In a world where 59% of teachers consider leaving the teaching profession (according to the 2022 Teacher Wellbeing Index) to focus on their mental health and well-being, and where being a teacher in a public school means having to bear the brunt of chronic government underfunding in public education, it is a given that being a teacher from communities that are discriminated against would be a difficult job. And that is precisely what research from the UCL Institute of Education (IOE) and the UK charity Education Support found.
According to the UCL study, 46% of Schools in England did not have a single teacher from the Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities. In a recent piece, The Conversation cited government data according to which only 2.5% of teachers are Black, even though Black people made up 4.6% of the working-age population, against which 90.3% of teaching staff and 96% of headteachers are white, while making up 79.7% of the working-age population. This could lead schools in the UK to become ‘white spaces’, which are social spaces where whiteness is the norm and any deviation from that is considered inferior and threatening. The findings of a 2019 report from the National Union of Teachers (now part of the National Education Union) support this, according to which BAME teachers were regularly given roles deemed non-intellectual, and were criticized for voicing their opinions.
Teacher Asif Haque concurs. He told Asian Voice, “Over the years, I have variously found myself involuntary spokesman for: forced marriages, terrorism, diabetes, caste, Sikhism, hijab, Hinduism and turmeric. Dutifully, this "expertise" gets supplied the usual way, one PowerPoint slide per topic.
A few years ago, perhaps as ghee to my ego, I was offered some extra "responsibility", ostensibly to "help integrate recent ethnic-minority arrivals into school life”. I had little idea of what this involved and requested support. Here is my summarised recollection of the discussion that followed.
‘We've taken on these children, but don't know who they are.’
‘Yes, and?’
‘We need you to find out.’
‘I wouldn't really know where to start.’
‘Don't worry too much. You are one of them- You'll figure it out.’
Challenge accepted I meet the class some days later, an assortment of Chinese, Vietnamese, Eastern European and Djiboutian girls and boys. Apparently, all of us "ethnics" looked alike to senior management.”
While teachers from BAME communities are indeed important to provide infrastructural and systemic support to BAME students who are often alienated in the ‘white spaces’ in their crucial development years, Haque’s points also highlight a risk overlooked by those merely willing to diversify their spaces- tokenism. As is often experienced by people from BAME communities, mere inclusion is not enough, as it can instead compound the problems brought on by racism and lack of awareness. What is needed is willingness and resources for school authorities to educate themselves, develop systems of support and care and be actively responsible in nurturing inclusive spaces in a world that is already difficult.
