Sheffield Town Hall
Saturday 27 November 2010
Sheffield City Council
Children and Young People’s Service
Governor Support Team

I want to thank Razwan Ul-Haq and Eric Pye for inviting me to share some thoughts with you on how black governors could empower themselves to ensure that schools make a difference in our communities.
We meet here in a week when the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, published a White Paper that heralds a raft of far reaching education reforms. Those reforms have major implications for school students, parents, teachers and, above all, governors. I will argue in this presentation that they have particular implications for black governors for reasons I will set out presently. But before I do so, let me tell you the background against which I frame my remarks to you today.
I have been involved in struggles to ensure quality education for children in inner city schools since the middle 1960s. I have lived through numerous education reforms and seen even more education ministers come and go. I was a pioneer of the
Supplementary/Saturday School Movement, starting with a number of others the first
African-Caribbean Supplementary School in Handsworth, Birmingham in 1969 and later becoming a founder trustee of the National Association of Supplementary Schools (NASS) and Chair of the NASS’s research and library committee. I was a founder member of the
Black Parents Movement in London in 1975 and in Manchester in 1978. I was Director of
Education and Leisure Services in the London Borough of Hackney for just short of eight years and I am currently Chair (for the second time in ten years) of the Communities
Empowerment Network (CEN).
CEN is a charitable organisation that supports school students who are excluded from school and represents them and their parents at Governors’ Discipline Committees and at independent appeal panels. We also work with schools to help them develop and implement strategies for identifying and supporting students who are at risk of exclusion and work towards a nil exclusion record. Though a small organisation employing two full time members of staff, CEN deals with an average of 950 cases per year in London alone.

All of the above have given me a vast experience of how schools operate, how governors function and especially how black governors see themselves and their role; how they are seen by headteachers and school managers and the expectations schools no less than black students and parents have of them.
I stated earlier that the reforms announced this week have particular implications for black governors and I want to tell you why that is.
Among the reforms the White Paper is introducing is the removal of the requirement that schools comply with the Equality Duty, the duty to promote race equality, disability equality, etc.; adopt measures to promote community cohesion. Child ren’s spiritual, moral, social and cultural development and pupil wellbeing will also be erased from the criteria
Ofsted uses to inspect schools.
Mr Gove said: “We need to refocus inspection on the principal purpose of schools, improving teaching and learning, and dramatically reduce the time and energy spent on other existing bureaucratic duties”. Gove insisted that the reforms would stop Ofsted
“spending time monitoring compliance with peripheral issues”.
The same White Paper reiterated Mr Gove’s intention to see a burgeoning of academies as announced in the Academies Act in July this year, including those established by closing some 400 ‘failing schools’ if they do not rapidly improve to required standards, and free schools established by parents, community groups and charities.
The ideological mission Mr Gove articulates over and over again and which informs his reform strategy is to remove schools from the control and influence of local councils and the representatives the people elect to plan and deliver council services. Schools will operate as autonomous entities with headteachers having control over the curriculum their schools teach and over decisions about which students to permanently exclude. The performance criteria by which schools would be judged are: teaching standards, leadership, pupil behaviour and achievement. High performing schools would be allowed to get on with their business, without interference from Ofsted or anybody else.
The Coalition Government packages these reforms in peoplecentred language: ‘getting rid of red tape’, not getting schools bogged down in peripheral issues’, diminishing the state and transferring power to the people’, etc.

And all of that is being done at a time when, despite improvement in schooling standards and in examination results overall, the achievement gap between African caribbean,
African, Pakistani and Bangladeshi students (boys and girls) remains stubbornly wide; at a time when black boys are still four to six times more likely to be excluded than their white counterparts; at a time when there is a level of fear among young people of one another such as the nation has never known; at a time when young people need concerted action to equip them with the outlook, values, skills and competences to manage themselves, take responsibility for their own learning and behaviour and keep themselves safe in school and in their communities.
At such a time as this, the Secretary of State for Education announces that to require schools to comply with equality legislation and to eliminate discrimination, to expect them to focus on children’s spiritual, moral, social and cultural development and pupil wellbeing is to demand compliance with ‘peripheral issues’.
I agree with Michael Gove about one thing: The British, to be more precise, the English schooling system is in crisis.
Successive governments behave as though they are scrambling to grab whatever is within reach in order to prevent the boat from going under. The process of schooling reform does not engage with students or take their realities as they would define them into account.
A schooling system in which 135,000 school age children are out of school at any one time and where one section of the population, black students and boys in particular, feature at the bottom of the league table decade after decade is a schooling system in crisis.
Unlike most of the other government services that impact upon children’s lives, schooling is compulsory.
Parents face sanctions, including being sent to jail, for not making sure their children attend school, irrespective of whatever parenting challenges they themselves might be grappling with.
School students are not a homogenous group any more than parents are. They come from a multiplicity of backgrounds defined by ethnicity, social class, gender, disability, language, religion and belief, geography, post code, level of literacy of parent(s), their own experience of the schooling system, etc.

Different categories of schools have admission procedures that act as a filter, ensuring that they admit only those students whose backgrounds they see as compatible with the regime they are operating and the profile they want to project to the ‘market’.
At its root, our schooling system is one that extends and perpetuates social exclusion, both in its admission and its exclusion practices.
Crucially and irrespective of their background, one thing is common to all school children:
- they bring what they are and they are what they bring to the classroom and to the learning community in school.
Some are competent learners who know how to learn, how they learn best and how to challenge themselves and stretch teachers to enable them to perform to the height of their ability. Others are challenged by learning and lack the capacity to form positive relationships with their teachers and other learning facilitators. Some take responsibility for creating a safe and supportive environment in which teachers and students could teach and learn. Others make it their business to create the chaotic environment in which they function best and which makes no demands on them but hinders others’ capacity to teach and to learn.
That latter group typically shows no regard for their own Right to Learn and set out to deny that right to their peers, not to mention teachers’ Right to Teach.
Irrespective of their disposition, however, ALL are required by law to attend school.
This raises a number of key issues and questions:
• What is the purpose of schooling and education?
• Does every child have an education entitlement?
• When do they forfeit that entitlement?
• Does EVERY child really matter?
• When do they cease to matter enough so as not to have their needs met, however complex, and their rights safeguarded?

There are further key issues that arise from this unti dy reality, from these ‘givens’ with which the school system operates:

Schooling and the notion of shared values in a liberal democracy

Equity

Entitlement

equality of access
 equality of parents’ ability to exercise choice

the capacity of school students and their parents to influence decision making and effect desired outcomes, irrespective of class and professional status

a commitment to eliminating educational disadvantage and the social exclusion that is a concomitant of it, and
 crucially, the role of elected government in guaranteeing the defence of the individual against invidious forces that do not necessarily respect the rights and entitlements of those who cannot fend for themselves, or who constitute the excluded in society
I am one of those old fas hioned people who do not see ‘the market’ written over everything, especially the way this or any other nation should provide organise schooling and provide education for children.
I believe that Education is a fundamental human right. Access to quality education is every child’s entitlement. It is not a privilege to be granted on the basis of social class, racial or ethnic origin, wealth, religion and belief, age, sex or physical ability.
Education is for life and as such it should be possible for individuals to key in and out of education at all ages and stages of their lives.
Education is not just for equipping people with skills for the workplace, or for enhancing the nation’s economic competitiveness in a global free market economy.
It is for developing in people the skills and competences to take control of their own lives and to function as responsible social citizens, demanding and safeguarding their own rights, having due regard to and respect for the rights of others, and embracing their responsibilities to themselves, their families and to society.

The United Nations Convention on Human Rights which enshrines the rights of the child applies to schools no less than to other areas of children’s lives:
 The best interests of the child must be paramount (Article 3)
 Children have a right to be heard (A.12)
 Children have a right not to be discriminated against on the basis of, for example, class, race, ethnicity, religion/faith or gender (A.2)
(OR because of the failings of either parent)

Children have the right to be protected from all forms of violence. They must be kept safe from harm. They must be given proper care by those looking after them
(A19)
‘Children have a right to be heard’
How do we, parents, teachers, headteachers, school governors as facilitators of young people’s personal, social, emotional, spiritual, cultural and academic development operate in accordance with those International Human Rights Standards?
How do we go beyond compliance and create a life-long learning environment that is values-based and in which all young people could feel safe, valued and respected?
How do we ensure that irrespective of the disposition or beliefs of parents, students and young people are provided with the knowledge, understanding and skills to be at ease with and respect themselves, so that they could respect others, especially people who are not like themselves?
So that they could respect and be at ease with ‘difference’ on account of size, colour, language, ethnicity, class, home background, religion, sexuality, disability, etc.?
Whatever pretensions successive governments might have about liberal education in a liberal democracy, education and schooling is increasingly hitched to a neo-liberal agenda that defines its purpose principally in relation to labour market needs and Britain’s economic competitiveness in a global free-market economy.

Some characteristics of Neo-liberalism:
 Excessive individualism
 Competition
 Narrow accountability & reductionism
 Standardization
 Narrow notions of usefulness
 Assumed neutrality

Cynical fatalism

No room for dreaming (utopia, vision)

No room for notions of equity, social justice and inter-dependence,; notions of collective responsibility for the weak, the sick, the disabled and those who cannot fend for themselves
 The presumed death of idealism
(Prof John Portelli, 2008)
Contrast that with a Critical Democratic Perspective that believes in:

society and the inculcation of commonly shared values

democracy as a way of life

critical inquiry

dialogue and discussion

openness to different views

free and reasoned choices

public participation and accountability in the public sphere

equity

community

creativity

taking difference seriously

Neo-liberalism has displaced:
 an emphasis on safeguarding and extending rights
 a belief in the capacity of collective action to bring about change
 the notion of ‘moral purpose’: doing things because they are intrinsically right and just and not because the law says we must
 the belief in the function of education and schooling in building a society that is fair and just and that, in the words of Federico Mayor, ‘promote(s) the self fulfilment of human beings and guarantees their dignity’

the capacity of school students, young people and their parents to influence decision making and effect desired outcomes, irrespective of class and professional status
As I noted above, this neo-liberal approach to schooling has led to more and more semiautonomous providers of schooling, with no accountability in the public sphere save for the extent to which they provide quality education as measured mainly by test and examination results
The government appears to be building social cohesion through structured disintegration:
 Negative and punitive approaches to youth
 Attitude to schooling and delivering yo ung people’s educational entitlement, an entitlement that is much more than high level examination results
- ‘Quality education for all as an entitlement of all’?
 School exclusion that invariably leads to if not compounds young people’s social exclusion; school exclusion that is wasteful, discriminatory & counter productive
 Spectrum: Role models and mentors –to- ASBOs & Young Offender Institutions
(YOIs)
Consider for a moment the following:
“The 13,000 young people excluded from school each year might as well be given a date by which to join the prison service some time later on down the line”

“Of 400 young people in a young offender institution (YOI), 200 had been excluded from school”
- Martin Narey – former Director General of the Prison Service
‘Two-thirds of the population of YOIs had left or been put out of school at 13 or under’
-
-
Home Office Research (2002)
“80% of young offenders of school age are out of school, either through exclusion or refusal to attend;….mainstream schooling is not willing and not able to deal with children with challenging behaviour”
Lord Warner
– former Chair of the Youth Justice Board
Let me take a moment to say something further about Negative and punitive approaches to youth.
On 19 November 2008, the Metro reported that the DNA of 7 year old was stored by
Merseyside Police when investigating the abandonment of a sibling. Nearly 1 million under 18s were then on that database, (25% of 10-18 year olds), of which 100,000 were
10-12 year olds.
As the Home Affairs Committee noted:
‘DNA samples can be taken by the police from anyone arrested and detained in custody in connection with a recordable offence.
‘Baroness Scotland (now Attorney General) confirmed that three quarters of the young black male population will soo n be on the DNA database’
- Home Affairs Committee report on young black people and crime (2007)
Passive social exclusion spawns active social exclusion.
‘Active social exclusion’ I define as:
‘the form of social exclusion that comes about when young people lay claim to particular identities and make choices about lifestyles and behaviours that compound their disadvantage and their existence on the margins of society’.

- Gus John (2003)
Social exclusion (passive and active) for a growing number of young people results in the abandonment of hope and the death of aspiration.
It also provides a ready supply of foot-soldiers for the global alternative economy, without which the mainstream economy would collapse.
Young black people, African heritage males in particular, have come to be associated with four things, mainly:

Persistent underachievement in schooling and education

unemployment and un-employability

crime and disorder

irresponsible fathering and absentee parenting
It is often argued, also, that where you find one of those four factors operating, you are likely to find another, if not all of the others. There is also a stereotypical belief that those conditions operate in cycles and transfer across generations. In other words, African heritage males who fit that type create offspring who in time become like themselves.
That is why none of us should consider ourselves or our children ‘safe’ until we ensure that all those young people have the opportunity to lead fulfilling and purposeful lives and do not give expression to alienation from:
 Self and Self Belief
 Parental and Community Values
 Society and all its contradictory messages
In a moment I want to get to the crux of the matter and explore with you the implications and critical importance of all that for black governors and argue that we need more black governors with the right disposition do three things: i) support schools in delivering to each child their education entitlement ii) to hold school managers to account and safeguard the rights of children and parents iii) to encourage parents and communities to become more effective partners with schools in supporting children’s learning and holistic development

But before I do that, let me share with you the results of an exercise I conducted in Bristol.
In November 2007, I worked for one day with 80 students from three secondary schools in
Bristol. They were aged 12 to 16 and they were mostly black and mostly male. I asked them to write down, working separately and without conferring, the three things they feared most. When I collated the results in rank order, this is what emerged:
 Dying
 Death

Being killed/murdered

Going pen (going to prison)

Getting shot

Getting stabbed
 My loved ones dying around me
 Anything happening to my family
 Losing loved ones
 Our youths
 Not achieving goals
 Not being able to afford the things I want in the future( house, car, etc)
 Not getting the opportunities I want
 Not succeeding
 Living by myself
 The Tories in power
Those who expressed that last fear had more than their worst fear realised. They not only got the Tories but more than a sprinkling of Liberals, too. But I digress!
When I asked the entire group to describe what their schools did to engage with them in dealing with those fears, they could point to not one intervention save for the guidance and support a few individuals and their families were receiving from teachers who were ‘safe’ and with whom they had developed a good relationship. In fact, the majority of the students stated that their school did not know they harboured those fears as it was not the kind of thing the school is interested in.
In 60 years of Post-War black presence in Britain, this society has created an underclass of young black people, British born and bred, who are:

 living on the edge
 living in ever widening conflict with one another
 living at odds with the society
Some five years ago, I wrote this:
‘ We, as facilitators of children’s learning and self development, must be seen to model by our own conduct and by living our values, the behaviours and principles we wish to see our children, and all children, exhibit’.
I wrote it against the background of my work with CEN and especially the casework I do when I could make the time. It was in response to what I experienced in providing support to students and their parents in their attempts to resolve conflicts in schools:

Bullying
 Unfair and unjust dealings with one another and with young people in school and society
 Abuse of power and authority
 Visceral intolerance of young people
‘Children have a right not to be discriminated against’ ….
Children also have a right to guidance and support in developing the positive and holistic
SELF, irrespective of their background. Guidance and support in cultivating the following attributes and embedding the values that underpin them must come not just from parents and families but from schools too, especially given the amount of time children compulsorily spend in school in social interactions with their peers and with teachers and people in authority:
 Self Definition

Self Management
 Self Discipline

Self Esteem

Self Worth

Self Image

Self Confidence

Self Knowledge

 Self Development
 Self Realisation
Against the background of all of the above and at such a time as this, Black Governors in my humble opinion need to ask themselves some searching questions:
1. What is the role of governors in ensuring that schools deliver to every child its educational entitlement?
2. How do global majority governors deal with the dynamics of race, class and gender as you seek to perform your function as governors?
3.
How, as black governors, do you bring the ‘additionality of blackness’ to the way you conduct business within the governing body and the school?
4. What difference does it make to students and teachers of any ethnic background if the training you receive displaces your knowledge and experience of the way the schooling system has dealt with black and white working class people for generations, and if the stance you take towards school management and towards issues such as exclusion, differential schooling outcomes for black students compared with whites, school/home interface, etc., are identical to that of your white counterparts?
5. To what extent do you see yourselves as part of the 50 year old ‘Black working class movement in schooling and e ducation’ and, as such, drawing upon the struggles, advances and defeats of yesterday to inform the way you deal with today’s challenges?
6. How do you prevent yourselves being marginalized within the governing body, especially if you refuse to simply go with the flow and actually question the way the school deals with the needs of young people?

7. From where or from what do you derive the confidence and the power and authority to question school leaders and managers and to challenge your fellow governors in that way?
8. What relationship do you have with the communities from which your students come, especially global majority students and parents? How much do they know about what you do and how do you enable them to know?
9. How do you ensure that the school engages with the community and is mindful of its concerns and its educational aspirations? How do you ensure that the schools’ policies and ethos are respectful of the diverse cultural customs and practices within its community?
For some decades now, schooling has been characterized by the structured omission of issues to do with ideology, exploitation, discrimination, inequality and social injustice.
There are many who still believe that teaching and learning are a-historical and politically neutral processes that involve consensual thinking, knowledge transfer and commonly shared beliefs.
So, given what people such as Martin Narey (now head of Barnardos) and what young people themselves have said as noted above, what are the implications for governors:

How should governors ensure that schools deal with the fears and anxieties of young people and parents?

How do you ensure that schools enable young people to have a voice and be secure in their identity, irrespective of whether they are high achievers or so-called
‘slow’ learners?

How do governors ensure that schools raise their aspirations for and their expectations of young people and constantly encourage their students to have equally high aspirations and to demand more of themselves both in terms of their self management and academically?


How do you as governors develop the confidence to question the differential access to sets and streams and differential schooling outcomes for students (by
‘race’, gender, home background, free school meals, etc?

How do you ensure that schools support and guide young people in the process of constructive self building I mentioned above, especially given the amount of time students spend in school in social interaction with their peers, their teachers and others in authority?

How do you ensure that your school applies approaches to personalised learning and self development that can support students’ holistic development and not just their academic progress?
 How do you ensure that your school’s definition of educational entitlement is wider than just high levels of academic achievement and that entitlement is delivered to every learner?

How do you ensure that your school is in the business of building social and cultural capital by equipping its students with advanced social skills, labour market skills, active citizenship skills, self management skills, skills for collective action in pursuit of change; in other words the skills that make us fit for living in an increasingly disordered and unequal society?

How do you ensure that your school is nurturing in young people the belief that starting each with him/herself and acting collectively, they could bring about change and effect more control over their lives and their life chances?
My life experience has taught me that individuals experience their living holistically.
The student at school, at home, in work experience, in their peer group and in their community is the self same person. They may present a different persona and alter their behaviour in these different environments, but they remain the same person. That is why we have a concern not just about appropriate behaviour in school but about equipping young people with the social competences, the values and the skills to manage themselves appropriately wherever they find themselves.
That is why I firmly believe that empowering the individual to develop her/his full capacity to act in a self directing way and to take collective action with others is at the heart of the process of building and managing a democratic culture.

Finally, I want to leave you with a warning, whether you are a serving governor or are contemplating becoming one: ‘Beware of Goves bringing gifts’. Don’t be beguiled by the empty promises of freedom that this government is dangling in front of yo u…, the
‘gift’ of freedom from local authority interference; the ‘gift’ of freedom to establish ‘free’ schools; the ‘gift’ of freedom to take over and run ‘failing schools’, all amounting to the
‘gift’ of freedom to build an ever more divided society and ruin the life chances of a huge slice of the population of young people in our schools. Market forces and the law of supply and demand will ensure that more and more privately owned and privately operated prisons are built to contain them, but we seriously need to ask ourselves whether that is the future we want for our children; indeed, whether that is the society we want to build for present and future generations.
I dare say that all I have said so far might well sit very awkwardly with what you received or will receive in Governor training, but, alas, this is the message I consider most relevant to you as serving or aspiring BLACK governors.
Thank you for your patience.
Professor Gus John
London
23 November 2010