I am based at the Moray house school of education. I am the head of school there but, for today’s purposes, I am here as the co-director of the centre for education for racial equality in Scotland, which is a research centre.
The earlier panel was brilliant and it covered a lot of points. Across decades of research, there has been inconsistency between what adults feel that they are able to talk about and what young people want to talk about. We need to break that down. We find that young people want to talk about social issues and to engage with difficult topics such as racism, homophobia or Islamophobia. As adults, regardless of time factors, we seem to have much more anxiety about that. The concern is whether we are short-changing our young people as regards their ability to shape future policy and reinventing the wheel by shoehorning them back into the structures that we are comfortable with. Therefore, the first issue is the fracture between what teachers and other educators, including university lecturers, want to talk about and what young people want to talk about. Young people must be part of the scoping and lead some of that development.
The second issue is that a lot of our research shows that young people feel that schools are safe spaces, which provide consistency. Teachers try to deal with the issues, even if they make a bit of a mess of it, and young people really appreciate and understand that.
In Scotland, because we have strong rhetoric about inclusion and challenging discrimination, we do not have as permissive an environment as there might be elsewhere. The flipside of that is that we need to put our foot on the pedal and keep it there, because we could move to a more complacent mode. I was a little taken aback recently when, in working with teachers, I heard headteachers and teaching colleagues on the ground talking about a culture in the world and the UK that is beginning to legitimise the view that, “Oh, I can make this sort of comment,” on the basis of freedom of speech. In my submission, I describe the parent who was rung up because their child was bullying in the school and responded, “My kid got caught. That was a bit unfortunate, but it happens in the school.” The headteacher said that she did not think that she would have got that kind of response six months ago—I have to say that she used the phrase “pre-Brexit”—and it shocked her.
I will conclude with two very quick points. The first panel said that it is not just about teacher confidence but understanding the nature of bullying. The absence of overt bullying, racism, homophobia or whatever does not mean that there is harmony. People—even young people—are a lot more sophisticated now. I am talking about behaviour such as giving somebody the body swerve or not recognising them. Such daily aggressions and invalidations are harder to record and nail down, because they are generally done outwith the presence of the people who can do the recording. Also, if you are not on the receiving end of it, you do not know about it, because it is so subtle. We might be better at tackling the overt stuff, but not the other kind.
I do training in the school of education. In fact, tomorrow I am doing a session on “Into Headship”, which is the programme for people who want to become headteachers in the future. At the previous session, one of the participants said, “Well, Rowena, it’s great that you’re talking about race issues, but they’re not issues that affect my school. If you’d been talking about social class, I would’ve been interested but I really only have one or two minority ethnic pupils in my school.”
I was quite shocked and did not respond, but I have reflected on that and decided that, if somebody says that to me tomorrow, I will push back on it. However, I was so shocked that I just thought, “Oh—okay.” In the learning environment, you do not want to back people into a corner. At that point, I did not have enough time to think about how I could convert the situation into a quick learning or educational response.