Diversity in Teaching

As a profession 92% of teachers in the UK are of white heritage. The remaining 8% are BAME. Transposed against the national ethnicity figures from the last census (2011) 86% of the UK population is of a white heritage and 14% of BAME. The question is why are BAME professionals not considering teaching as a profession?

A recent study published in February 2021 suggested that one of the main barriers to BAME professionals joining an organisation, schools in this case, was a lack of transparency relating to progression within that organisation (Tattersfield, 2021). This is understandable, given the significant difficulties, unconscious biases and systemic racism in organisations it would be a considerable risk to an individual if there was not a clear pathway that would, in some ways, negate these difficulties. Working in an independent school and having worked in a predominantly independent environment for the majority of my career I can reflect on and see the problem of a lack of clear progressional pathways. Of course my experience is not one that has been impacted upon by the difficulties of the BAME community, nevertheless, the problem of a lack of clear steps forward is an inherent one in education. The maintained sector certainly has a much clearer and less opaque method of progression in the clear way that remuneration is afforded through the national scale system, and efforts to upskill staff through high quality CPD, the independent sector is attempting to catch up. Nevertheless, there is still some way to go before the necessary securities are in place to encourage more from a minority background into the profession.

I am incredibly fortunate to work in a school whose student body is 53% BAME. The Black Lives Matter movement which achieved global support in 2020 forced the school to look more carefully at its heritage and recognise that it needed to reflect on the very important and real issues that the movement threw up, particularly given the ethnicity of its students. In my own subject, History, we had always had the vision and mission to support pupils understanding of global issues and to try to give them perspective. Nevertheless, we knew we had to do better and this has led to the development of a curriculum of ‘The History of otherness’ initially driven by staff, but later with contributions and suggestions from the student body. Furthermore, a ‘Celebration of Black Excellence’ was inaugurated, co-inciding with but not ending with, Black History Month. With staff support senior pupils delivered a wonderful range of events, competitions and discussions crossing the curriculum. We look forward to continuing this student driven event in the future.

However, the matter of recruitment is one that is still not effectively resolved. The question is, how do we resolve it? Recruitment from diverse groups is always tricky, nevertheless it occurred to me that it might be the case that culturally the profession of teaching is not perceived as having significant value amongst the communities from which our students come from. In order to address this I hope to engage more formally with the students and our BAME staff to try to ascertain if this is the case and whether or not solutions can be devised. Could one be to afford teaching apprenticeships at the school? Could one be to target tertiary institutions with significant BAME graduates. The opportunities presented by having such a student body are vital and engagement with them in order to tackle these matters is one that should be taken very seriously and approached sensitively. I am well aware of the irony of a white male talking about diversity, but, as weak as it sounds, at least I am talking about it.

Bibliography

Tattersfield, S (2021, February) Representations matters: How do we increase diversity in our school staff body? Impact (Journal of the Chartered College of Teaching

Thanks to https://schoolsweek.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Diversity-hands-in-illustration-feat-1.jpg - for the image for this post.