Decolonising the curriculum in our schools

How are you planning to celebrate Black History Month in your school? 

We teach Black History all year round at Rathfern. Our curriculum is designed to reflect and celebrate our local community’s culture and history. We empower all our pupils by exploring the role that key black people and others have played in challenging racism and shaping a more just and equitable world today. We strongly believe that black history is British history and the teaching of it should not be designated to a single month.

What sort of topics do you cover in your curriculum?

We follow the national curriculum but within this our anti-racist and decolonised approach includes subjects such as the Bristol Bus Boycott, the origins of the Notting Hill Carnival, the Battle of Lewisham and the murder of Stephen Lawrence plus more well known topics such as Windrush, Rosa Parks and the abolition of slavery.

You do lots of work in other Lewisham schools on decolonising the curriculum.  Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Rathfern is working with 30 Lewisham schools on a project called ‘Your Voice Can Change the World’. It is a connecting schools project with South Africa – a country whose anti-apartheid struggle is globally recognised as a fight against a brutally racist regime. All participating schools and pupils will learn how we can stand up and oppose racism. When I developed the project I was determined to find a way for all our pupils but especially our Black pupils in Lewisham schools to see the power we all have to change the world. 

I also lead the Chartered College of Teaching Rathfern Research Network and this year we have three academics whose focus is decolonising the curriculum, running seminars which are attended by over 50 Lewisham educators.

How do you think the killing of George Floyd and the recent global interest in the Black Lives Matter movement has affected your work?

It has reminded me of how embedded the pursuit of race equality is within our school curriculum at Rathfern. It has helped me to remember how coming from a minority ethnic group myself, my experience of race, class and gender has impacted in a positive way on the culture and teaching within my school community.

What are your hopes for primary education in Lewisham for the future?

Lewisham schools are led by committed educators and our collective focus now needs to be on continuing to:

• Develop safe educational spaces for our pupils and parents of colour by understanding how whiteness dominates and diminishes others.
• Becoming aware of and challenging our own entrenched biases.
• Creating a safe space to acknowledging racism and call out inequitable practices.
• Teaching the history of colonialism and anti-racist struggles including local history.
• Ask questions to regularly disrupt assumptions about race, class and intelligence.

What’s next for you in terms of your work?

I lead the Race Equality strategy steering group and I’m currently collaborating with 12 Lewisham headteachers to implement the recommendations of a recent research project on embedding race equality in Lewisham schools.