Gus John | The ethnic penalty we Africans still pay

It will soon be 25 years since I and three other people, each with a track record of defending the education entitlement of black children, founded the small charity, Communities Empowerment Network (CEN) in 1999. Two years earlier I had retired as Hackney Council’s director of education.

The Labour Party had been in power for two years, having come out of the Margaret Thatcher wilderness by winning the general election of 1997.

What led us to establish CEN? In the 1960s and 1970s, we actively resisted the scandalous practice of shunting disproportionate numbers of black children, predominantly African and Asian from the Caribbean diaspora, into schools for the educationally subnormal. Children were given that damaging label as a result of tests that were biased on the axis of race and class, tests which were created by education psychologists who were also avowed biological racists.

They not only propounded theories of race and intelligence based on eugenics, they also ensured that those theories were taught to trainee teachers, predominantly white, many of whom ended up in inner-city schools with lots of black children.

By the time Labour regained power in 1997, black children were at least six times more likely to be excluded from school than their white counterparts. We felt we needed to demonstrate to all parents, but especially to black parents and to policy-makers in government that there was a growing body of evidence to demonstrate how wasteful of human potential, destructive of young people’s lives and life chances, discriminatory on the axis of race, class and disability, school exclusion actually was, and still is.

SCHOOL EXCLUSION

Black young people were also experiencing discriminatory and oppressive policing in their communities, with police using ‘Stop and Search’, not as a crime prevention measure, but as a way of harassing, intimidating and criminalising young black people. Parliament dusted off a piece of arcane legislation, the Vagrant Act of 1824, and handed it to the police to further indulge their racism by accosting young people on the streets and charging them because they suspected they were ‘about to commit an arrestable offence’. What became known as the ‘Sus’ laws placed under siege entire communities of school-aged children and school-leavers in education or training, or worse yet, unemployed.

School exclusion made young people’s visibility on the street even greater and the more the police secured convictions against them, the less likely they were to return to education, or to be employable.

Schools, for their part, attributed the underachievement of black students to their behaviour and general failure to conform to schools’ behaviour and uniform policies. Black community organisations, the Commission for Racial Equality, the Runnymede Trust, the Institute of Race Relations and any number of academics sounded alarm bells not just in relation to schools’ disproportionate exclusion of black students, but out of concern about what has become known as the School to Prison Pipeline. At the mouth of that pipeline is the process of school exclusion, sending excluded students to Pupil Referral Units or other forms of ‘Alternative Provision’, places which I have dubbed the ante-chamber of the young offender institution, and young people getting caught up in youth offending and involvement with the youth justice system.

‘OTHERED’ STATUS

I should point out at this stage that the young people to whom I refer here are not children who came on the Empire Windrush, or descendants of the bizarrely named ‘Windrush generation’. They are British-born Africans and Asians, most of whom have no knowledge whatsoever of the lands their forebears once called home.

But as British Africans, they have come to have a particular profile, an ‘othered’ status, which both schools and the state believe predispose them to certain behaviours and attitudes to society that must be controlled.

The history of race in Britain and the abject failure of the British state to confront the legacy of empire and the racism that it generated, account for the crisis in education and schooling that has impacted the lives of generations of the African diaspora in Britain since the second world war, at least.

This accounts for the profile black children, boys in particular, has in schooling and education. It accounts for the confidence with which the head of a secondary school could exclude a black boy for contravening the school’s uniform policy by coming to school with his hair in cornrow plaits, arguing: a) that in addition to not complying with the uniform policy, that hair style ‘is an aggressive form of ethnic identification’ , and b) ‘it is indicative of gang culture, a culture that the school is working hard to keep out’.

What is more, that headteacher felt emboldened by the fact that he had the unqualified support of his chair of governors, a black Caribbean male. That man not only endorsed the headteacher’s decision to exclude and his reasons for doing so, he argued in his own right that other black parents were happy to comply with the school’s uniform policy by making sure that they cut their boys’ hair as stipulated in the policy and that the protesting parent of the boy with braided hair was unrepresentative of other black parents in the school.

‘THE SOCIAL FIGHTBACK’

I was engaged as an expert witness in that case by the Equality and Human Rights Commission which supported the student and his mother in taking the school to court. I was horrified at what I read in the school’s submissions in justification of their decision to exclude.

That systemic racism accounts for the introduction of the government’s ‘Safer Schools’ programme and its targetting of black students. It accounts for the stationing of police in schools and for Britain adopting the USA-style of securitisation of schooling, again with a focus on black students in particular. It accounts for the confidence with which the management of Child Q’s school could hand her over to police to carry out intimate body searches and violate her without school staff or any other responsible adult being present.

Following the police killing of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, north London in 2011, the government made a number of pronouncements in the face of the massive civil unrest that resulted from that shooting.

In a speech he gave in the immediate aftermath of that civil disorder, David Cameron said, “The next part of the social fightback is what happens in schools. We need an education system which reinforces the message that if you do the wrong thing you will be disciplined.”

As was expected, the Education Act 2011 was geared towards delivering what Cameron called ‘the social fightback’, with specific measures relating to behaviour, discipline and exclusions.

Small wonder then that the new Ofsted chief inspector, who took up post on January 1, 2024, is none other than Sir Martyn Oliver, former chief executive of the Outwood Grange Academies Trust, one of the country’s two biggest trusts with the highest suspension and exclusion rates.

In an interview with Schools Week, he was asked to comment on Ofsted’s view that the rate of exclusion was too high, including in the Multi Academy Trust he just left:

‘That’s where Ofsted has a job to look civically across all the areas and say: ‘what is the quality of alternative provision in an area? If suspensions are high, what is the quality of alternative provision? What’s the quality of children’s services?’

So, the ‘social fightback’ requires not that every child is kept in school and be supported to learn, however complex their needs, but the embedding of a twin track school system where the most vulnerable and needy are siphoned off into alternative provision.

The people most affected by that policy is young British Africans. In this election year, it is essential that the black and global majority population rally together and demand that Keir Starmer and the Labour Party commit to measures to end that massive human wastage among and systemic oppression and social exclusion of yet another generation of descendants of enslaved Africans.

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