Black history must be made mandatory in England to counter hatred and help prevent racist riots, a leading campaigner says.
Lavinya Stennett, who founded the Black Curriculum, warned of the real risks of black history and a diverse curriculum being relegated to just one month, or only being implemented in schools with diverse students and in metropolitan areas.
She pointed to the riots that broke out in England and Northern Ireland in the summer as the consequences of failures to ensure that diverse teaching is widespread and available to all.
“As long as we place black history as a thing that is in October, as long as we continue to place black history as a thing that’s only for black people, as long as black history is only focused on the metropolitan areas and negating those rural areas where a lot of the riots actually kicked off, then we’ll forever have instances of young people … continue to be ignorant and racism will be fuelled,” she said.
Stennett spoke to the Guardian for Black History Month ahead of her upcoming memoir Omitted: The Untold Black History Lessons We Need to Change the Future. The book also explores the 27-year-old’s time in foster care and in pupil referral units.
Stennett said that while there was a flurry of interest in the black curriculum during the Black Lives Matter protests, systemic change had been too slow.
“There is a lack of appetite in this country to systemically recognise the importance of who we are and recognise our full humanity. Interventions that recognise our [black Britons’] importance are more than just ‘let’s talk about racism’,” Stennett said.
She pointed to the national curriculum as an example of this. “Why are we still facing so much resistance to having a curriculum that accurately reflects who we are as a people, and also providing … mandatory training for teachers, or they won’t recognise racial literacy as a safeguarding issue?”
Stennett criticised the previous government’s opposition to what it deemed “anti-white” rhetoric in schools, saying it had a chilling effect on their ability to teach black history.
The Department for Education guidance states that schools should not “under any circumstances” work with or use material from groups that promote “victim narratives that are harmful to British society”.
“There were a few schools that we had engaged with that said we’re not sure how to engage with you, we don’t have to break the law,” Stennett said.
She believes the government must be clear and unequivocal in its support for the black curriculum: “This new government needs to say that it is mandatory that all schools engage with this, that it’s mandatory that teachers do this training.
“They need to put some metrics to it. This is what we want teachers to achieve by 2027 for example, because I think leaving it to teachers to just decide is not working.”
She points to the gulf between what students are learning in Wales, which made black history lessons mandatory in Welsh schools, compared with students in England.
She has been working with the Welsh organisation Diversity and Anti-Racist Professional Learning (DARPL) for the past three years. “It’s been amazing because there’s a lot of appetite,” she said, adding that there was buy-in from teachers because “not only is it mandatory, there’s a culture of reward … It is top-down approved”.
“Whereas in England, what we try to do is still very much bottom up.”
A spokesperson for the Department for Education said the government had recently launched a review of curriculum and assessments, which would “consider how to ensure young people can access a broad, balanced and cutting-edge curriculum that reflects the issues and diversities of our society”.
