always, we welcome your thoughts about the best way forward.
Penny Lewis
Editor
Contact us at editorial@sue.scot and teachers@sue.scot.
Five ways for schools to avoid racial division
This week’s article was written by a team of our regular writers and editors, parents and teachers.
In response to the recent UK riots, the Westminster government decided that we need to educate children to be ‘anti-racist’ and to be always alert for disinformation. Bridget Phillipson, the new education secretary, said that she is launching a review of the curriculum for both primary and secondary schools to put ‘critical thinking’ across subjects so that children can filter the information they’re exposed to online. Phillipson told the press: ‘our curriculum review will develop plans to embed critical skills in lessons to arm our children against the disinformation, fake news and putrid conspiracy theories awash on social media.’
Although Scotland escaped the riots, there is little doubt that the Scottish government will follow Starmer and Co.’s lead; Labour’s approach to both racism and education aligns with Scotland’s existing policy. Last week, following an online spat with Elon Musk, former First Minister Humza Yousaf instructed his lawyer to make a public announcement that anyone who chooses to ‘incite racial hatred’ against Mr Yousaf ‘should expect multiple years in prison’.
On a more serious note, Phillipson’s promise to review the curriculum coincided with a piece by Nuzhat Uthmani, in the Times Education Supplement (TES) magazine, urging schools – primary and secondary – to adopt more stringent ‘anti-racist’ policies. Uthmani is an academic at Stirling University, and a former primary school principal, who describes herself as an ‘anti-racist educator and advisor’. She is a busy woman, advising government and government-funded non-governmental organisations (NGOs) (i.e. global citizenship education and WOSDEC) that deliver teacher training and provide school resources. More importantly, she is a board member of the Scottish government’s Anti-Racism in Education Programme, which funds Education Scotland to deliver the national Building Racial Literacy Programme, and she’s also co-chair of the government’s Diversity in the Teaching Profession and Education Workforce sub group, which works closely with the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTC Scotland) on teacher training.
Nuzhat’s article, 5 ways schools can foster an anti-racist environment is a good example of how to create an environment of fear and retribution, for both pupils and staff. Uthmani believes it’s naive to think the recent events have been caused by economic difficulties; for her, the issue is more straightforward: ‘Many of us have, for decades, been trying to educate society about the racist impact of colonialism and the reality of institutional racism’, she wrote. So according to one of the Scottish government’s lead consultants on race, the current unrest and lawlessness is the outcome of a failure to teach ‘anti-racism’ and post-colonial theories.
Uthmani wants to use the riots to compel teachers to become social justice warriors: ‘Are you willing to continue to embrace any discomfort, and honestly reflect on your practice and your responsibility for upholding the values of social justice?’ she asks.
SUE members, teachers and parents, were concerned that, left unchallenged, Uthmani’s 5 ways might dictate school priorities. So here is our first attempt to look at this policy agenda and its potential impact on children and staff.
1. Establish clear policies and guidelines
‘If they don’t already exist at your school, create comprehensive anti-racism policies that explicitly define unacceptable behaviours and outline the consequences of racist actions.
Ensure racist incidents, including micro-aggressions, are recorded’, urges Uthmani.
Anti-racist policies already exist in Scotland’s schools, as Uthmani knows, having played a key role in implementing them. Some might argue that similar initiatives in England bear responsibility for the recent unrest. Tony Sewell, who led the 2021 Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, when recently asked what action Keir Starmer should take to promote harmony in the wake of the violent disorder of the past week, replied:
Get rid, first of all, of all of the identity politics, all of the nonsense, all of the rhetoric around diversity, exclusion, inclusion, blaming the majority for ills in the past. It’s not actually taking us anywhere. It’s actually making the country disunited.
Unfortunately, Sir Tony’s plea will be disregarded by those benefiting from creating and delivering ‘anti-racist’ initiatives. To borrow from Upton Sinclair’s famous aphorism, ‘It is difficult to get someone to understand something when their career depends on not understanding it.’
So before creating new policies, schools might do better if they begin with the question ‘How good is our school?’ rather than ‘How racist is our school?’ They might want to look at the number of ‘racist incidents’, or incidents construed as racist, and ask the question, ‘Do we have a problem?’ This issue will be different for every school, and a good headteacher will address these issues quickly and appropriately, communicating their actions with the school community, without the need to ‘embed’ these reactive discussions into subject areas.
Both the Scottish and the Westminster governments need to recognise that not everyone is in favour of ‘anti-racist education’; some people consider it a racially and ethnically divisive political project. Often, today’s ‘anti-racism’ seems to overlap with the racism it purports to challenge. Both belief systems are underpinned by the miserable idea that people can be lumped into reductive categories based on their racial or ethnic background. They both support the idea that different races have fundamentally different traits and capacities, and that people should be judged based on their membership of these groups rather than their individual characters. These identities or categories are used by racists to justify the division of racial or ethnic groups into inherently ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ peoples, and for ‘anti-racists’, their division into ‘oppressors’ and ‘victims’. This outlook, whether racist or ‘anti-racist’, is not shared by most people of any colour.
The recording of ‘incidents’, including micro-aggressions, might sound like a harmless activity, but as we know through our experience of health-and-safety recording procedures, they do change the way people behave – and not necessarily in a good way. Note the number of educational conventions and activities that are now cancelled because they don’t comply with health-and-safety rules. With the issue of race, there is a real danger that monitoring of micro-aggressions will curb teachers’ ability to say what they think. Working to an enforced narrative decided by governments and their advisers is something we are familiar with in countries such as the former Soviet Union, China and North Korea, but do we want this in Scotland? Proposed policies may undermine trust in and between teachers and interfere with their ability to do their job based on knowledge, experience, good judgement and common sense.
2. Training and professional development
‘Provide regular training for teaching staff on recognising and addressing racist attitudes and behaviours. Building a racially literate staff is vital, including leaders, teachers, support staff and admin colleagues’, says Uthmani.
Are training and professional development required to build staff racial literacy? Ever since the creation of state education, schools have encouraged children to treat each other as equals and with respect and kindness. Where there are incidents of racism, schools have got much better at dealing with them within the existing liberal framework. However, the current government and quango-led ‘anti-racist’ practice draws significantly on divisive ideas imported from the United States known generally as ‘identity politics’ and specifically ‘critical race theory’(CRT). Such ideologies see race everywhere. Through the lens of race, history is politicised and simplified into a story of racial groups defined as exploited or exploiters; this is followed by calls for reparations and the challenging of privilege, and the Enlightenment goal of universal equality is always downplayed to imply that very little has changed over the centuries.
The American writer Coleman Hughes has labelled proponents of these new ideologies as ‘neo-racists’ who believe that ‘the lens of race is central to improving our society, our relationships and even our private lives’. These ideas are already in Scotland’s teacher training courses, in universities and in schools. Do we really want to compel everyone involved in education to sign up to them?
For teachers who wish to learn more about ‘anti-racism’ and the imported ideology on which it is based, information is available via the website of the organisation Don’t Divide Us. This includes details of the implementation of ‘racial literacy’ training and an ‘anti-racist schools’ plan that, contrary to the legal requirement for impartiality in education, entailed the teaching of contested ideas as facts. Schools should be wary of any initiative that requires teachers to accept values and political views that are incompatible with their own.
The role of school staff is to socialise pupils; divisive ideologies won’t help. Instead, perhaps interpersonal respect built on the principles of Martin Luther King Jr might be a useful starting point:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.
MLK’s approach unites us all in the task of instilling into our young people our best values, based on tolerance, democracy and respect. We may not need training and staff development to do that.
Scotland already has a serious problem with teacher training and GTC Scotland. Teacher training courses are not recruiting or producing enough teachers in the right subjects, and subject-specific skills are not being taught properly. Teachers are now encouraged to see themselves as activists tasked with educating future activists, rather than as objective and impartial observers hoping to enable children to evolve into independent, thoughtful adults.
GTC Scotland appears to have been ideologically captured; trainee teachers are taught how to promote the ‘correct’ political values rather than develop their understanding of their subject or a range of pedagogies. As a result, we have seen a decline in teachers’ ability to be impartial, and often the undermining of their authority. Some teachers have lost a sense of what is age-appropriate, not just in relation to sex education but also in relation to many issues, such as race, which are a feature of life today. Resources are being rewritten and teachers programmed to deliver a one-sided world view. There is a growing tendency for dogmatic ideas, rather than accepted facts, to be incorporated into the curriculum in service of the delivery of a ‘social justice’ agenda.
3. Curriculum integration
‘Ask yourself: why do we teach certain topics and texts? Whose perspective is centred and whose is missing? Are you upholding negative stereotypes, because “we’ve always done it that way”?’ asks Uthmani.
Educators working at all five stages of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence have a responsibility to ensure the accuracy and appropriateness of teaching resources, which are evidence based and free from bias. Teaching resources, whether created in-house or by external organisations, need to be of the highest standard and go through a rigorous quality assurance procedure before they are used in the classroom. Poorly designed resources, rather than facilitate progress, create a barrier to learning. ‘Decolonisation’ is a form of activism, not an educational project. It assumes that our current curriculum is something unduly prejudiced, while bestowing on itself the authority to unravel supposed ‘wrongs’, and it is not really about the promotion of equality.
The campaign to decolonise the curriculum works against the basic principles of accuracy, objectivity and appropriateness. There is a real danger that people with a limited knowledge and understanding of discrete academic areas become the purveyors of mis- or disinformation in our schools (as discussed in SUE newsletter No44). The problem with decolonisation is that it diverges from the idea of what we have in common as learners and teachers in the classroom; it separates society into racial identity groups, pitting people against each other, at a time when public unrest demands that we cultivate our common bonds.
The decolonising of the curriculum is based on a narrow understanding of the world and history centred solely on a colonial past (and that seems to exclude non-European and premodern imperialism), involving absolutist beliefs about white power and the disempowerment of non-white people. It subscribes to concepts such as ‘white privilege’ and ‘unconscious bias’ (i.e. the inherent racism of all white people). Decolonisation content is changed to avoid being too ‘western’, and history mined to support a narrative of continuous racism through the ages. In the decolonised curriculum, the arbitrary interpretations of teachers thrive, and students who dare to question them are excluded. The new content is often age-inappropriate and runs a real risk of scaring the wits out of children. Its advocates, like Uthmani, often say we need to accept the discomfort that accompanies discussions around race, but there is never space allowed for uncomfortable discussions with people who don’t buy into the decolonising agenda. And is ‘discomfort’ appropriate in primary education?
4. Encourage student leadership and involvement
‘Give priority to learner-led pupil committees that focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. Encourage students to take an active role in promoting anti-racist initiatives’, says Uthmani.
Getting students to lead discussions is not a useful way to deal with a complex issue. Often, student-led initiatives are really being directed by adults who don’t want to take responsibility for their ideas. Teachers should understand that it’s wrong to coach or direct pupils’ political opinions – particularly when they are under 16. Some pedagogies or teaching methods promote learning as a student-led process, and many teachers encourage pupils to be active and engaged learners, but engaged teaching is not the same as abdicating responsibility for leading the learning process. Children do bring different experiences to the classroom, and the rich variety of experiences can inform the education process, but that is different from getting children to lead on political issues, such as race or the ongoing Israel–Gaza conflict or the American election, that would demand adult engagement with the world.
The danger of student-led activity based on CRT is that it can promote prejudice and intolerance by encouraging the prioritisation of group identity (usually based on skin colour) over personhood; it often seems to be fostering an us-versus-them mentality. Pupils of different racial or ethnic groups could be discouraged to risk interacting socially for fear of committing any action perceived as a ‘micro-aggression’, which, Uthmani states, must be recorded as a ‘racist incident’. What if Pupil A compliments Pupil B on their performance in an exam, and Pupil B interprets this kindly intended remark as a racist microaggression because ‘[Pupil A] seemed surprised that people who look like me can do well at school’? Being branded as the perpetrator of a ‘racist incident’, Pupil A will be far less enthusiastic about engaging socially with pupils from a different racial or ethnic group; they will thus risk committing yet another ‘micro-aggression’ – that of avoidance.
5. Monitor and evaluate progress
‘Many of the actions above do not require hours of extra work or space in the timetable.
Most of all, it demands a shift in how we think about what we teach and how we teach it’, says Uthmani.
Is it true that more ‘anti-racism’ demands no extra time or resources? The declining standards in Scottish education are regularly reported. Be it the Curriculum for Excellence, the latest PISA scores, the ever-widening attainment gap, education cuts and the reliance on probationary staff, or simply lamenting the loss of a world-class system, there seems to be no end to the bad news. Perhaps it’s time for those in power to reflect on the past decade of existing ‘anti-racist’ policy and to consider how the campaign to convert teachers into social justice activists might have contributed to falling standards?
Monitoring and evaluation exercises are something that are very familiar to those involved in Scottish education. It seems we can hardly lift a book or deliver a class without someone else requiring that there is quality assurance. There is a lot of bureaucratic talk about the risk of low-quality delivery, and very little genuine investment to improve teaching. Monitoring is a lucrative growth industry, generating a whole sector of NGOs and other bodies with flags and award schemes. Sometimes they seem to have more weight and funding than those trying to deliver education. Perhaps the best way forward is not to worry about the monitoring but to employ more teachers and open up parent forums to give staff and families time to discuss the content of the school curriculum and where it impacts on the school – issues such as racism.
In recent years, Scotland has hurtled down the track of cultural change. Our political class, egged on by activist organisations, have been convinced that to be ‘progressive’, gender ideology, CRT and the narrative of anthropogenic climate change need to be embedded into every aspect of the Scottish curriculum. This shift means some schools have lost their core sense of purpose as centres of learning. Even a sprinkling of CRT across the curriculum will take time and energy, it will be divisive, and it will also distract attention from the substantial crisis that we face: a decline in genuine achievement, attendance, discipline and engagement.
Racism and rioting are issues that must be addressed in the world of politics, not through the lives of children.
Newark Primary School in Inverclyde has been heralded as an example of good anti-racist practice. The school’s anti-racist club produced an award winning video We Are All Special with financial support from the Scottish Government and the help of a teacher who attended Education Scotland’s Building Racial Literacy. It’s a good (and sad) animation, which captures some of the very negative experiences of young immigrant children in the school. It might be a good resource for trainee teachers, but is it right for children? It opens with the statistic that ‘45% of people living in Scotland see black and Asian people in a negative light’. One wonders where the children found this statistic. We hope it doesn’t educate children to think that almost half of the people they meet are racists.
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