AS A six-year-old in the 1970s, Noel Gordon was sent to an “educationally subnormal” boarding school, 15 miles from his family home. 

The reason wasn’t due to any intellectual or developmental disability. It was a result of undiagnosed Sickle Cell anaemia. 

As a four year old he had gone to hospital to have a tooth removed, and while treating him doctors found out that Noel had the condition. 

The medication he was given triggered a serious reaction. But then, bizarrely, his health issues saw him classified as having “learning difficulties.”

His parents were never given any evidence of this. 

“When I was six, a man from the local Education Department came to our house,” Mr Gordon recalls. 

“Because the hospital had informed them that I had to be monitored for the rest of my life, the man told my parents that they had a boarding school for me with a matron where I would be taken care of when I was not well. What he was alluding to was a school for ‘educationally subnormal’ children, or special schools as they were called at the time. But my parents weren’t told that.

“If they had been told they would never have agreed to it.

“My parents trusted the education department officials. They thought small class sizes meant I would get better teaching, but they were basically lied to.

A confused and scared Mr Gordon was sent to the White Spires boarding school for educationally subnormal children.

“My mum and dad were told I needed to be in a school where there was a matron to keep an eye on me if I was unwell. But I remember that during a swimming lesson at the local pool, I had a crisis, and she didn’t know what to do. So she called my parents to come and collect me, but it was over three hours later before I got painkillers.”

His time at the school was an extremely traumatic experience, one that has left him with mental scars well into adulthood.

“That school was hell,” he recalls. 

Soon after joining the school he was assaulted by a much older boy, a 16-year-old pupil who had a mental age of 6, in the school’s dining room. When his father visited the school for the first time with his brother to complain, what he saw devastated him. 

“While he was there my dad quickly realised what type of school it was. My brother asked him ‘Are you going to leave him here?’

“He didn’t want to, but his hands were tied. My parents didn’t know at the time that they could have appealed the decision.”

Further physical assaults were to follow, this time from a support worker at the school.

“When I was about 12, I remember playing with another boy in the playground. The teachers at the school knew my character, I never got into fights. As I chased this boy as part of a game we were playing this teacher catches up with me, wrenches my arm and pulls me and starts beating me over the head with her fists, calling me a black b*****d under her breath so no-one would hear. This woman was quite stocky but I managed to get away from her. I cursed her and ran away from school. One of the good teachers brought me back. I was penalised and put to t bed early in isolation. Thank God my mum phoned me that evening, she took me out of school that night until they could sort things out.”

He continues: “An arrangement was made for me to attend a secondary school near my boarding school two days a week. I was told that if I stayed there until my education picked up, I would be transferred to a normal school in my hometown. But while there I was racially abused and I didn’t fit in. I refused to go back and had to stay at White Spires. 

“After they sacked the support worker, I was bullied by two teachers and another teacher who was the deputy head until the very day I left school. I called her the she-devil. It was mental torture, and the most painful. I’ve been trying to get justice for years.”

As well as the racism and bullying, Mr Gordon’s education took a backward step. 

There was no curriculum. Children did addition and subtraction on a Friday afternoon but that was about it. For the rest of the time they played games. 

“We were never taught how to spell, use grammar or the English language,” he says. “We had a reading scheme and I could just about read, but could not write or spell.”

Exams were out of the question for ESN pupils, so he left school without a single qualification to his name.

“I couldn’t fill out job application forms or even spell basic words. The only jobs I could apply for were labouring or cleaning jobs. These are not the best jobs to do when I’m trying to manage my Sickle Cell. 

“Had I been educated, I could have gone straight to college or university.”

After leaving school he discovered a love for learning and went on to earn a number of impressive qualifications, including a degree in computing. He has also written a children’s book.  

However Mr Gordon says he feels like he’s spent his whole life trying to catch up on his education, and still carries the stigma of the label ‘educationally subnormal’. 

He is one of many Black people wrongly classified as educationally subnormal in the 1960s and 70s, a subject that was dramatised in one of Steve McQueen’s ‘Small Axe’ films.

They are now set to launch legal action against the government.

The former pupils have banded together to demand a formal apology and compensation for their lives being ruined.

Members of the group say they have struggled with a lack of self-worth and confidence.

Last month, the eight survivors told MPs about the lifelong impact of being classified as educationally subnormal.

Mr Gordon told The Voice: “My life could have been so different if I had had a proper education like the other children.  

“A lot of us are living lives that have been diminished. We’re not walking in our true potential. 

“My life has been diminished by the struggle to overcome barriers that shouldn’t have been there in the first place, barriers that were put there because of racism.”

Mr Gordon disagrees with those who say he should leave the past behind.

“People need to walk in my shoes before they start saying things like that. I, and others like me, are living with trauma. 

“The system holds us back. And then when you try to hold it accountable there’s nothing but denial.”

Among those who are part of the campaign is Maisie Barrett, who grew up in Leeds. 

Ms Barrett says the decision to send her to an ESN school ruined her life chances. 

“In terms of education we did nothing,” she recalls. “We played, we did PE, we traced letters and numbers, but we didn’t learn anything.”

When she was 13, she was transferred to a mainstream school after her mother got in touch with a Black social worker who, after evaluating her, concluded that young Maisie was intelligent and had been sent to the ESN school due to racism.

But unable to read or write she struggled to make up the lost ground in her new school. 

“I was hearing the words like maths, English, geography and history for the very first time. I didn’t know what they were. 

ABOLISHED

“I also didn’t have any social skills so very few pupils could relate to me, so I just became a loner. I left with zero self-confidence and a self-image that is poor to this very day.

”The early years of a child’s life are crucial for healthy, normal cognitive, social, emotional, speech and language development. At the age of six years old, they sent me off to a special school where they didn’t stimulate my brain. They did not teach me to learn in order to learn. They put me into an environment with children with behavioural, learning difficulties and Down Syndrome children who in those days the education system thought couldn’t learn. We know now that is not true. Therefore, I was in an environment where there was no learning and no curriculum or structure. We were just left to read pictures and draw and play.”

It was only in her 30s that she was diagnosed with dyslexia.

Ms Barrett now has four university degrees and is also a published author. 

But her early education has had a lasting and painful impact on her children, who have been negatively affected by her own feelings of inadequacy.

“In my twenties, I was very quiet due to a lack of vocabulary and social skills, which affected my confidence and self-esteem, and I was depressed throughout this time” she recalls. “A lack of social skills makes you a loner. You also become defensive to protect yourself. This environment greatly affected me because I was a dyslexic child who they made educationally subnormal.

“When I returned to a learning environment in my thirties, I couldn’t work and study. Because I was made educationally subnormal, not only did I have a lot of catching up to do, but due to dyslexia, it took me a long time to process and retrieve information therefore for this reason I couldn’t work and provide for my children’s needs and being depressed did not help.

“Children need as a safe and nurturing home to imitate their siblings and parents, but I was single, depressed and was studying all the time and I couldn’t nature my children the way a mother should do.

Barrett continues: “When I eventually went to university, my son began stealing mobile phones to buy clothes and went to prison. He told them in prison that he was depressed, so they gave him psychosis medication. The aftereffects of the medication gave him a lockjaw and before he came out of prison, he was addicted to the medication. For this reason, he has been in and out of mental health hospitals because when he stops taking the medication; he becomes mentally unwell.

“I blame the education system for deliberately handicapping my development when I was a child, which had a devastating effect on all areas of my life, especially motherhood.”

During the 1960s and 1970s, many Caribbean parents were told special schools would offer better support and learning opportunities.  This deception was exposed in 1971 by the Grenadian writer and teacher Bernard Coard, who wrote a pamphlet called How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System.

Mr Coard argued that ESN schools were being used as a “dumping ground” for Black children and that teachers were mistaking the trauma of immigration for a lack of intelligence. 

The pamphlet proved instrumental in shifting the opinion of Black parents, and was a key factor in the establishment of Black-led Saturday schools which taught curriculum subjects alongside Black history and prepared students for employment. 

The 1981 Education Act eventually abolished the term “educationally subnormal”.

TRAUMATISING

Francis Swaine, a solicitor at Leigh Day who is leading the legal action, says it is as much about justice as it is about compensation.  

“The histories given by people, whose entire lives have been shaped by being wrongly labelled as educationally subnormal, are sad and traumatising” she says. 

“The consequences as adults – as well as in childhood – have been extreme. Their whole lives they have carried the stigma of being treated as incapable of being educated. 

“The government needs to face up to its shameful history and the harm systemically racist schooling caused to so many children and their families.”

The group behind the campaign have also launched a petition in a bid to get the issue of racism in education debated in parliament.

They argue that cases such as that of Child Q, and the fact there are high numbers of Black children in Pupil Referral Units, mean that the problems they experienced are still manifesting themselves in today’s education system. 

Cheryl Phoenix, of the campaign group Black Child Agenda, said that changing the law is the only way to tackle an enduring problem. 

“Labelling Black students is still a problem” says Ms Phoenix. “The blatant racism is there, I read these cases every day. 

“But what we don’t need is another inquiry. Change has to come from the top down. There needs to be legislative change that stands in law, to say that if racist bullying is taking place in school, or if a school is being discriminatory, that school needs to be investigated.”

For details of the petition, please visit: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/631043