Slay In Your Lane

I partly grew up in Dulwich – a suburb of South London, home to Dulwich Picture Gallery. I would often pass the gallery, so I had noticed that they hosted a range of events aimed at their usual demographic – middle class, middle-aged and white – nothing that 16-year-old me particularly fancied. But I needed work experience, and I had an idea, so I went on Google, did a quick search and found the email address of the person who headed up the gallery’s events and marketing and sent her an email. In it, I said I believed their events could do with appealing more to young people. I asked to meet her and, much to my surprise, she agreed – obviously she had no idea she was arranging to see a teenager. On the day of the meeting, as I sat there waiting for her to arrive, I was so nervous. To say I felt out of my depth is an understatement. I was thinking, ‘This middle-aged white woman is not expecting some inexperienced 16-year-old black girl asking to be involved in her events.’ But when she did arrive she looked pleasantly surprised. It just so happened that during that summer the gallery was introducing outdoor cinema screenings, and she wanted my input to help bring the idea to life. And that’s what I spent my summer doing. It became my first experience in marketing.

Results day came and, much to my surprise, I did well and my parents were pleased. My panic had propelled me into finding work experience that would go on to prove valuable in my career, so I don’t regret that move, but looking back on that summer, what I do regret, and find depressing, is how I let my crippling fear of not doing well and letting other people down take over my life. Instead of making the most of those weeks I spent them waiting anxiously and fretting about my future. Why? Where did my lack of faith in myself come from? On balance, when I look back on it, the work experience was a good thing for me to do, it was just the circumstances that drove me to do it that were far from ideal.

In my school, unless you were identified as a gifted and talented student achieving straight As and exhibiting model behaviour, it was almost inevitable that you would fall through the cracks and be forgotten about. By the time it came to making decisions about your future, you could find yourself in a no-man’s land, caught between your parents’ very high expectations and the lower opinions of the teachers who doubted your ability – not forgetting the usual teenage peer pressures. For me, this self-doubt then developed into a loss of self-esteem, and anxiety crept in about what I was good at and how I could translate that into a future.

When the time came to take the exams, I had noticed that some of my friends didn’t believe they could possibly do well, so they just started to give up and misbehave – because this seemed to be what was expected anyway. This tension often became a ‘one-way ticket’ to disengagement, and so they began to succumb to that feeling – whether they had started out well-behaved and ambitious, or not. Being doubted by your teachers and put under great pressure from your parents created a sometimes toxic combination. The truth about educational achievements is often more complex than the stats suggest.

When the topic of race and education is covered by the media it is usually cast in an overwhelmingly negative light. When they aren’t focusing on the low achievement of white working-class boys, the experiences of ethnic minorities are characterised by low aspirations, high exclusion rates and subsequent underachievement. With black children, the spotlight tends to be focused on black boys – perhaps understandably, because their educational attainment levels are shockingly low compared to black girls. As a result black girls are largely rendered invisible within the education conversation, so there has been little contemporary research and literature that looks into their experience of our education system, asking the question: how are black girls in the UK really doing in school?

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‘My friend, face your books, not this Facebook.’

Unknown African parent

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It’s not hard to see why an extremely high value was placed on education in my childhood home and in the homes of my friends, as well as in those of many of the women we interviewed for this book. We are a generation of people who grew up with parents – or grandparents – who had gained professional qualifications in the countries they had migrated from, but who often found it difficult to get jobs in the UK that reflected their skill sets because those qualifications weren’t always recognised when they went to job interviews. Educated though they were, they often faced discrimination as they entered the labour market, and many had to take jobs for which they were overqualified.

Our parents appreciated the value of education and the opportunities it could bring. As mine would often remind me: ‘Back home we do not have the same opportunity that you children have here. Education makes a way for you.’ Despite this, they also weren’t in the dark about how difficult it was going to be for us to navigate our future in Britain, and so they would also make us aware that ‘this isn’t our country; we have to work harder’. My parents had extremely high ambitions for me and my siblings. In their eyes, ‘the sky’s the limit’– if you worked hard, you would go far. I would hear them talk to their friends in true Nigerian style about how I would be doing a masters, when I hadn’t even got into university yet. They believed that education led to job opportunities, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, as Karen Blackett’s father did, they often steered us towards careers such as law and medicine – professions in which no one can deny your qualifications, regardless of the colour of your skin and the prejudice you might come across. From our parents’ perspectives these traditional professions would give you job security.

Bola Agbaje, Olivier Award-winning playwright and writer, had a similar experience growing up: ‘For African parents, I think it was just that thing that they wanted stability. A lot of parents who are first generation, they want their kids to be lawyers and doctors and things like that because those are the jobs that create stability, and also you can be wealthier with those type of jobs. So for them, they want their kids to have better lives than they had, so that’s why they push their children into those types of careers.’

Educational researchers acknowledge that, of all factors within the home, parental values and aspirations have the largest positive effect on children in school. However, the high aspirations and motivations of ethnic minority parents do not always translate into the greatest achievement in the classroom, and there has been little research into why this might be the case. When black children enter the school system at five they perform as well as white and Asian children in literacy and numeracy tests. Their results are largely in line with the UK average, with literacy at 67 per cent and numeracy at 75 per cent, compared to the national averages of 69 per cent and 76 per cent respectively. However, by the end of primary school as they enter secondary school, aged 11, black pupils’ attainment falls behind.1

When we look a little deeper, it’s noticeable that there are differences in achievement levels between the different black groups. In the 2013–14 academic year, 56.8 per cent of British African students achieved A*–C grades – slightly above the national average of 56.6 per cent. This attainment level places them alongside Indian and Chinese pupils as the country’s highest ethnic achievers. However, in sharp contrast, Black Caribbean pupils have a 47 per cent pass rate, trailing by nearly ten percentage points. On the whole, black pupils achieved the least in the five top GCSE grades out of all ethnic groups, but it is the performance of Caribbean pupils that averages out at 53.1 per cent.2 There has been a corresponding lack of research into the differences in attainment levels between Black African and Black Caribbean pupils.

Not enough has been done to try to understand why a disparity exists between different black groups. Instead, the two groups are often amalgamated into one, which means we are unable to see emerging patterns and there’s a tendency for many children to be left sidelined unless they are doing really badly. This lack of substantial research is especially apparent when it comes to the attainment levels of black girls. Althea Efunshile CBE, former deputy chief executive of Arts Council England, explains: ‘I have sometimes wondered if black girls who don’t do as badly as black boys are invisible in the education system. Because if you compare them to black boys, they’re doing better, and so people say, “Right, okay, we don’t need to worry about them so much.” But if you compare them to white girls, they’re not doing as well.’

Young black girls appear to value education highly: they want to succeed and try their best to navigate the school system. But as they progress through secondary school it seems that factors come into play that often lead to them not fulfilling their potential. Heidi Mirza is Professor of Race, Faith and Culture at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and has written extensively on ethnicity, gender and identity in education, most notably in her book Young, Female and Black (1992). As she pointed out when we spoke to her, ‘Everyone says black girls do well, there’s no problem for them. They do better than the boys, they do better than black boys, they do better than white working-class boys, and they’re doing better than white working-class girls, what’s the deal? We don’t even need to look at them; in education they’re kind of sorted. But actually, when you look down and you drill down, as I did for Young, Female and Black, what I found was that there are so many mythologies around black womanhood, and the fact that there’s always the “strong black woman that survives narrative”. All the theories and studies were saying was that, because they’ve got that inner strength, they do well, and what I found was, yes, they have that inner strength, yes, their parents really valued education enormously, and pushed them to do well – some did, some didn’t, but at the same time there were structural things like racism, schools with not very good teachers, issues around poverty, resourcing, government policies, that they had to contend with, and the fact that they do well is because they overcame that, they learnt to navigate the system.

‘They had very high aspirations, but as they got a bit older and they realised that they weren’t getting the support at school to get through, they would make very strategic choices, so they would say, “I’m not going to get my GCSE, but I will go to college and I will get it in another institution, and I will go for nursery nursing because I can get on that course, but I don’t necessarily want to be a nursery nurse. I want to go to university and study sociology, that might be a stepping stone for me.”

‘They knew the system didn’t work for them and so they made many choices to accommodate – I call it the “long, backdoor route into success” – so they have to make many, many more different steps to sidestep the racism and the lack of support in the system by making strategic choices. So it takes some much longer to get into higher education, into university. They’re usually older; nearly all my students when I was teaching at places like Southbank and Middlesex, all the black women were, you know, already in their mid-twenties, where the white young people would be 17, 18, 19. They were much younger because they didn’t have to navigate the system as much.’

If black parents do notice that their kids are struggling in school, they often look for alternative methods to compensate for the failure of mainstream schools, rather than trying to effect change in the schools themselves. Some black parents choose to send their children overseas during their secondary school years as soon as they start to see a pattern of bad grades or disruptive behaviour. When I was in Year 9 in secondary school, I was constantly warned that I would be sent to Nigeria if my grades didn’t pick up in maths and science, and my brother and sister were sent to boarding school there for a few years. This was in contrast with the faith they placed in the education system in the UK. I had friends who were in class on a Monday morning but by Friday they would have been taken out of school.

Private school is another option for parents who can afford it. Dr Nicola Rollock, Reader in Equity and Education at Goldsmiths College, University of London, started off in state education but her parents soon made the decision to send her to an independent school when they realised she wasn’t being stretched academically. ‘We used to read Peter and Jane books and they had a sequence – 1a, 1b, 1c – and I would get through the sequence quite quickly. Then, rather than being allowed to go on to the next sequence, 2 or 3 or 4, the teacher would ask me to go back to the beginning, so I was incredibly bored.’ Rather than move her into a higher class, Nicola was expected to wait for the rest of the class to catch up: ‘There was one black teacher who advised my parents to move me because I wasn’t flourishing there. I had been held back by my class teacher, a white woman, so my parents moved me and I went to an independent all-girls school.’

Some black parents supplement their kids’ education with tutoring. I went to a Saturday school for many years, run by two black women who employed highly motivated black teachers. There, parents had a say in the curriculum and the school was committed to raising the achievement levels of black students whose mainstream schools had often given up on them.

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Attitude gal

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So what do we know about why so many black girls are underachieving at school? We know that institutional racism plays a part and that bias in teachers’ perceptions and expectations contributes to some black pupils’ underperformance and attainment. Studies have revealed that bias can manifest itself in a number of ways. There is evidence that teachers have routinely underestimated the abilities of black students and that assumptions about behavioural problems are overshadowing their academic talents. In essence, low achievement among some black students is made worse because their teachers don’t actually expect them to succeed. Dr Steve Strand from Warwick University, the author of one study, said: ‘After accounting for all measured factors, the under-representation is specific to this one ethnic group and indicates that, all other things being equal, for every three white British pupils entered for the higher tiers, only two black Caribbean pupils are entered.’3

It’s no surprise then that, according to the same study, black children are also the most concerned about how teachers view them and are less likely to feel their teachers would describe them as clever.4

Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock MBE, space scientist and co-host of BBC2’s astronomy show, The Sky at Night, can relate to these findings: ‘At school I wasn’t considered to be very bright, I suffer from dyslexia and so when you first go to school it’s all about reading and writing. When I started the teachers said, “Oh yeah, okay, Maggie’s not very bright,” and they put me in the remedial class, and so I was in the back there with the safety scissors and the glue tucked out of the way and they didn’t see me as having much potential at all. This is quite in contrast with what I was getting at home, because I was speaking with my father and he was saying, “Ah yes, you should go to university, you should study,” and so the two were very much at odds. I didn’t speak much at school about what I wanted to do because usually when I did I think the teachers would try to be kind, but they would look at me with little disappointed faces, like, “Oh Maggie, science is for clever people, you should consider something like nursing, nursing is good, and that’s science, too.” So I think they were trying to mitigate my expectations. I felt a bit disillusioned; I felt that school wasn’t for me, so I would sit in remedial class. But things turned round at one specific moment for me, when I was sitting in a science class and a teacher asked a question. The question was “If one litre of water weighs 1kg, how much does one cubic centimetre of water weigh?” Now a cubic centimetre is one-1000th of a litre and I worked out, “Oh, that would be 1 gram.” So I put my hand up to answer the question and I looked around the class and no one else had their hand up. Now knowing that I was the dumb one in the remedial class I put my hand back down, because I thought I couldn’t be right. But then I decided to give it a go and I answered the question and got it right, and suddenly I thought, maybe I’m not as dumb as I thought. And science is a subject that gets people into space and so I thought “if I study science maybe I can go into space”. That was a real turnaround for me, so I started paying more attention in science classes, and as my science grades started going up, my other grades went up, too. After that I got lots of encouragement at school, because that’s when they saw I had an aptitude.’

Manifestations of unconscious bias in the classroom also extend to black girls being shown fewer leniencies than their white counterparts, and written off as problem children more quickly. The groundbreaking Swann Report in 1985 pointed out: ‘Teachers’ attitudes towards, and expectations of, West Indian pupils may be subconsciously influenced by stereotyped, negative or patronising views of their abilities and potential, which may prove a self-fulfilling prophecy, and can be seen as a form of unintentional racism.’ In the UK, black children are almost four times more likely to be suspended from school than white children. In the 2013–2014 school year, 18 per cent of black boys and 10 per cent of black girls were suspended from school. This is compared to 5 per cent of white boys and 2 per cent of white girls.5 In my school, I remember pupils being excluded because of their hair. Black kids were penalised for their hairstyles, whereas the white middle-class kids with floppy long hair were left alone. At the time I couldn’t understand why one kind of hair was policed and the other not. If someone’s hair doesn’t affect their ability to learn, why should it matter?

I also remember thinking that there was often a double standard between the black girls and white girls in school. We were punished when they would be given second chances. Alarmingly, this is borne out in a study published in 2017 by Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality. It revealed that, starting as young as age five, young black girls are viewed by adults as being less innocent and more adult-like than white girls.

Heidi Mirza elaborates: ‘If you just step out of line a little bit, if you’re white and you laugh in the class they might laugh with you; it’s kind of a joke. If you laugh, it’s like, you’re laughing at somebody, get up and go out of the room. So what they found was that there is a kind of stereotype of blacks being more aggressive, and it’s like you said, this subconscious bias goes on, so any little thing is escalated much quicker.’

Dawn Butler explains how perceptions of teachers left her at odds aged 12: ‘There was a girl, a white girl, called Andrea in my school, and she would always get As, no matter what she did she would always get As, so I decided I was going to buckle down and get an A. It was a history assignment and so I worked really hard on this history homework. It was a really good piece of work, and I remember going into school and I was really chuffed, and I brought it in, and then I got a D for it. And I compared it to Andrea’s work, and we both compared it because we were actually in competition to see who could write the neatest and the smallest.

The teacher said that I had cheated. There was no way I could prove that I didn’t cheat, that it was my bit of work and that I worked really hard at it. And I just thought, “things are never going to change” – I even had this discussion with Andrea. We decided one day we were going to swap work, because we knew that no matter what I put in I was never going to get an A and whatever she put in she was always going to get an A. Looking back I was so frustrated that I couldn’t do anything to change this, but it was the first time, I suppose, that I realised that once somebody has an impression of you, it’s very difficult for them to change that impression. So, you know, Andrea the white girl was always going to get an A, Dawn the black girl was never going to get an A. It was a hard thing to accept – I kind of didn’t want to try my best anymore because it was just never going to be rewarded.’

Being an opinionated confident black girl was a no-no in my school, and as Jamelia, singer and TV presenter explains, her daughter’s experience sounds similar: ‘I’ve noticed it in their school, being in a private-school environment, they’re still the minorities there, and I’m being called in and I’ve had a meeting where they’ve said, Oh, you know, she’s just acting too confident. Yesterday, my eldest, she tested out a sociology class, because she wants to do it for A-level – she’s finishing her GCSEs but they get a taster class – and the teacher said he showed her a statistic, a table, and at the bottom, it showed ethnicity and their success in exams, and he said black boys and black girls were at the bottom of the table. My daughter was like, I don’t even know how he thinks that might have made me feel, and it shows that he just didn’t even think, but, what I said to her is that at least he had a statistic. What he then went on to say was that the reason black boys are at the bottom is because they don’t have father figures and my daughter called him out, and she got in trouble.’

There’s evidence to suggest that if your teacher looks like you, you might do better in school. An American study revealed that when black students have black teachers, those students are more likely to graduate high school. ‘The study found that when students had teachers of the same race as them, they reported feeling more cared for, more interested in their schoolwork and more confident in their teachers’ abilities to communicate with them. These students also reported putting forth more effort in school and having higher college aspirations. When students had teachers who didn’t look like them, the study found, they reported lower levels of these feelings and attitudes. These trends were most visible in black students, especially black girls.’6 So it is particularly frustrating that in the UK, we don’t have enough black teachers. According to the National College for Teaching and Leadership, only 12 per cent of trainee teachers in 2013–14 were from minority ethnic groups – a statistic that has not really changed in five years.7 The lack of black teachers across the country means that there could be a lack of understanding as to how to motivate and work with black children. In 2007, Catherine Rothon argued that a lack of co-ethnic role models may explain poor performance from Black Caribbean boys,8 and those teachers who do come from ethnic minorities report difficulties that include casual racism, lack of role models for black and minority ethnic (BAME) children, and being forced to deal with microaggressions from other staff. I go into more detail about the impact of casual racism in the ‘Water Cooler Microaggressions’ chapter.9

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When I grow up …

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What did you want to be when you grew up? Who were your role models? We can all remember what it felt like to be full of hopes, dreams and ambitions about what jobs we were going to have when we were old enough. But as the years passed, society – and school – often shut down those ambitions and set limitations before we had time to really know what it was we wanted to do. According to a BBC Newsround’s study, about one in five black children believe their skin colour could damage their job prospects. One child told Newsround’s reporter, ‘This generation is still being judged and stereotyped, so it’s going to be difficult for us to do what we want to do when we’re older.’10