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Race Equality and Your School: Reflecting Celebrating, Creating

On 8 November 2007, 38 members of the Achieve Network met to celebrate the completion of two successful Achieve projects: Traveller Education’ and ‘Race Equality and Your School’. They also learned about a new race equality resource, the Achieve Research of the Month anthology.

Objectives of the event

• To investigate the current policy context for race equality.
• To celebrate the achievements of two Achieve projects.
• To promote good race equality practice within the Achieve Network, based on research evidence from Research of the Month (RoM).
• To support teachers to complete Race Equality TLA presentations.

The current policy context

Three major pieces of legislation have been passed in recent years placing duties on school to promote race equality, disability equality and gender equality. 

The Race Relations (Amendment) Act, which was passed in 2000, requires schools to:

• eliminate unlawful discrimination
• promote equal opportunity
• promote good relations between people from different racial groups
• have a written race equality policy
• assess the impact of all policies on pupils, staff and parents and, in particular, on attainment levels on all pupils.

Celebrating the Achieve projects

There were two speakers from each project. All four shared their reasons for joining each project, their current working contexts, and how they and their schools have benefited professionally from taking part.

Traveller education

The speakers involved in this project were:

• Sulan Goodwin, head teacher of a school with over 95% traveller children
• Lynn Stuart, a Traveller education adviser from Bedfordshire local authority.

An overview of the work of Sulan’s school was published by Achieve in spring 2007:

Meeting the needs of Traveller learners: two case studies (Crays Hill)

 

Race Equality and your School

The speakers in this case were:

• Uberta Casely-Hayford, a primary school teacher, ICT coordinator and year group leader from Medway
• Gurminder Pal Matharu a secondary school teacher in Surrey local authority.

Both Uberta and Gurminder successfully completed Stage 2 submissions to the Teacher Learning Academy (TLA).

Read case studies from Uberta and Gurminder’s work:

• Improving school induction processes for entrants with EAL
• Promoting diversity in the school learning environment through ICT

Activites

In engaging with these speakers and other research provided to them during the day, the participants considered an enquiry question to promote race equality within their school.

The teachers will be supported to explore their enquiry question during the spring 2008 events we are holding across the country to support teachers promote race equality in schools,

The Achieve RoM anthology

A new research resource will also be available through the spring 2008 events. It will highlight teaching and learning strategies that optimise the achievement for all pupils and students and explore these strategies through a race equality lens.

Spring 2008 events

We will be supporting teachers in events across the country to promote race equality in their school.  To find out more about these events and register your interest, please visit the conference website.