Schools are failing to promote racial inclusion in schools with Black teenage boys being particularly prone to “adultification” and considered “less innocent” than their contemporaries.
Baroness Anne Longfield, the former Children’s Commissioner for England and now executive chair of the Centre for Young Lives, said Black children often felt unsafe and over-policed, and disciplined more harshly, in schools.
She told a safeguarding event in London, organised by Tes, that she wanted to see an “emphasis on racial inclusion which, everyone wants to really tackle but it so often falls off the agenda”. Longfield sits on the national taskforce on inclusion, chaired by Geoff Barton.
She said she was meeting with organisations and educational leaders to discuss how inclusive practices could be put “firmly at the heart of a new era of inclusion”.
“We heard how zero-tolerance behaviour policies often disproportionately punish Black and mixed-race students – especially boys – and can reinforce harmful stereotypes of these children as troublemakers”, she told Tes.
Asked why she believed racial inclusion often fell off the agenda, she said the education system “had not been developed to be inclusive”.
“Incentives have been built into the system that can reward exclusion and penalise schools that are inclusive. In the past, too little attention has been paid to the impact of the curriculum, insufficient training for teachers, and the need for a system that celebrates and supports diversity and inclusion.”
Zero-tolerance behaviour policies…can reinforce harmful stereotypes of Black children as troublemakers
She also said she was “hopeful” that changes were beginning to happen.
Embedding an anti-racism culture
Longfield called on education leaders to commit to “embedding a culture of anti-racism into the heart of their schools” and for the Department for Education to make anti-racism “a key thematic priority”.
She said that a curriculum lacking diversity and representation is “another barrier to fostering a sense of belonging and inclusion”.
“It should never be a tick-box exercise – it should run right throughout the whole education system. To achieve this, we need government, Ofsted and school leaders to both recognise what the problems are and, most importantly, tackle them”, Longfield said.
In a speech, she also called for more statutory guidance on inclusion, for pupil attendance dashboards and for admissions departments “to look at going to your local school becoming the norm”.
Longfield also expressed concerns about an increase in both persistent absence and suspensions, and said poor mental health was a big problem.
“One in 10 children had a nominal mental health condition before Covid – now one in five. And the one in five is just such a huge number that it’s really coming into all our lives,” she said.
The national discussion around children’s mental health had not translated “into the kind of action that’s needed to really tackle that level of crisis”.
