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Sewell: ‘We’ve been bogged down with the socialist route and agenda’

The experts agree: black kids are getting a raw deal in the classroom, but the solution remains far from clear

The underachievement of black students in schools has long been a source of concern to parents, teachers, and the wider community.

It was with this in mind that The Voice hosted an editor’s form at the House of Commons on March 23.

The forum brought together a range of experts in the field of education to discuss the question of whether black children were getting a raw deal from the education system.

Chaired by The Voice deputy editor Vic Motune, the panel included: Diane Abbott (MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington); Professor Gus John; education advisor Gloria Hyatt and Voice columnist Tony Sewell.

The audience included Peter Okoye and Ann-Marie Morris-Daley from the CarAF Centre; Gerry German, director of the Communities Empowerment Network; Paul Phoenix from Black Parents in Education; and Denise Roberts, editor of My Child magazine.

Despite being invited, the Government’s Department for Education and Skills declined to take part in the debate. There have been recent announcements trumpeting successes in the achievements of black students.

However the panel held the general view that little had improved.

“All the evidence suggests that there has not been much change in the situation which the country has been aware of for many decades," said Gus John.

ATTAINMENT

“The last set of statistics suggests that there has been a rise in the attainment of young black people, greater than any other ethnic groups in the school population.

“While that is something to welcome, the fact of the matter is that it proves what we – those of us who are teachers and had a Caribbean education

– were aware of for the longest time, that our grey matter didn’t drop into the Atlantic when we crossed the pond.

“And consequently there’s no reason why the levels of performance we were used to in our countries of origin should not be evident amongst black children in this country.

“What is important to understand are the structural, cultural, political factors that have given rise to these levels of underachievement."

He continued: “There’s a whole complex of issues that we need to unravel here. One of them is: how do you ensure schooling is organised in a manner that actually addresses the needs of individual learners rather than constantly seeing things in terms of groups?

“So that you consider the specific needs of individuals – their strengths, their weaknesses, and you’re attending to both their academic progress and their individual self-development."

However, Sewell called for a rethink of educational strategies for black students.

“One of the ways that we’ve got it wrong is that we’ve been bogged down with the socialist route and agenda, which is not necessarily our agenda, and what we’ve done is concentrated on a very small group of disaffected black youths.

“It seems to me – strategically – that we’ve missed a whole way of going about it. We’ve got to come to the government and not say: ‘here’s a group of black children underachieving and what are you going to do?’

“What we want to actually say is: ‘here are the big strategic ideas and this is the group we want to focus on’." Sewell stunned the group when he called for the exclusion of the badly behaved minority in favour of the wellbehaved majority.

“In some schools, children are openly dealing drugs, they are openly violent with teachers, they are not coming to school on time.

“They never do any homework, they never have any of their bags with any schoolwork and they are bringing in a culture from the street of gangsterism right into the classroom. And then you sit down and say ‘we are concerned about exclusion rates?’

“To be honest, in some of those schools half of those students should have been out and if I was the head teacher I would kick them out because they deserved it," he said.

Other members of the panel violently objected to Sewell’s view.

“All you are doing is perpetuating that system of selection that has been refined by rejection," said German.

“There are too many schools like that which are not fit places to educate children," German added.

Paul Phoenix interjected: “We have got racism in our education system to a level that it is almost becoming acceptable.

HUMANITY

“How can we expect any child to go into a system that tells them, one, ‘you don’t exist’ and two, ‘your foreparents did absolutely nothing for the benefit of humanity?’

“Would any of us walk into an environment that treats them the same way that the education system treats black children?" Phoenix asked.

Hyatt added: “What tends to happen in the classroom situation is that if the child disrespects the teacher, the teacher immediately takes a power role and begins to take that to the child.

“I had children who committed murders in my school. I had children being involved in gangs and drugs. But in the school, in the environment that we set up, those type of things were least likely to happen and they were managed if they did happen."

The panellists were also quick to recognise that underachievement began at an early age.

Abbott explained: “When black kids go to school at age five, they are on an equal level. By the age of 15, the achievement of black boys in particular has collapsed.

“Even though the figures coming out now are saying that things have improved, I’m not so sure. Black children, from the point they come into the system, start to underperform and the situation gets worse."

Abbott asked: “Why is it – as some of the figures suggest – that African children do better than Afro-Caribbean children?

“I think it’s to do with issues of identity, issues of culture, issues of family.

Somehow the first generation in this country from Africa have a strong sense of who they are and are able to survive in the society better than our third and fourth generation Afro-Caribbean boys,” she said.

But just where does the blame lie with students’ underachievement? Is it a fault on the part of parents, teachers or the system itself?

“There’s lots of stuff around having a more diverse workforce, a more diverse teaching workforce, and we need a teaching workforce which, regardless of their colour, are more culturally literate," said Abbott.

“We need more diverse teaching, more attention to teacher training, and more money put into the schools where black pupils are.

“It’s not about blaming teachers. In 2006 the proportion of black teachers in London is 2.9 per cent, but the proportion of minority ethnic students in schools is 43.5 per cent. That doesn’t make sense."

LAMBASTED

Professor John also lambasted the lack of involvement of black youth in discussions around education.

“I have a very simple approach to this thing. Any teaching situation, whether it be in a grammar school or state comprehensive, is predicated upon one thing: that is the relationship between an individual child and the teachers.

“The child might form part of the group, but effectively the teachers’ learning objectives have got to register with the individual child.

Professor John said: “We’ve go to ask questions such as, why it is that black young people of Afro-Caribbean descent as a group have come to have such a profile within the British education system? And how could we invest in those young people such power that the type of discussions that people like us have regularly are happening among young people? That is what is lacking."

“Does the society have built-in structural pre-disposition to silencing the voices of young people?

“There is this notion that if you encourage young black people to meet and organise and find a voice, they would have so many things to say that are critical of the damn system that you won’t be able to control it."

Hyatt explained that from her own experience of setting up Elimu Academy, which caters for black pupils at risk of exclusion, there were opportunities for change.

“What we did in schools was to make them accountable. We had a selection of quality assurance and I think this should happen around the country.

“We should be measuring schools’ quality assurance in measuring how teachers are engaging black young people."

However activist Gerry German was adamant that blame should not be put on the parent.

“What concerns me is the everlasting propensity of unions and teachers to say that the fault must either be in the child or in the family. The place we need to look at is the interplay between the child and the teacher.

“The teachers have problems and if criticisms are going to be levelled, that’s where they must be levelled.

“Twelve million days a year – seven million in secondary, five million in primary – are lost in education. Teachers are absent on sick leave at seven times the rate of children who absent themselves through truancy.

PREJUDICE

“So if it’s bad for teachers, how much worse must it be for those young people who are regularly looked upon with the combination of negative prejudice and destructive stereotyping?" German asked.

Sewell pointed out that if changes were to be made, a radical, long-term strategy was needed: “We need to look at how we engage the government. We haven’t gone to them and said: ‘over 10 years this is the strategy that we want for black boys and this is the millions that it is going to cost you’.”

However German objected: “If you want change over 10 years, what is going to happen to our children now?

All of the initiatives we’ve had have been so long-term that nothing happens.

It seems to me that if there’s going to be change, its got be intense, electric and now."

Published: 27 March 2006
Issue: 1211

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