Posted January 19th 2011

"30,000 pupils branded as bigots: Teachers log 'racist' and 'homophobic' jibes in playground squabbles, even at nursery."

See the Daily Mail article here. 

Yesterday's front page news story used some data and a few quotes supplied by me.  Heavily sub-edited (I suspect) the piece skipped a few salient points revealed by my research and added a few intriguing points of its own.  But, I think, largely an accurate account, correcting the impression given by a previous Daily Mail headline back in March 2010 – See: ‘Pupils aged 5 on hate register: Teachers must log playground taunts for Government database’.  This referred to Labour government proposals to make the recording and reporting of prejudice-related bullying a legal duty.  It took a careful reading of the March article to realise that whilst pupils of any age may well be named on ‘incident’ forms held in school files, the local authority database “will show incidents and their nature, but not names of pupils” [my emphasis].

Worries over records kept on ‘racist kids’ not withstanding, for me this issue is all about how the aggregated statistics generate the illusion of a problem of racism in schools.  As I told the Daily Mail ‘these policies misunderstand children profoundly’.  But yesterday’s piece could have gone further.  The figure of 30,000 incidents for 2008/09 totalled up the data from the 80% or so English and Welsh LEAs who responded to my freedom of information request.  The UK total could reasonably be estimated at 40,000.  Importantly though, the figure of over 10,436 racist incidents from primary schools was the total for those LEAs who offered me breakdowns by school type.    Frustratingly, the Daily Telegraph (using the Mail piece) concluded, "A further 20,000 “hate crimes” were recorded against secondary school students …”.  No - the figure for secondary schools was 7159 and confirms the point made in The Myth of Racist Kids – most racist incidents derive from primary schools.  My recent research also confirms that almost all incidents are ‘verbal’ or ‘name-calling’ incidents. 

In the new report – published by the Manifesto Club in a few weeks – I look in detail at this data, including data on schools reporting homophobic incidents.  I’ve also obtained actual schools incident report forms.  What they reveal is startling – so watch this space.  But one thing I can reveal is there is no epidemic of racism or homophobia in Britain’s schools.

The new coalition government wants to be extra tough on all bullying – especially ‘prejudice-related’ bullying.  They have placed a particular emphasis on homophobic bullying.  They say they want to cut the red tape and hand power back to teachers.  But they also speak of Ofsted having new ‘no-notice inspections’ on bullying – which rather implies the continuation of incident reporting with Ofsted collecting the data. 

And so the change we can most hope for will be in the new, simplified schools guidance the DfE promise.  Clarification on definitions of serious bullying, on verbal ‘incidents’ not necessarily involving bullying and an abandonment of a ‘zero tolerance’ approach would be a good start.  In particular, I hope for an abandonment of the infamous Macpherson-approved definition of a racist (or ‘prejudice based’) incident ‘as any incident perceived to be racist/homophobic (etc) by the victim or any other person’.  This is the definition that might have made sense when it was first formulated for the police (to encourage them to take victim allegations seriously), but caused untold damage when it crossed into the world of children.  In schools it became a dragnet for every childish transgression to be elevated into an official ‘incident’.  With an ethos of ‘zero tolerance’ continually pushed on schools (along with warnings that if you’re not recording incidents you must be ignoring them) it’s hardly surprising that ‘racist incidents as allegations’ quickly became just plain racist incidents reports and the termly or yearly tallies poured into LEAs.  After all, better to report it right?

Last week a DfE anti-bullying spokesperson emailed me this: “The [schools]White paper stresses the Government's intention to give heads and teachers the freedom to drive their own improvements in schools. As a result, the Government is still reviewing whether it is appropriate to place a duty on teachers to record and report incidents of bullying within the context of trusting teachers to do what is best for the schools but also ensuring that schools meet Government's expectation of preventing and responding to bullying.”