Introduction
In April the BBC reported that black children at school were more likely to face punishment at school, including exclusion, because of a process of “adultification”. It was based on a report by the Commission on Young Lives, which is sponsored by the Oasis Charitable Trust. The former Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield, said that adultification was “very real and it has a huge impact on children’s lives”. Jahnine Davis, of child safeguarding consultancy Listen Up, which provided evidence to the report, claimed that black girls are “perceived as being loud, as being aggressive and being hyper-resilient” and that to understand how that came to be “we have to look at the history, which is rooted in slavery and colonialism”. So, are black children being over-policed in schools?
What does the report say?
The report argues that the education system is insufficiently inclusive and that those children who are excluded usually go on to have poor life results. They note that one in five children permanently excluded goes on to be cautioned or sentenced for a serious violent offence. In Young Offenders Institutes, 86% of young men have been excluded at some point. In prison, 63% of prisoners had been temporarily excluded at some point and 42% permanently excluded. 71% of all children who were cautioned or sentenced for an offence had received a suspension. Only 4% of pupils in Alternative Provision pass English and Maths at GCSE, compared to 64% of pupils in mainstream education, whilst 71% of the young offenders released from detention will go on to commit another crime within 12 months.
Those excluded are twice as likely to be in the care of the state, four times more likely to have grown up in poverty, seven times more likely to have Special Educational Needs (SEN), and ten times more likely to suffer a mental health problem. Just 10% of schools account for 88% of expulsions, both nationwide and in England (which the Children’s Commissioner says they have no “plausible explanation” for). Boys are three times more likely to be excluded than girls.
The permanent exclusions and suspensions data for England, published in July 2021, showed that there were “racial disparities”, with Black Caribbean children excluded nearly three times as often as White British children. Whilst the highest permanent exclusion rate is for White Gypsy and Roma pupils (0.39% or 39 exclusions per 10,000 pupils) and Traveller of Irish Heritage pupils (0.27%), Black Caribbean pupils were excluded at a rate of 0.25% whilst White British pupils were only at 0.1%. The report says that “these statistics provide evidence of structural racism and the need for a more inclusive education system that proactively tackles racism”.
In particular the report blames “adultification”, where “Black children can be viewed as both older and less innocent than their white peers, and also falsely perceived as angry in the classroom”. They say this also affects black girls, who are viewed as “less innocent”. In practice this leads to “Black students being disproportionately targeted by “draconian” zero-tolerance behaviour and uniform policies in schools”. David Gillborn, Professor of Critical Race Studies, told the Commission that “there is a set of low expectations from teachers around what Black children can achieve, which makes them get propelled through disciplinary systems much more quickly than other children”.
The report also claims that research shows that “nonblack teachers can have lower expectations of black students and may be more likely to negatively judge” them. Therefore teacher training and school inspections should have a “mandatory” race equality aspect. They also complain that 90% of teachers are white, even though a third of state school pupils come from ethnic minorities. Citing charity Power The Fight, the report says that “effective therapeutic interventions to end youth violence are reliant on applied cultural competency” because “marginalised groups are often deeply distrustful of organisations and institutions”. Therefore for “many Black people, trusting relationships with professionals rely on representation…with young people and families much more likely to engage with those who share or understand their ethnic background and culture”.
It also requires changes to the curriculum so they feel a greater sense of “belonging”. They note that a 2020 study by Teach First found that AQA “the biggest exam board, accounting for almost 80% of GCSE English literature entries, does not feature a single book by a Black author, and just two books by ethnic minority authors” on its English curriculum. They claim that “the absence of a diverse curriculum that reflects black history invariably has an adverse effect on the attainment outcomes of young black people” and praise the work of The Black Curriculum, which seeks to bring more black history into the curriculum (including the British Black Panthers).
Amongst their suggestions are: making “schools monitor disproportionality in rates of…exclusions and consider the impact of adverse childhood experiences, racism and personal circumstances in their response to Black and mixed heritage boys”; that “ the Department for Education should hold [school authorities] to account for monitoring rates of racial disproportionality in the use of permanent exclusions”; for race equality training to be a “core module at the new Teacher Training Institute”; for “cultural competency” and “unconscious bias training” to be included in teacher training; an “inclusive, antiracist” approach to the curriculum; a national campaign for more ethnic minority Governors and school board members; an increase in “the number of black teachers”; Ofsted to inspect whether the “the special educational needs of Black and mixed heritage boys” are being met; and for the Department for Education to look at how “adultification is working in practice in schools”.
What is wrong with the report?
Although the report musters plenty of evidence that those excluded often do badly in life, it fails to prove that this is caused by the exclusion rather than the bad behaviour which led to the exclusion proving to be equally negative outside of school. When they cite the case of Jaden Moodie, who was murdered at 14 after being excluded, they fail to mention that he was excluded for posing with a gun on Snapchat. The school would have been failing in its duty towards the safety of other pupils to have kept him.
In many cases it would be unsafe to keep a child in mainstream education or would come at the expense of the learning of many other pupils. Whilst improvements can be made to Alternative Provision or Pupil Referral Units, the reasons why children were excluded make clear why: bullying, damage, drug or alcohol related, persistent disruptive behaviour, physical assault against a pupil or adult, racist abuse, sexual misconduct, theft, and verbal abuse or threatening behaviour against a pupil.
As for racial discrepancy in exclusions, their data relies on a sleight of hand. It’s true that Black Caribbean pupils are more likely to be excluded than White British ones but Black African pupils are less likely to be excluded than White British ones; whilst White British pupils are excluded ten times as often as Indian or Chinese pupils. So it makes no sense to conclude that systemic racism is to blame for discrepancies, when the two main black groups have such different rates and other ethnic minorities do significantly better than whites.
This casts doubts on all of their claims, including “adultification”, the lack of black teachers, and the supposed lack of diversity in the curriculum. If Black Africans do better than the White British when it comes to exclusions, then clearly none of the issues above have a significant impact. Indeed much of the research it is based on is of dubious relevance or quality. The main source for “adultification” is a five-page article which bemoans that a 13 year old found with a “Rambo” knife, drugs, and an air gun got “youth justice” and not “welfare”. The argument that police shouldn’t be present in schools links to No Police in Schools, a nakedly activist campaign by Kids of Colour and the Northern Police Monitoring Project.
Similarly the claim that black pupils are punished disproportionately is a claim made by an activist from No More Exclusions, whose manifesto says they “recognise the Anti-Black foundations of “Great” Britain” and who have said in their work that they want a “non-punitive” response to sexual violence. No data for offered for their claim. Other research actually comes from America, when it isn’t obvious the same culture exists here, or is based on tiny sample-sizes, such as a survey of 62 parents. Another source is a report by the Institute of Race Relations, a think tank with a dubious past.
Even the Teach First survey is dubious. They admit that when it comes to counting diverse work on the curriculum they ignore poetry and the AQA curriculum shows that it contains three parts: Shakespeare, 19th century novels, and modern works. The first two are obviously limited in how diverse they can be and the third section consists of twelve options, two of which are written by “people of colour” and two of which are about or feature black people in significant roles. That makes up about one third of the options, the same proportion that ethnic minority pupils make up in school.
Comment
If “adultification” was real then it would affect all black pupils, yet it doesn’t seem to affect those of Black African ethnicity. Therefore more black books on the curriculum, more black teachers in school, or Department of Education mandated race equality training and assessment aren’t the solution to whatever it is which causes problems for Black Caribbean children, as they don’t cause Black Africans any issues.
That the very data they quote easily shows that Black Africans do better than White British suggests either an ideological motive or wilful blindness of the part of the report’s authors. Ignoring this and focusing their critique on white books, white teachers, and supposed white systemic racism suggests anti-white prejudice. That they are so heavily reliant on the dubious field of critical race studies and on highly ideological activist groups is equally revealing. Similarly, it is telling that they cite the disparity where boys are three times as likely to be excluded as girls but don’t use this to argue that schools are systemically anti-male, using the logic they apply to race.
The singular focus on black pupils, even though it’s White Gypsy and Roma and Travellers of Irish Heritage pupils who have the worst exclusion rates, and Chinese and Indian pupils who have the best, shows that this isn’t about data but about race. The end result of mandatory race equality training and assessment based on this faulty analysis would be one unfairly tipped in favour of certain races at the expense of others. That really would be systemic racism.