No Healing For A Broken People

I have been so encouraged over the last year at how much my school has tried to improve its equality, diversity and inclusion. Especially as so much of it has been student-led. Following the murder of George Floyd last year, the anger some of our students felt about what they saw as a lack of comment from the school regarding the brutal assault led to some honest and impactful conversations with the Headteacher and the creation of a Black Lives Matter group which has, this year, morphed into a broader Equality, Diversity and Inclusion committee looking at all aspects of “EDI” across the school. Action from the school’s Student Council, and co-ordination with fellow Councils from across all the schools operated by the same Academy Trust - led to a Trust-wide committee with similar aims. Concurrently and independently, a decision was made to start working towards a Stonewall School Champion award - knowing we are a long way off but deciding to start the work right now; inspired by LGBTQ+ students we know need better support than we are currently offering them but who are already breaking down barriers within the school community.

All of this is really promising, and already behind the scenes a lot is being done. Subject audits, transformations to hiring policies and processes, changes in the way we mark exams, and this afternoon some online CPD sessions on inclusivity and diversity. Soon, we will all be receiving training in unconscious bias too. Working on this stuff has been one of the professional highlights of my year and I can already imagine the difference it has the potential to make to so many lives going forward.

At the same time, however, discussion about diversity remind me just how inherently conservative and identity-oppressing schools - at least schools in the UK - institutionally are. We talk about celebrating diversity and ensuring representation, yet ask our students to subsume their personalities into identical school uniforms, punishing them for adding any embellishments which might allow some self-expression. How can we expect our students to flourish as “themselves” when we police their appearance, their language and even sometimes their hobbies at every turn? Meanwhile we continue to teach the disputed curricula of colonialism and marginalisation which remain embedded in formal exam specifications. Exams do not “celebrate diversity” - they instantiate ranking and hierarchy, sorting difference into success or failure that starts in the classroom and ends in the job market. How inclusive can we really be when it remains our prerogative to deny you entry to the next stage of your education or employment on the basis of your aptitude for arbitrary tests of memorisation and regurgitation? What hope have we got to truly create a more equal, diverse and inclusive world when it remains our professional responsibility to groom our students into becoming a certain kind of citizen: one who is accepting of the unjust norms of an unequal and fundamentally flawed social order and able to navigate their way to success within it; a success which, by necessity within such a system, can only come at the expense of somebody else? Someone likely disadvantaged by the structural inequalities and exclusion that, in their lived diversity, has left them vulnerable to systemic prejudices and discrimination?

If I teach my students to reject the whole damn thing then apparently I do not meet the professional standards expected of a teacher. But as the Black radical, Kehinde Andrews, puts it: “there is no sanctuary within this imperial system; there is no respite, no safe space. We can only ever partially heal when we are constantly living under oppression…There is no healing for a broken people while the system that breaks us is left intact.”