From ESN Schools to PRUs: the Great British betrayal

Three significant and seemingly unrelated events took place in Britain in the last week.

The one that received the most publicity was the announcement that Professor Jason Arday was, at 38, the youngest black professor to be employed by Cambridge University. As far as I am aware, Cambridge did not tell us how many black professors of any age they employ. The second was a meeting at the House of Commons on March 1, about the ESN scandal; and the third, the acknowledgement on March 2 of the 40th anniversary of the Black People’s Day of Action.

On that day in 1981, an ordinary working Monday, some 25,000 people, predominantly African, took to the streets of London in protest against those who massacred 13 young people at 439 New Cross Road in the borough of Lewisham in south London. That was also a protest against the Metropolitan Police’s investigation of those killings and the circumstances surrounding them.

The state’s response to that disaster was consistent with its lack of protection for the growing number of people of the African and Asian diaspora in Britain. It was a response which shouted that black lives did not matter enough to warrant the protection of lawmakers, of the police and the criminal justice system.

Despite the growing number of racist murders year after year since the late 1960s, in communities up and down the land, successive governments refused to deal with the domestic terrorism perpetrated by organised groups of neo-fascists and avowed racist extremists. Although the number of black and global majority people killed by such groups and individuals belonging to them, as well as by the police while black people were in their custody, far outweighed the number of citizens randomly killed by so-called Islamic terrorists, we could not get the government to take action to protect the black population from such murders.

CULTURE OF ANTI-BLACKNESS

When, in the 1960s and 1970s, the government sought to enact anti-discrimination legislation, there were howls of protest from some sections of the society, including parliament, against what they saw as attempts by government to curtail their freedom and interfere with their right to employ whom they chose, or to provide goods and services only to those whose presence in ‘their’ country, if not on Earth, they approved of.

That culture of anti-blackness and of xenophobia, kept alive and growing by the systemic racism of the state itself, not least through its immigration and border control policies and practices, gave neo-fascists and racists, including those in police forces across the country, the justification they needed for their efforts to keep Britain white and to send out an unmistakable message to black folk that they are not wanted here.

The excuse, that the country needed to limit the number of immigrants from the black commonwealth so as to enable those already here to be fully integrated, was the foundation for a number of policies and practices which were to have a devastating impact upon black communities.

One such was the practice of assessing black children as being ‘educationally subnormal’ (ESN). A related practice was bussing black children away from schools in their neighbourhood, which they were fully entitled to attend, to schools in majority white areas, once their number in any one school exceeded 30 per cent of the school’s overall roll; a process we called compulsory integration.

Some policymakers saw bussing as necessary if integration was to be achieved. In other words, black children should not be allowed anywhere in numbers that white Britain could regard as excessive. Integration was necessary because of the presence of black people and the onus was therefore upon them to integrate. The fact that the majority white areas to which they were sent were no more inclined to welcome them for what they were, rather than seeing them as an alien threat to their own children’s education, which local councils were imposing upon them, did not seem to matter.

EDUCATIONALLY SUBNORMAL LABEL

The House of Commons ESN meeting was hosted by Kim Johnson, MP (Liverpool Riverside), to launch a campaign for reparations for black folk who, as children, were sent to schools for the ‘educationally subnormal’. For over two decades, beginning in the middle 1960s, hundreds of children arriving from the Caribbean were formally assessed as being educationally subnormal, many being described as ‘dunce’ and ‘mentally retarded’.

As Bernard Coard reported in his iconic book: How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System, children were classified as educationally subnormal on the basis of tests which were biased on the axis of race, class and cultural background.

In the Inner London Education Authority, for example, the percentage of black children in ESN schools exceeded their overall percentage in that authority’s schools. The stigma of the ESN label, added to the poor quality of the education those children received and the mental, physical and sexual abuse they suffered, especially in residential schools, compromised their health and their life chances and wrecked their lives.

Yet, before the BBC screened Subnormal: a British Scandal in May 2021, the excellent documentary made by Lyttanya Shannon, most British people were unaware that, between 55 and 35 years ago, disproportionate numbers of black children were sent to schools for the educationally subnormal. The country remains similarly ignorant of the related bussing practices in various councils across the country. Schools to which black children were being bussed, especially Caribbean children, were generally sceptical about having to teach those children on account of the fact, well known at the time, that they were typically regarded as having low intelligence.

PUBLIC INQUIRY ESSENTIAL

Listening to Professor Arday describe his education journey and the way autism impacted his learning and ability to access schooling and curriculum, one wonders just how many Jason Ardays were condemned to wrecked life chances and unfulfilled lives as a result of decisions made following assessments with tools made by biological racists.

But we would be wrong to assume that ESN is in the past. Over the last 35 years, generations of black children, predominantly Britain-born, have had their life chances ruined by labels that have replaced ‘dunce’ and ‘retarded’, such as disruptive, emotionally unstable, aggressive, lazy and by punitive measures such as school exclusion, police in schools operating as police do with young people on the streets, permanent exclusion and transfer to Pupil Referral Units (PRUs) or other alternative provision.

One of the main reasons why a public inquiry into the ESN scandal is essential is precisely to chart that continuous link between then and now and ensure that we put an end to repetition of the betrayal of succeeding generations of black British citizens, on whom the future of this deeply fractured society depends.

Professor Augustine John is a human rights campaigner and honorary fellow and associate professor at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London.