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The Silent Catastrophe: Black school exclusions

Since Bernard Coard’s 1971 seminal work “How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System” academics, activists, black commentators and educators have argued that black children are treated differently within the UK school system.

I have been campaigning on the issue of black children being excluded from schools for more than a decade. Recent research has found that black children are 3 times more likely to be excluded from school than white children are. Even when we account for other factors – poverty indicators or whether the child has special educational needs – black children are still excluded from school 2.6 times more than white children. In which case there must be another factor affecting when a child gets excluded. I believe that schools as institutions as well as teachers, headteachers and governors are, just like the rest of us, subject to a social conditioning that means we have pre-conceived ideas about the people we interact with. This may well lead to discriminatory behaviour based on negative images of black men and boys that has existed for centuries. These negative images can lead teachers, headteachers and governors to expect the worst of black pupils, to be more threatened by their behaviour than other students and to punish them more harshly than other students.

Being excluded from school is not a simple matter of disrupting a child’s education; it can have a knock-on effect for the rest of that person’s life. Being excluded from school automatically means a disruption to education, no matter what other provisions are put in place. The disproportionately high level of black exclusions is making the achievement gap between black and other students worse. The Government’s Priority Review on exclusions predicted that excluded black pupils were one third less likely to achieve 5 A – C GCSE grades.

A 2004 report for the Prince’s Trust found that half of unemployed young people said a lack of qualifications led to their unemployment. Leaving school without qualifications makes it much more likely that young people will fall into unemployment, a reliance on benefits and even crime. The Priority Review on exclusions suggests that exclusion from school means Black pupils are 3% more likely to be unemployed and will on average suffer a reduction of £36,000 in lifetime earnings.

In 2004 80% of the 2662 juveniles in prison had been excluded from school. Compared with the general population, prisoners are 20 times more likely to have been excluded from school. The former Director General of HM Prison Services Martin Narey could not have made the situation clearer when he said: “The 13,000 young people excluded from school each year might as well be given a date to join the prison service some time later down the line”. There has been much debate over the past year on the prevalence of black-on-black teenage crime. The media has been flooded with reports of horrific robberies, stabbings and shootings involving young black men. The exclusion of black boys from school, from the education system and ultimately from society does not occur in a vacuum – it can lead to crime, it can lead to prison sentences and if we want to take a cynical stance it can lead to the expenditure of a large amount of public money and the loss of economic potential. If this Government were serious about tackling the problem of violent crime amongst young people they should be dealing with the problem of black and ethnic minority school exclusions as a matter of precedence. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that solutions to deprivation, crime and unemployment begin in education.

Unfortunately “race” has become a bit of a taboo subject in recent times. People do not like exploring the possibility of racism at any level and schools certainly do not want to admit to having a problem with racism. Schools of course are under a lot of pressure with league tables, targets and increased bureaucracy. But the point is that to shy away from this issue is to deny a sizeable and important section of our society a fair chance. I would like to see the Government accept that there is a serious problem and force Local Authorities and schools to deal with it.