Adrian Hart reports from a fraught and futile employment tribunal that warns of trouble-ahead for increasingly tortuous school anti-discrimination policies.
Have you heard the one about the primary school teacher, the racist children and the Employment Tribunal hearing?
… well it goes something like this … a teacher (of Greek Cypriot origins and a devout Christian) walks into a classroom and feels offended by the anti-Christian and anti-Semitic sentiments of a few of his Bangladeshi pupils. Among their comments are phrases like “we hate the Jews” and “don’t touch me you’re a Christian”. Following standard government procedure on ‘racist incidents’ he fills out the necessary local authority racist incident report. He then awaits the stage in the procedure where he’s supposed to be interviewed by the head teacher and later invited to a meeting with the pupil concerned (who is then required to apologise). Head forgets all about procedure, tells teacher the kids are too young to understand concepts of “racism” and he should really keep better discipline. Teacher gets angry with school. School gets angry with teacher. He goes off-sick with anxiety and depression. Eventually he’s dismissed and they all end up in an employment tribunal.
A true story? Well, I’m tempted to say ‘you couldn’t make it up’ but in fact the story of 51year old support teacher Nicholas Kafouris versus Bigland Green Primary School and the London Borough of Tower Hamlets quickly received a make-over from The Sun (1), The Daily Mail (2), The Daily Express (3) and others. The story transformed into a straightforward unveiling of double-standards: “Christian teacher ‘forced out’ after complaining Muslim pupils praised 9/11 hijackers ‘as heroes’” ran one headline. Others proclaimed ‘Sir Axed over Race Reports’ and ‘Tower Hamlets School Ignored Racist Pupils’. For the press, this was a story illustrating how its apparently ok to ignore the “racism” of Muslim kids toward a white Christian but not ok if it were the other way round.
But in their enthusiasm for this particular ‘angle’ the press coverage missed the obvious point. A grown-up, teacher “offended” by the remarks of his eight year old pupils? Get a grip!
Perhaps less obvious – until you really look – is the mischievous role of anti-racist policy in all of this. After all, a “racist incident” is defined as,‘ any incident perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person’. In other words, if Kafouris felt these incidents to be racist then they were. And with procedures this daft its not really surprising that every so often a head or deputy head will inadvertently lapse into common-sense and point out that children are, well, childish occasionally. What is surprising is the fact that Tower Hamlets council have backed such a robust legal defence of the school assuring the Daily Mail “we believe all the correct procedures were followed”. (4) Strange …perhaps they regard their policy as daft too?
Without official ‘racist incident reporting’ Kafouris could not have claimed victim status. He could not of claimed to be the offended victim of quips made by 8 year olds or the victim of a cruel employer failing to soothe his wounds. Without official policy he might have recognised his role was to behave like an adult (the professional paid to teach these kids).
A few weeks ago the Employment Tribunal finally produced its 23 page judgement. Kafouris’s claim that he was, in some roundabout way, the victim of racial and religious discrimination (rather than just hung out to dry), was dismissed. But as far as agonising muddles caused by misguided policy go this was the ‘perfect storm’ with a 12 year teaching career sunk, a school system burdened with an expensive eight days defending itself in court and the staff, parents and children of an east end primary school presumably looking on in complete bemusement.
The real significance of the Kafouris case is that it issues a clear warning of trouble ahead. In a climate of hypersensitivity, policies steeped in the pretence that they exist to resolve conflict, do the exact reverse. Today official anti-racism is expanding into a single duty on schools to record and report all prejudice-related bullying and incidents of verbal abuse by type (i.e. race, religion or culture, disability or special educational needs, sexuality, gender or gender identity). The exact form all this will take is unclear. We await the results of the previous government’s consultation on the detail of this new duty, which is supposed to take effect from September 2010. The election of a new government has inevitably sent everything into flux and publication of this consultation is delayed. But despite Con-Lib rhetoric on rolling back state regulation and handing power back to schools, when it comes to being tough on bullying, homophobia, racism – making schools ‘safer places’, this is a box they all want to tick. It’s something of a crowd pleaser. The new Department of Education is likely to wave this one through.
So – anticipate outbreaks of racist, homophobic, zeno-racist, anti-religious, disablist, sexist and trans-sexist eight year olds; and teachers of various sensitivities wounded by the words of the little ones or simply feeling they must record and report anything they overhear. But also anticipate schools and governing bodies tied in knots over how to operate these policies. How, for example, will they deal with a teacher offended by the anti-gay ‘beliefs’ of a Muslim child who then ‘perceives’ the teachers ire to contain an element of racism?
School-life is in danger of becoming swallowed-up by competing grievances and the laborious activity of recording, reporting and arbitrating them. In this atmosphere teachers and children cease to be resilient and therefore willing to work out conflicts informally. Instead all parties look to the higher authority of government guidelines to sort things out. No doubt the new government will borrow the old government’s line that says schools must deal with incidents “in a sensitive way and exercise common sense”. But the policy itself mistrusts and undermines the ability of schools to know if and when and how they should react to moments of conflict. In the case of Nicholas Kafouris, the schools attempt to argue that ‘they’re just kids’ was merely his cue to point out that policy says different. In other cases it will be parents or a local authority citing policy to prompt a school to accuse a teacher of ignoring the racism or homophobia in their midst.
Last week the press reported on NUT findings after a survey of Lancashire primary schools. (5) The survey found an “endemic or prevalent culture of homophobia” citing widespread derogatory use of the word “gay”. Commenting on this “disturbing insight” into primary level homophobia, the NUTs Simon Jones was at least encouraged by his member’s overwhelming demand for “professional advice”. With teachers understandably anxious about how they should respond to what unions and employers regard as an unfolding crisis its no surprise that they’d prefer to play it according to official guidance. Problem is, the guidance doesn’t work - it just makes things worse.
