Positive action through a focus on racial justice

In 2021, St Michael’s V.A. Junior School in Norfolk were proud to be awarded a Silver Award from the Race Charter Mark and shared their practise at the SSAT Summer Series, speaking alongside Professor David Olusoga. Here, Deputy Headteacher, Sarah Claflin and Co-Race and Conscious Equality Lead, Corri Laniado reflect upon the school’s continued journey: how their achievements and work in overcoming barriers focused the whole school on their mission for racial justice.

“Education is the only way things are going to change” Corri exclaimed with passion and heartfelt determination in the summer of 2020. This conversation about the power of education, its power to change lives and inspire the next generation to do better than the one before, was the catalyst that ignited our relentless focus on racial justice.

We have always known that many of our children face challenges before they come to school. Our locality ranks as one of the poorest wards in the country for deprivation and social mobility combined. It is a surprising fact to many. Norwich would not immediately spring to mind as an area with challenge; it’s not a big city. However, this stark reality, coupled with our growing concerns around low pupil self-esteem, confidence, passivity, and the tragic events of 2020, meant we needed to act.

Our school community is unique in many respects, but particularly as we have children from over 44 different countries and there are over 25 different languages spoken at our school. Traditionally, Norfolk has been a predominantly white locality, however, in recent years, it has become more diverse. The make-up of our school meant that racial justice work was important if we wanted to break the cycle of deprivation, improve aspirations and social mobility.

But how do you deal with the constant and shifting demands in education that attempt to knock you off course? Our work already matched our school vision, so we took the step to embed it into our school improvement plans, placing racial justice at the centre. We felt passionately that this had to be a shared responsibility; all staff had to be on board and committed. Not only this, we wanted staff to be proactively noticing diversity, equality and inclusion issues and be able to take action. We wanted to build a culture of positively noticing and staff feeling confident and empowered to act. This task was no mean feat, but we were unrelenting in this goal.

Early into the journey we took every opportunity to engage staff in conversations and spent time listening to viewpoints and perspectives. From this, we carefully crafted bespoke training that countered unconscious views and worries, using the training to develop our staff’s racial literacy. Challenging conversations on race are now embraced as part of our school culture. Rather than being led or directed, they now occur naturally with children and staff at different levels of responsibility. Investing time in the early stages is essential. Strong foundations in knowledge builds confidence. Confidence is empowering.

Listening to our children’s voices and enabling them to lead and make a meaningful contribution that drives our race equality work forward has been very important to us. Our Culture Society is made up of 30 children. There are representatives from each year group, and they reflect the diversity of the school. The children have a key role in planning cultural celebrations, games, quizzes, displays and other activities that the whole school community can learn from and be involved in. They feel strongly about encouraging their peers to share their backgrounds and beliefs.

One of the greatest challenges was connecting with our parents. Some schools serve a large community, with a distinct ethnic group, but we have many groups, some larger, some smaller. We had to connect with individuals first and then start to bring groups together. Despite our attempts, we struggled to engage with parents. It was the children from Culture Society who helped us make the shift by writing letters to their parents inviting them to a meeting about a summer fair. This opened conversations. As a result, we had our most inclusive summer fair, with children and parents bringing in cultural food (which sold out!) and families playing cultural games. We are continuing to build on communication. It is so important that we hear our community’s voice and have their support in steering our racial equality work.

Now that the work in school has become more embedded and directed by our race leaders, we are seeking to collaborate with others. Working with the Diocese of Norwich, we have created a new Black History Month resource this year which celebrates local and national black British icons. Several schools in the local area are also using an assembly resource we created with colleagues in the diocese. This resource is a starting point for learning during Black History Month and has been developed so that pupils develop a deeper understanding of some of the momentous events in the British civil rights movement that helped shape life in modern Britain. Feedback has been great.

None of this work comes easy. It is an emotional journey, with an incredible amount of self-learning for your team. By investing the time, bringing everyone along and sharing the responsibly, you can make the enormity of the task, possible. In the words of the children in our Culture Society, “we are strong together because we are one”. 

Find out more

Visit the school website
Follow the school on Twitter: @SJuniorschool
Follow the authors on Twitter: @SarahClaflin and @corri_orri