Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

How do we progress racial justice in education?

2021; Wiley; Volume: 28; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/newe.12242

2573-2331

Zahra Bei, Helen Knowler, Jabeer Butt,

Early Childhood Education and Development

School exclusion, systemic racism and off-rolling “yet another example of attention being diverted away from exclusionary practices that are denying children access to high-quality education” Historically, the use of illegal school exclusion – effectively the denial of a right to an education – was a tactic used in US states in the 1960s and 1970s to maintain racist structures and systems, even after the abolition of segregated education. Black pupils were ‘pushed out’ from school, apparently because of poor school performance, repeated but minor behaviour infractions or suggestions that the school was not the ‘right’ place for them to attend.4 In England around the same time, Bernard Coard published his ground-breaking pamphlet ‘How the West Indian child is made educationally subnormal in the British school system: the scandal of the Black child in schools in Britain’ (1971), which galvanised Black parents and educationalists into action in the decades that followed, spurring on the growth of the Black supplementary schools movement – a form of self-help and a way to fight racial discrimination.5 Coard exposed the ways in which immigrant children were disproportionately moved to special schools following racially biased assessments of educational needs.6 In addition, the authorities misled Black parents into believing these placements would enhance the education of their children. At the time of Coard's writing, around 34 per cent of the school population in so-called ‘educationally subnormal’ (ESN) schools were from Black Caribbean backgrounds. This knowledge in turn led to the famous ‘sin bin’ campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s, demonstrating how racial injustices – writ large in exclusionary practices in education – have generated grassroots activism going back 50 years or more, even before words such as ‘off-rolling’ were used.7 “Today, off-rolling continues to do significant damage” It is a disappointing fact that the review has led to further obfuscation rather than illumination, meaning that off-rolling is likely to be continuing even throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The Timpson analysis, while problematic, does confirm that Black Caribbean boys and girls are more likely than others to be permanently excluded from school, and that this is a statistically significant association. Yet this is used in the review to explain that the ratio is not as high as the raw data – that is, it is subjectively interpreted as part of the case for inaction. Whether or not the ratio is as high as the raw data, the result is still statistically significant – and it follows that racial discrepancies in exclusions and, by implication, ‘unofficial’ exclusions are explained by racial discrimination. “to underplay the importance of statistically significant results that point to the impact of racial discrimination is deeply problematic” While off-rolling was brought into sharp focus in 2019 following an Ofsted blog and further analysis of ‘unexplained exits’ in a 2019 Education Policy Institute report, it is a very particular exclusionary practice that has resulted from the entanglement of a range of competing policy initiatives, such as school performance policies, austerity pressures and inclusion policies.14,15 It appears to happen in secondary schools more than primary schools and is most evident in Year 11 census data. However, Machin and Sandi argue that the precursors of exclusionary practices that lead to off-rolling can be seen from as early as Year 9.16 “Once off-rolling has been identified, it becomes apparent that these ‘off-rolled’ children and young people did not ‘drop out’ or disengage” “49,101 students from the school cohort who were set to have completed Year 11 in 2017 ‘disappeared’ from school rolls with no explanation given” Fifty years after Coard's seminal book on the denial of school education to Black children, organisations such as No More Exclusions are still calling for the basic right to an education to be enacted for all learners. Behaviour hubs are not the answer to stopping off-rolling or other forms of potentially illegal exclusions. The establishment of a national helpline for parents of children and young people, where illegality is suspected, could shift the dialogue about how to overcome this issue. A helpline of this kind could maintain a register or advocate who can support and accompany parents to secure the best education for their child and offer basic legal advice on school exclusion. While legal remedies are no substitute for policy change, parents and carers in the US who have this kind of legal literacy and support have had success in overturning illegal pushout practices. Off-rolling and other exclusionary practices have wider impacts for housing, health, welfare, criminal justice and employment policy and so it has been significant that trade unions,21 think tanks,22 activists,23 and mental health practitioners,24,25 are now campaigning for a moratorium on exclusions in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Until the systemic conditions and institutionally racist cultures, policies and practices that legitimise exclusionary practices are transformed, we will not be able to say with any conviction that every Black child in Britain does not remain at a higher risk of leaving mainstream education prematurely and, with the worst outcomes, through the back door. Zahra Bei is a secondary and pupil referral unit (PRU) teacher with 20 years’ experience in the classroom. She is currently at UCL Institute of Education as a PhD student researching school exclusions, racism in education and special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). Zahra is a member of the Black Educators Alliance (BEA), one of the co-founders of the Coalition of Anti-Racist Educators (CARE) and co-founder of No More Exclusions (NME). Helen Knowler is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Exeter. Her work focuses on permanent exclusion from school, and she is currently exploring the policy impacts of off-rolling and other exclusionary practices and the implications for practitioners. She has worked as an advisory teacher, a classroom teacher and leads on the National Award for SEN Coordination at Exeter. Jabeer Butt is chief executive of the Race Equality Foundation. Jabeer has researched and written extensively about racial inequality in care and health. Jabeer provides leadership on the Strengthening Families, Strengthening Communities parent education initiative at the Foundation. Jabeer was on the Marmot Advisory Group supporting Sir Michael Marmot in the production of his recent report on the social determinants of health inequalities. He is currently co-investigator on the £1.3 million NIHR funded extension of the VirusWatch study, focussing on Covid-19 and BAME communities, led by Professor Robert Aldridge of University College London.