Anti-racist practices are key to children achieving their potential

Why have you and your school signed up to the anti-racist network?

At Roundhay School we have an incredibly diverse cohort. We have children from many different religious, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds, and we're always looking to make sure our children feel comfortable, safe and are able to thrive. 

We believe our school should be a harmonious and diverse community where people are free to be themselves, and they should have the confidence and the freedom to do that.

But, we're also aware there's always more we can do, and more we can learn to provide the best possible experience for our children. So, we need to make sure we're able to keep up with new research and new ideas within this incredibly important area. 

What are you hoping to gain most from the joining the network?

We don't have a specific aim in mind, apart from trying to make sure that our school is a kinder, happier and more harmonious community.

By being part of a network of teachers and other kinds of educators and researchers, we hope to get more ideas and to see where things are working in other contexts. We want to see if there are ideas we can move forward, or opportunities to share some of our own experiences. 

If we are finding problems with certain things, and we need additional support or training, then we want to be part of a network of people who all want to achieve the same things and will be able to support us in in doing that or finding those opportunities.

What are the challenges of developing anti-racist practices in schools?

I think there are a number of challenges, but I don't think the challenges are in anyway insurmountable.

This is a huge issue, because in lots of ways the young people we work with are so much further down the line than what you might see on the news or in research. This is their lived experience, so it's something we pick up because of the way that they engage with different topics. It forces us to change and to consider different things. 

So, the challenges are twofold. The first one is to keep moving forward, because I think it's never going to be finished. There's always going to be things that we can do better, or that we can change and adapt, and it's having the humility to be able to say “actually, this has worked for the last 10 years, but it's not working anymore for these children”. And for the children coming through now, it's giving them the confidence to be able to change things and to be able to talk to people about these issues. 

I think the other big challenge is finding time to make sure teachers have the training and support they need, to be able to make their classrooms, curriculum and lessons as inclusive as possible. And that's something we obviously strive to do, but as a profession, it's something that we need to keep getting better at.

Why do you think it's important for schools to engage in programs like this?

Ultimately, we all want to achieve the same things. We want our children to thrive and to leave here and to go off to every possible career that they could imagine. We want them to be leaders in business, we want them to be lawmakers. We want them to be doing all the things their potential allows for them to do so.

We have to improve things, because if there are barriers children face that are preventing them from being able to achieve their ambitions, or to achieve the same as somebody born with a different background, that's something that we have to tackle as a school.

As an education system we need to ensure those barriers are torn down so everybody can achieve to the best of their ability.