Earlier this year a TV series, Boarders, dramatised the vexed relationship between race and education in the UK. In the BBC drama, a distinguished boarding school called St Gilbert’s gets itself into trouble when a video is leaked of a group of its students urinating on a homeless man. In order to improve its image, St Gilbert’s agrees to a scheme whereby five black inner-city kids are awarded full scholarships to attend the school.
The show is full of the clichés that typify many screen and fictional accounts of race. There is the racist and thick posh white boy. The black girl who complains about bougie coffee shops destroying black communities. The white girl who sexually fetishises black boys. There is even, to top it all off, a black actor playing a Nigerian character with an unforgivably bad accent; most of the people watching the show will not be Nigerian and so will be none the wiser.
Boarders presents school as a terrible place to be if you are a black kid, and Kalwant Bhopal makes the same assertion in her new book Race and Education: Reproducing White Supremacy in Britain. In it, Bhopal, a professor of education and social justice at the University of Birmingham, examines secondary schools and universities in Britain; her method is critical race theory (CRT). This is a set of ideas developed by American legal scholars in the 1970s and 1980s to explain how and why the civil rights legislation of the 1950s and 1960s was unable to defeat racism. Racial inequality persisted after the civil rights revolution, these scholars argued, and racism is so embedded in society that legislation was insufficient.
Bhopal applies this to a British context. “I work from the premise,” she writes, “that racism is a given in society, and is central to explaining how education reinforces systems and structures of Whiteness and White privilege that benefit White people.” Elsewhere she writes: “Everything has a racial element.”
According to Bhopal, ethnic minority students in schools and universities experience racism “on a daily basis”. This is either through explicit racist abuse, micro-aggressions, or institutional and structural racism. All of this leads to one outcome: white students benefiting at the expense of their non-white peers. As I read the book, though, the same set of questions kept recurring: is this fact true? Is this statement correct? Can I trust this passage? The answer to all these questions, upon finishing the book, is a resounding no.
Bhopal argues, for instance, that ethnic minority pupils are “more likely to be excluded or expelled and to face harsher punishment compared with their White peers”. This isn’t true. It is more accurate to state that some ethnic minority pupils are more likely to be excluded or expelled than some white students. But the groups with the highest exclusion rates by far are white: Gypsy, Roma and Irish Traveller communities had 43 exclusions for every 10,000 pupils in 2022-23.
The groups with the lowest exclusion rates, by contrast, are Indian and Chinese pupils: for both demographics, one pupil is excluded from every 10,000. The exclusion rate for white British pupils is 13 for every 10,000. This means that white British students are 13 times more likely to be excluded from schools than Indian and Chinese students.
If we focus specifically on black African pupils, rather than generalising about black pupils, we notice something equally startling and contrary to the narrative presented by Bhopal: black African pupils are excluded at a rate of six pupils for every 10,000. This means black African pupils are also less likely to be excluded from schools than white British students. It is black Caribbean pupils who are more likely to be excluded than white British students.
It only took me a minute to check this. I found it on the gov.uk website. Either Bhopal didn’t look this up, or she knows but can’t reconcile them with an ideology in which race shapes every aspect of education. Either way, it makes her account unreliable.
In one passage she admits that “there is evidence to suggest that Chinese and Indian students perform better compared with other groups” and adds that this is “due to their cultural and family background (irrespective of their social class), which includes a significant emphasis on professional careers and high educational achievement, a committed work ethic and access to support networks within and outside the family”. This assertion may well be correct, but it is plainly inconsistent with the general message of the book, in which she repeatedly claims that ethnic minority students “are more likely to be excluded from school, experience racism, or be offered less support compared with white pupils”. Do Chinese and Indian pupils not count as ethnic minority students? Bhopal also presents a graph in the book from the Department for Education that looks at GCSE attainment: the graph shows not only Indian and Chinese pupils outperforming white British pupils on this measure, but black African and Bangladeshi pupils too.
Bhopal is allergic to the word “some”. She speaks in generalities. And yet the education system is more complex than her analysis will allow. Some ethnic minority students are struggling. Some are thriving. Likewise, some white British pupils – in particular, white working-class boys – are languishing while others are doing extremely well. Bhopal seems less interested in reflecting this nuanced reality than advancing her belief that racism guides educational outcomes.
She argues that “recent data from the Department of Education also suggests that inequalities in gaining good A-level grades are related to ethnicity”. But the graph she uses to support this claim illustrates the very opposite: getting a good A-level is not related to ethnicity. Some ethnic minority groups are doing well while others are not, and similarly with white groups.
When she is not wrong as a matter of fact, Bhopal presents arguments with dubious assumptions. She states that “only 14.9 per cent of teachers were identified as being from an ethnic minority background… compared with the high numbers of students from an ethnic minority background, this figure is relatively low”. But Bhopal doesn’t explain why it’s a problem that the teacher demographic doesn’t precisely match the student demographic.
Speaking from personal experience, I was not especially in thrall to the black and brown teachers at my school; I didn’t feel any safer with or validated by them than I felt with my white teachers. Some of my black and brown teachers were awful and some were good – I wouldn’t expect this to be any other way. They were not saints or icons carrying the black experience on their backs, but human beings with ordinary human strengths and weaknesses.
In another passage, Bhopal scolds schools for the way they teach history. She argues that: “In schools, children are taught to value European history and culture in an environment in which the history and culture of other ethnic groups are at best ignored or treated as subordinate, or, at worst, demonized.” One can make the case that schools should expand the scope of what they teach. This is fair. We live in a world where cultures and nationalities are increasingly interconnected; education should do a better job of reflecting this. But Britain is a European country. A curriculum that favours the history of European culture need not be to the disadvantage of ethnic minority students; they are just as British and European as their white peers. They are equally entitled to feel part of the legacy that constitutes British and European history.
In any case, if it is important for ethnic minority schoolchildren to be taught about their cultures in order to feel more included in the British school curriculum, what relevance is the history of Indian culture to a child from a black African background? What relevance is the history of African kingdoms to a child from an Indian background? These subjects are worthy of study – but on the basis of knowledge rather than for tokenistic, identity-based reasons.
If inclusion is the guiding criteria, the only truly inclusive way of relaying history is by teaching British history. This connects children from various backgrounds with something common to all of them: the country in which they live.
In other parts of the book, Bhopal presents anonymised testimony from victims of racism: secondary school and university students along with university lecturers and professors.
These accounts all paint the same picture: British education is a racist dystopia. She quotes a university student called Jonathan (not his real name) who states: “These days, it’s more acceptable to be racist. I think the way things have progressed – or not progressed – around race has made it more OK for people to say racist things and for people to see that as a legitimate view.”
Who would be callous enough to cast doubt on someone recounting traumatic experiences? And yet it is patently nonsense to claim racist statements are more acceptable in mainstream society today than they were in the past. Are we to believe the present is more racist than a time when blackface was presented on prime-time television, when the National Front was marching through multi-racial neighbourhoods, and when football fans were throwing banana peels at black footballers?
This is not to say we live in a post-racist country. Such a statement would be absurd in light of the heinous race riots that engulfed many towns and cities in England earlier this month, when asylum seekers and British Muslim communities were demonised and targeted by far-right thugs. Education is likewise not free from the racism that afflicts wider society. Far too many students still endure racist abuse from their teachers. But the fight against racism will not be best served by relying on those who think it shapes every aspect of society: when it comes to education, in particular, the evidence does not support this conclusion.
Race and Education: Reproducing White Supremacy in BritainKalwant Bhopal
Pelican, 288pp, £10.99
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[See also: Britain’s exam delusion]
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