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Being Black in Education

Koyinsola is a City Year Mentor currently serving at Audenshaw High School in Greater Manchester. Alongside delivering a fantastic talk for us at an EDI session on race and ethnicity earlier this month, Koyinsola wrote this piece about being black in education. Koyinsola developed this piece for Black History Month, around this year’s theme: ‘Reclaiming Narratives’.


“Inclusivity makes students feel valued and respected. It helps them feel capable of reaching their full potential thus all schools should strive to be more inclusive.”

Under the 2010 Equality Act, race-based hair discrimination is technically illegal as race is a protected characteristic. However, this didn’t stop my secondary school from creating an arbitrary rule that students could not wear their hair in box braids and a ponytail or bun. Although they didn’t outwardly mention race, many Black students felt as though we were being disproportionately targeted, since the vast majority of us wore our hair in box braids—a cultural protective style for Afro hair. This was clearly an example of indirect discrimination, defined as when “a policy which applies in the same way for everybody has an effect which particularly disadvantages people with a protected characteristic”¹. Despite this, the school still attempted to enforce this rule for weeks, ignoring our complaints and objections. Eventually, they gave up; not because they accepted that this rule was indirectly discriminatory, but because they couldn’t be bothered to keep forcing students to take their ponytails and buns down.

Aside from this particular rule, there were many, many instances where Black students were discriminated against and had their voices ignored. Whenever we made our concerns known, we were labelled as ‘ghetto’, ‘violent’, or ‘threatening’. In many cases I was personally labelled as the stereotypical insatiable ‘angry Black girl’ when I expressed my discomfort with microaggressions e.g., people touching my hair without permission; or with overt racism e.g., teachers saying the N-word when reading Of Mice and Men. Teachers, and students alike, would get very uncomfortable when I raised issues with the ethnocentric nature of the national curriculum², but how could I not when as of 2021 less than 1% of GCSE students had studied a text written by an author of colour?³

Alongside not studying authors of colour, I also found that the histories of people of colour were highly sanitised and censored when (or rather, if) we were taught them. We were taught about the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in America as if it was this isolated period in history — in reality, it was a global movement that wasn’t all that long ago. It wasn’t until I was 16 years old doing my own research, that I heard about the 1963 Bristol Bus Boycott and its key role in improving race relations in the UK for the first time. Not being taught the racist history of the UK allowed the school to act as though racism simply didn’t exist, both in the past and in the current day. I often felt as though I was crazy when my reports of racism were dismissed and denied. This feeling of going crazy soon changed to feeling devalued and less than.

But after 2020 there was a shift. Following the highly publicised murder of George Floyd and the #BlackLivesMatter protests, the world started to pay more attention to the issues Black people had been raising for years. Around this time, I started a new school and the difference that this increased awareness had made was undeniable. This new school listened to the voices of students of colour and did its best to create a more inclusive, diverse environment. This is not to say they were perfect in doing so, but what mattered most was the active effort. An EDI committee was formed with staff members and students of all different cultural backgrounds where our concerns were listened to and validated. Teachers encouraged discussions surrounding the long-lasting impacts of colonialism in education and openly problematised the curriculum’s ethnocentrism.

Although I only spent two years at the new school for my A Levels, I’ve carried this experience with me. Experiencing these schools’ contrasting approaches to race relations made me realise the vital importance of inclusivity in education. I went from being not particularly motivated or optimistic about my potential at 16 to feeling more confident and appreciated as a student (and a person) at 18, largely because of how my new school treated students of colour. Inclusivity makes students feel valued and respected. It helps them feel capable of reaching their full potential thus all schools should strive to be more inclusive. It doesn’t have to be something big—small actions such as using more culturally diverse names in resources, or having a school calendar with various holidays (not just Christmas and Easter) could make a world of difference.


¹Equality Act 2010 – Explanatory Notes

²An ethnocentric curriculum can be defined as a “educational curriculum that is based on the cultural values and perspectives of a particular ethnic or cultural group” (tutor2u)

³Penguin Books and Runnymede Trust (2021), “Lit in Colour: Diversity in Literature in English Schools Research Report”

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