Executive Summary

The race relations (amendment) act 2000 led to a reqirement on schools to report ‘racist incidents’ to local authorities, which has resulted in the reporting of an estimated 250,000 incidents. Many of these ‘racist incidents’ involved very young children: the majority of recent incidents in Yorkshire schools were in primary schools, and the majority of Essex council’s incidents between 2002–5 were in age 9 –11. Anti-racist officials believe that these incidents are the ‘tip of the iceberg’, and call on schools to step up identification and reporting, and extend reporting to even younger age groups.

Schools are being encouraged to use a broad definition of ‘racism’, including name-calling in the playground and excluding other children from games. One anti-racist theatre professional interviewed for this report explains that ‘leaving someone out because of their race is also racism’, a message he sought to communicate to 7-year-olds in london. As a result, incidents are being reported where the ‘victim’ didn’t complain, and the six-year-old perpetrator was confused and worried that they had ‘done racism’.

CPS prosecutions for racist or religious offences for ages 10 –17 rose from 404 in 2005/06 to 2916 in 2007/08. There were 4,410 temporary and permanent exclusions as a result of racist abuse in the year 2006–07, and 350 of these occurred in primary schools.

Anti-racist educators claim that children as young as three can be racist, and teachers are being given special training to deal with ‘racist incidents’ in their classrooms. In Glasgow, nursery schools were sent an anti-racist pack, on the basis that ‘the earlier you can pick up any tendency towards discriminatory or prejudicial behaviour, the better chance you have of successfully tackling it’. Nursery schools have been encouraged to report racist incidents to their local councils. Several nursery schools in Kent are training staff in challenging racist statements from toddlers.

Officials use the notion of ‘institutional racism’ as a pretext for the intervention into school life, encroaching on teachers’ ability to resolve disputes and bad behaviour within their classrooms. Teachers are obliged to fill in forms, or even to call in the police, rather than resolve playground situations themselves.

Yet the notion of racist kids is in large part a myth. Psychological studies showing three-year-old prejudice have been subjected to heavy criticism. Thankfully, racism is declining in society at large, and especially in schools, where children are increasingly expressing their natural colour-blindness, and building peer groups of many different ethnicities. Very young children cannot, in fact, be racist, or at least not in the way that adults imagine: they do not yet have systematic beliefs about social groups or ethnicity. If they use words adults consider extremely offensive, they often do so without understanding their meaning.

Indeed, anti-racist policy itself has become a key racialising influence in schools: its result is to encourage children to identify with their ethnic group, and to consider their relationships with children from other ethnic groups as fraught and somehow different. Through events such as Black history month or holocaust memorial day, children are encouraged to ‘think race’. Some teachers report that ‘awareness- raising’ assemblies lead to an immediate outbreak of ‘racial incidents’. One teacher reported that their school’s anti-racist intervention has ‘created an absolutely awful atmosphere around the school. Children who used to play beautifully together are starting to separate along racial lines’.

Racism has become a catchall explanation for some children’s educational difficulties, particularly with African Caribbean boys. This mystifies the socio-economic and social causes of educational failure. Worse than this, the ‘race’ narrative can actually contribute towards the exclusion of some groups, encouraging them to expect failure and to take a hostile attitude towards schools and teachers, in what Adrian Hart calls a ‘permanent victimhood defined by their race’.

Anti-racism measures in schools have been put beyond criticism, with anybody who questions their efficacy seen as just ‘not getting it’. Currently, criticisms must often be whispered in staffrooms or behind the veil of anonymity. We need to break this censorious silence and hold these measures up for scrutiny and we need to have an open debate about how to realise the vibrant future of social diversity, which our children want and deserve.