Black Curriculum founder claims summer riots were a result of relegating black history just once a month.
A leading campaigner argues black history must be made mandatory in England in order to assist prevent racist riots and counter hatred.
The founder of Black Curriculum, Lavinya Stennett, cautioned of the real conquests of black history and a diverse student in metropolitan areas.
Stennett cited riots that broke out in England and Northern Ireland in the summer as the risks of failures to ensure that diverse teaching is well spread and available to all.
She stated: “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 fueled.”
In a media interview about Black History Month ahead of her upcoming memoir Omitted: The Untold Black History Lessons We Need to Change the Future. The book also explores 27-year-olds in foster care in student referral units.
Stennett stated that there was an outbreak of interest in the black curriculum during the Black Lives Matter protest. However, the systemic change had been slow.
Stennett stated: “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’.”
She noted that the national curriculum is 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?”
She also lashed the previous government’s opposition to what it considered “anti-white” rhetoric in schools, claiming that it had a chilling effect on their ability to teach black history.
The Department of Education guidance argues that schools should not “under any circumstances” work with or use material from groups that promote “victim narratives that are harmful to British society”.
Stennet stated: “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.”
She believes the government must be unequivocal in its support for the black curriculum: “This new government needs to say that all schools must engage with this, that teachers must 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 pointed to the gap between what students are studying in Wales, which makes black history lessons compulsory in Welsh schools, compared with students in England.
For the past three years, Stennet has been working with the Welsh organisation Diversity and Anti-Racist Professional Learning (DARPL). She stated: “It’s been amazing because there’s a lot of appetite.” She continued that there was buy-in from educators 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.”
The Department of Education’s spokesperson stated the government had recently launched a review of the 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”.
