Education for Diversity

Is ICT worth the hassle?

2012-01-19T16:40:00.000Z

As I type I am pulling my hair out about the bugs in a new website we are developing. I am not a technical expert so I am relying on the experts to get the site to do what we want it to do without too much jargon and tech-speak but it is not easy. The point is, my eyes are firmly on the prize.

Webby / ICT stuff can be maddening and frustrating and feel like it is taking years off your life but you have to look at what it is for. Ultimately it can make your life a lot easier. A friend of mine (who shall remain nameless to protect his very guilty self) used to poo-poo the internet and ICT in general as he could see no benefit to his life. Until, that is he realised that he could find the Barcelona FC fixtures online and use the dates to plan a holiday to Barcelona to coincide with a home game.

The analogy I use is in learning to drive, ask any learner: mastering the clutch, gearstick, indicator as well as watching what other traffic is doing feels nigh on impossible at first, there may even be times when she wonders why she is bothering at all. The answer, when you can drive a car you can get to places much faster than if you walk or take public transport. The prize in this case is worth the effort.

Many teachers hate "things techy" with a passion. I have lost count of the number of times I have worked in schools and asked a member of staff how to (for instance) use the ceiling mounted projector only to be met with a gasp of horror and "Ooh, no I don't know anything abut techy stuff me.." as they scurry off to get the ICT Coordinator.

But Michael Gove's planned reorganisation of the ICT curriculum means that like it or not ICT will have to become more native in schools, creating the odd excel spreadsheet and powerpoint projection will not be enough, children will have to learn how to create apps themselves. In essence there is nothing wrong with this, it's the "teach a man to fish" philisophy. We run a project which enables primary children to create and publish their own web pages and they love it. It's not about the technology, it's about what it can do for you, and it can do an awful lot.

Marcia Hutchinson MBE

Marcia is the Managing Director of Primary Colours whose mission is to create a better world for our children by helping them to understandan appreciate cultural diversity. The views expressed in this blog are not necessarily endorsed by Primary Colours.

The Verdict

2012-01-05T13:10:00.001Z

Like many people I had almost given up hope that there would ever be convictions in the Stephen Lawrence murder case. The sense of relief once the verdict came was palpable. The two convicted killers have been given the maximum sentences the law allows.

Whilst there are still between three and seven others who have not yet been brought to justice, I think this is a good time to reflect on how far we have come in terms of equality. My last post of 2011 was a little despondent but in some ways this verdict (coming as it has at the beginning of the year) has triggered some interesting reflection in the media.

I was asked to take part in a panel on this yesterday at 1pm on BBC Radio Leeds, listen again here, (scroll to 1 hour into the programme). While I was a little saddened by the tone of some of the callers, the bigger picture is that great strides have been made, particularly in education. The Stephen Lawrence Award, pioneered by Leeds local authority is seen as a real gold standard for schools to aim for. It covers not just the curriculum but also recruitment and staff training in diversity and equality.

We work with many schools who are working towards one of the Stephen Lawrence levels and the commitment shown by many of the staff we work with is brilliant. It may be that in death Stephen achieved much more than he might have done in life.

But the last word has to go to his family and his mother Doreen in particular. Her eighteen years of campaigning has lead to this verdict, and arguably to a sea-change in British attitudes toward race. She should never have to have gone through this but we are so grateful to her that she did.

Marcia Hutchinson MBE

And the fight goes on.

2011-12-22T13:49:00.002Z

This is my last blog post for 2011 and I would have liked to end they year on a happy note but it's not easy. As I write the jury are out on the Stephen Lawrence murder trial. One can only hope for a conviction 18 years after this hideous crime.

In theory the news that Luis Suarez has been handed an eight match ban and a £40,000 fine by the Football Association is good news. But the Liverpool team training in shirts with Suarez's image on them is stunning in it's insensitivity to racism. They claim to be showing support for Suarez but does this mean they support him calling another player racist names?

All eyes are now on England Captain John Terry who has been charged with a criminal offence after comments made to Anton Ferdinand. Anyone who can lip-read can work out what he said. Interestingly the video of the event has belatedly been pixellated when last shown by the BBC.

There is a silver lining; the fact that the Lawrence trial is taking place; Suarez has been fined and Terry has been charged represents a huge development in the fight against racism. Twenty years ago racist comments were the tip of the iceberg, some people thought they could get away with murder.

Marcia Hutchinson MBE

Diamond Jubilee - Lesson Plans

2011-12-16T07:30:00.000Z

So what are you and your school planning for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee next year? Is it something you think you should be celebrating or do you think the monarchy is rather archaic in this day and age. How (if at all) is the monarchy relevant to children in a post-colonial multicultural society?

There will be more interest in this anniversary than her Golden Jubilee if only because if she is still reigning in four years time (and there is no reason why she shouldn't be) she becomes the longest reigning English monarch ever and maybe in the world.

The Queen is still the Head of state of sixteen countries and the signs are that most of them would like her to continue to be so. These countries contain people of a many races and cultures and this is a great starting point for promoting cultural diversity and community cohesion.

You could look at a different country each week, make links with schools from those countries, sample their music, cuisine, dress and languages. You could look at what year the Queen last visited each country and what changes have occurred in each country since then.

At Primary Colours we have created a Diversity Toolkit with over 50 free downloadable lesson plans. (You need to register to download the plans). Some ideal lesson plans for linking to the Diamond Jubilee include:-

9037 - Around the world in a search engine

9030 - Wish you were here

9021 - The world Around us

9011 - Nice and Hot and Tasty

The Royal family will be visiting all the of the Commonwealth Realms next year. I can't wait to see what Harry gets up to in Jamaica!

Marcia Hutchinson MBE

Racism Alive and Kicking on the Tube

2011-11-30T13:26:00.001Z

It is absolutely astonishing that Emma West, the woman who racially abused fellow passengers on the tube in London, felt that she could get away with her diatribe. What to me is more astonishing is the restraint shown by the other passengers on the tube, many of them black, who chose not to engage with her. One man clearly has had enough and gets up to 'remonstrate' with her but fellow passengers persuade him to back off.

To me the really shocking thing is that no one hit her. The black people around her being subjected to her outburst reacted with dignity and restraint and I am glad that she has been charged with a racially aggravated public order offence. The problem in the past has been the reluctance of the police and courts to prosecute people under the existing laws, not the absence of laws to deal with this kind of behaviour.

Many commentators seem more shocked because the comments are coming from a woman who has a young child with her. If these are the views she airs in public God only know what she says in private and what opinions her child will be forming from such an early age.

My work is very much about promoting cultural diversity by getting to the children before the views of parents like her take hold. We work with schools to promote community cohesion often by delivering creative projects that enable children to learn about other cultures and their contribution to British Culture.

All that is needed is that the law is enforced and this kind of abuse of people (both black and white - she was non too fond of the Polish either) in public will stop. What she said has always been against the law one wonders if she would have been prosecuted if a citizen journalist had not had the presence of mind to film her and put the footage on YouTube.

A word of caution to teachers though. I would not recommend sharing this clip with your students. No one should be subjected (even second hand) to her comments by a person in loco parentis. (Students choosing to share amongst themselves is something else entirely). I have in the past seen examples of teachers sharing examples of 'racist' behaviour with students as a cautionary tale but this almost always backfires. This is a crime not a teaching aid.

Marcia Hutchinson MBE

2011-11-24T15:20:00.001Z

Migration figures have hit the headlines again. This time the media is commenting in increasingly hysterical tones about the fact that net migration has reached a record high.

What many news outlets don't mention is the fact that the number of people coming into the country has remained relatively stable. The increase in net migration is because fewer people are leaving the country. Australia, it seems isn't the nirvana it was cut out to be and many Brits who emigrated are coming back to the UK.

Migration is seen as a 'bad thing'. "They come over here they take our jobs, etc". A documentary a a few years ago exposed the lie in this statement when English unemployed were offered jobs that migrants were doing. Most barely lasted a week, they found the work too hard.

The fact that many migrants arrive (like my mother) already educated at another country's expense and ready to work and contribute to the economy is often ignored. Many, like my father, spent most of their working lives here and then died before retirement age so they did not get the benefits they worked for.

The fact that large chunks of the hospitality industry and the NHS would cease to function overnight if migrants left is also ignored. In a country like the UK, with a rapidly ageing population, there will soon not be enough tax payers contributing to the nation's coffers to pay for the pensions of the retired. Migrants are one of the few groups who can plug this gap, not only taking jobs caring for the elderly but also paying taxes to help pay the pensions of tomorrow's pensioners.

Going and Coming one of Primary Colours's project celebrates the stories of migrants to Yorkshire. Perhaps it's time we stopped focusing on 'them' and looked at 'us'. Maybe our social problems are primarily of our own making and migrants, rather than being part of the problem, could be one of the few solutions.

Marcia Hutchinson MBE

Sepp Blatter and non-existent racism

2011-11-18T09:22:00.003Z

Last year Primary Colours produced Did You Know? 3, a series of biographies of black and Asian footballers to coincide with the South African Football World Cup. One common theme that emerged was that all the ten footballers featured had suffered from racism on the field (and many off it).

We are not just talking about racist comments from other players, heinous though that is, but also racist chanting from the terraces and in many cases missiles being thrown from the terraces at the footballers.

It is a wonder that many of these players were able to continue to play so well under such a barrage of abuse. John Terry, the current England Captain, is being investigated for alleged racist comments towards Anton Ferdinand and Luis Suarez is under investigation for comments made to Patrice Evra.

When asked about this, FIFA President Sepp Blatter denied that racism exists in football and suggests that any untoward comments on the pitch should be ‘settled by a handshake at the end of the match’. It would be laughable if it were not so serious. Racism on the pitch is a reflection of racism in society at large.

Let us not forget that we are in the middle of the second Stephen Lawrence murder trail. In 1993 eighteen year old black A level student Stephen Lawrence was murdered, at a bus stop in London by total strangers. You might argue that such extreme violence has nothing to do with football and what happens on the pitch. We might hope that Britain has changed in the eighteen years since his death and the violent murder of a black man by total strangers would never happen again.

Two words; Anthony Walker. In 2005 eighteen year old black A level student Anthony Walker was murdered at a bus stop in Huyton Liverpool by total strangers. The axe that killed him was swung with such force that it smashed his skull and was left embedded in his brain.

The killers; Michael Barton and his cousin Paul Taylor.

Michael Barton is the brother of Premiership footballer Joey Barton. Joey Barton’s criminal convictions include one for attacking his black team-mate Ousmane Dabo on the pitch. Joey Barton has also been pictured with the head of the far right English Defence League but denies being a member of the organisation.

For Sepp Blatter racism doesn’t exist in football, for many others it is literally, a matter of life and death.

Better late than never - One Love Foundation

2011-10-27T09:33:00.006+01:00

In the year 2000 I visited Jamaica and made my ‘pilgrimage’ to the Bob Marley Museum on Hope Road Kingston. It was a surreal experience. The ‘tour’ around his house lasted less than 20 minutes the ‘shop’ did not sell his albums and although we had been promised that we could look round at our leisure after the guided tour had ended this did not happen. One of our party, a German man, wailed “but, I came all the way from Germany to see this!” But to no avail.

The oddest thing however was not the short tour and the lack of souvenirs but the assertion, via panels on the wall, that Bob Marley had only four children. Just about everyone present knew that he had many other children. I asked one the attendants’ why they were not included. “We only count the ones he had with his wife,” she replied sniffily. I can’t imagine a museum to a famous person omitting seven of his known and acknowledged children; including arguably the most famous Damian Marley whom he fathered with Miss World Cindy Breakspear, who at the time was a rising music star in his own right.

I was delighted to see on TV today that His widow Rita Marley and all 11 children have now started The One Love foundation using income from merchandising House of Marley branded products to promote charities that help children. It’s thirty years after his death, but better late than never eh?

Black History Month 2011

2011-10-13T11:06:00.003+01:00

So what are you doing to celebrate Black History Month 2011. This can seem like a bleak time indeed. Many of the organisations we used to work with who supported the black community no longer exist or have had their funding cut so dramatically that they are a shadow of their former selves. The riots of the summer of 2011 were used by many white commentators to demonise the black community, when in truth people of all races rioted and looted. So, as a teacher how best to celebrate BHM in 2011?

The approach we have always taken at Primary Colours is integrating black history into the curriculum. For me Black History Month will, I hope, eventually no longer be necessary when black history becomes an integral part of the history curriculum. For those who naively complain that there is no ‘white history’ month it should be clear that ‘white history’ is taught all year round. I remember studying A level history and hearing our teacher talk about ‘The Scramble for Africa’. I was the only black student in the class and felt the eyes of my classmates on me as the European carve-up of Africa was outlined. At no point were the views of any black Africans included.

What I have tried to do is add a black perspective to aspects of history for young people who might otherwise not get a more rounded view of British History. Our most popular series, Did You Know? provides bite sized biographies of black and other ethnic minorities enabling teachers to integrate their stories into the national curriculum through literacy, history and other subjects with the use of tailored lesson plans. Our Did You Know?4 the Olympic Edition comes out next year.

We also provide a range of free downloadable lesson plans which help teachers to bring black history into the classroom in many other ways, though food, music drama and literacy. Black History Month 2011 can be one of your best ever, you just need to know where to look.

Marcia Hutchinson MBE

Extremism hits Norway

2011-07-26T14:23:00.006+01:00

When your children come back from their summer holidays what will they remember from the news? Maybe the death of Amy Winehouse or perhaps the the the horrific murders of 76 people in Norway this weekend. The murderer Anders Breivik is a right wing Christian Extremist who claimed that he was part of an Anti-Islam network. Is it therfore more than a coincidence that the killings have taken place during Ramadam?

While his lawyer considers that he is insane (and this may well be true) the problem is that at the margins of society this kind of person picks up on mainstream political sentiment and twists it to their own perverted ends. When Sarah Palin featured congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in her 'crosshairs' map, targeted at legislators who voted for Obama's health care bill, and Gffords was later shot by a 'madman'; Palin denied any responsibility for inciting violence.

Now more than ever community cohesion is needed; a real understanding between communities; not just in the UK but worldwide or we can expect an increase in this kind of hate crime and the criminals are getting more organised or 'madder' whichever way you look at it. With their insanity pleas at the ready they are killing people in the name of hate.

Marcia Hutchinson MBE @marciahut is the Managing Director of www.primarycolours.net whose mission is to create a better world by helping our children to understand and embrace cultural diversity within our society.

Citizenship

2011-07-14T18:08:00.003+01:00

We are required to teach our children about citizenship. What, they ask is citizenship? What are the rights of citizens and are their duties?

This is a very interesting question in the light of the News of the World scandal. It turns out that because James and Rupert Murdoch are not British Citizens they cannot be compelled to appear before Parliament. (Rebekah Brooks, thankfully is a Biritsh Citizen and therefore can be.)

You might think that the Murdochs are Australians but this is not so. They took US citizenship to allow them to expand their media empire in the US as only US citizens are allowed to own such large chunks of the US media.

Why then does the UK allow foreign nationals to own (in the case of News International) 40% of our press and a 31% of B SKy B (and until recently the government were keen to allow NI to own the rest of B SKY B). If Murdoch wants to weild the amount of power that he clearly does he should be answerable for it. For too long he has been allowed to have power without responsibility.

Surely it is time that ownership of more than (say) 10% of the British Media was limited to UK citizens. Perhaps this is why the Murdochs have volutarily agreed to appear before the Culture Select committee; to head off the obvious next step legislation that would see them divested of most if not all of their UK media interests.

Testimony

2011-06-08T10:26:00.005+01:00

I am at the INSPIRE conference in London and have just heard a great speaker; Erik Hersman talk about www.ushahidi.com

It helped find people after the Haiti Earthquake.It includes features like a 'harassmap' in Egypt for women to report when and where they have been sexually harassed and well as documenting the Lybia Crisis. It's in 17 languages and 128 countries. It's a bottom up information system allowing people on the ground to tell the world what is happening where they are.

What is great about the organisation is that it is an African Organisation. In this day and age where Africa is seen as a consumer of 'help' rather than a provider of help it's a great contradiction to the stereotypical view of the continent.

Michelle Obama encourages black students to go to Oxford

2011-06-06T17:27:00.002+01:00

As an Oxford Alumni it was fantastic to see Michelle Obama speak to black and minority ethnic girls not just in their own school but she made the point of getting them invited to Christ Church College Cambridge so that they could see Oxford in all it's glory. (More than David Cameron managed to do when he bemoaned the fact that last year only one Afircan Caribbean heritage student was admitted to Oxbridge.)

Citing her own experience, Mrs Obama she said;

"And I'm not the only one who's excited to see you all here today. Students and faculty at this university were eager to visit with you all, as well. And there's a reason for that. It's because all of us - and it's important for you to know that - all of us believe that you belong here; that this is a place for you, as well. We passionately believe that you have the talent within you, you have the drive, you have the experience to succeed here at Oxford and at universities."

Go girlfriend!

Getting away with Murder

2011-05-19T14:32:00.000+01:00

No one should be able to get away with murder and at last is looks as if the killers of black teenager Stephen Lawrence may be tried properly. Many people have forgotten the significance of his murder. Just to refresh your memories; Stephen was murdered at a bus stop in Eltham London in 1993 by a group of white youths who were total strangers to him.

They attacked him simply because he was black. But the killing itself was, in some ways not the worst of it. The true horror was that the police barely bothered to invesigate the murder and there is even some evidence that links between the police and the killer's families meant that they were tipped off about the investigtion.

Some good has come of the tragedy. The McPhereson Report into the killing labelled the police as institutionally racist and the law was changed and (Race Relations Amendment Act) to impose a positive duty on all statutory organisations to promote race equality. Councils like Leeds created the Stephen Lawrence Education Standard to help schools comply with the new duty.

And yet, and yet; despite a trial the murderers of Stephen Lawrence remain at large. A further change in the law removing the 'double jeopardy' meaning suspects can now be tried a second time for the same offence opened the door to a new trial and now finally it will happen. Almost twenty years after Stephen's death, justice just might be done.

Racism In Football

2011-05-05T15:49:00.000+01:00

Racism in football is nothing new. But we all thought the days when John Barnes had to back-heel a banana from the pitch were long gone. The enormous amount of work done by both footballers and fans alike as well as organisations like Kick it Out” has been tremendous and great strides have been made on the pitch; but that’s not where the problem now lies, it’s in the boardroom amongst those who manage football. Comments that used to be made in public are now made in private but it’s the powerful managers of football who are making them. One manager holds more power than a terrace-full of fans where it comes to who actually gets to play on the pitch. That is why it is so astonishing that French Football Federation technical director François Blaquart allegedly discussed the imposition of quotas for black French footballers. God forbid you should just let the talented play, that might lead to a pitch with 11 black players and no bleu, blanc, rouge anywhere in sight.

Primary Colours has produced Did You Know? 3 A biography of black footballers chronicling the discrimination they faced to get where they are today

CRB loosened

2011-02-18T09:34:00.000Z

I blogged a few weeks ago about how difficult the current CRB regime is to work with. So it's interesting the the government have decided to reduce the number of people who will need CRB checks if they work with children. However I don't think this will affect our Theatre in Education work as much as we might like. In theory only people who work "closely and regularly" with children or vulnerable adults will need to be checked. However I suspect our schools will still request CRB checked actors even though they do not have unsupervised access to children. So although on the whole I welcome the changes to the CRB system, for us it will be business as usual.

Valentines Day Around the World

2011-02-10T17:01:00.000Z

Valentine's Day is a great opportunity to work with your children on celebrating cultural diversity. You could compare and contrast how it is celebrated in other cultures.

In Brazil, the Dia dos Namorados ("Day of the Enamored") is celebrated on June 12. The February 14's Valentine's Day is not celebrated at all, mainly for cultural and commercial reasons, since it usually falls too little before or after Carnival.

In South Korea women give chocolate to men on February 14, and men give non-chocolate candy to women on March 14 (White Day). On April 14 (Black Day), those who did not receive anything go to a Chinese restaurant to eat black noodles and "mourn" their single life.

Traditional Chinese Valentine's day is called "qixi" in pinyin, and is celebrated on the 7th day of the 7th month of the lunar calendar, commemorating a fabled day on which the cow herder and weaving maid are allowed to be together. Modern Valentines day is also celebrated.

In Indian antiquity there was a tradition of adoring Kamadev, the lord of love. This tradition was lost around the Middle Ages. In modern times, Hindu and Islamic traditionalists consider the holiday to be cultural contamination from the West. Despite these obstacles, valentine's day is becoming increasingly popular in India.

Egyptians celebrate Valentine's Day and the indigenous Eid el-Hob el-Masri(Egyptian Love Day) on November 4.

In Iran, the Sepandarmazgan, or Esfandegan, is an age-old traditional celebration of love, friendship and Earth. It has nothing in common with the Saint Valentine celebration. It has been progressively forgotten in favor of the Western celebration of Valentine's Day.

Happy Valentine's Day! xxx

Drowning in Paperwork

2011-02-04T18:15:00.000Z

As a specialist schools Theatre Company we not only obey the law but go above and beyond in order to satisfy our clients that their children are safe with our staff but the requests do sometimes border on the extreme. The first misconception is that everyone who enters a school to work with children needs a CRB check. This is not the case it is only adults who will have unsupervised access to children who require a CRB check. As our staff are never alone with children (and it is part of our Child Protection Policy that they ensure that this is always the case) strictly speaking they do not need CRB checks but we know better than to rely on this.
There is a common misconception amongst some schools regarding CRB checks for individuals working in schools.

We ensure that all our Actors have not only CRB checks but enhanced CRB checks but it is arguable that this is not necessary. A further problem is the evidence required. Many schools are now asking not only for the CRB check but also photographic evidence that the individual is indeed the one referred to in the CRB check. We have even had situations where a driving licence has not been deemed acceptable and a passport is required. It is simply not reasonable when actors are touring all over the country to have their passports with them at all times. And try getting a school to send a passport back to an actor if it has mistakenly been left in the school!

A bigger problem is that a number of schools have tried to photocopy the CRB check certificate. We have had to explain on many occasions that they are not allowed to do this. They can read it, write down the number and check ID but they are not entitled to a copy of the CRB. It may just be a case of over enthusiasm but it does make life difficult for those who are trying to provide services to schools. Technically a CRB check only covers the local authority area for which it was issued so an actor with a CRB check issued in Leeds is not covered for work in London but it is totally unrealistic for a national company like ourselves to get 187 CRB checks covering every Local Authority Area in the country.

There has to be a balance between protecting children and enabling outsiders to work with them. The balance has to take into account probability. The probability of a school visitor abusing children is very very low. This has to be set off against the inconvenience and disruption of insisting on CRB checks for everyone who sets foot inside a school.

Education White Paper and Black Pupils

2010-11-27T09:48:00.002Z

Michael Gove is a fan of the Promise Academy in Harlem established by Geoffrey Canada which has had extraordinarily good results with children from very deprived backgrounds. However one thing that has really made the difference is offering wraparound services. The school is part of the Harlem Children’s Zone which offers many more services than just education such as healthcare. But the Coalition government is cutting some of the very services that would be needed to support the children in the sort of Charter (or Free) Schools.
While on paper policies like ensuring that exclusions ‘stick’ and that teachers don’t find that appeal panels reverse their exclusion decisions sound great; but what if black children are five times more likely to be excluded? Who is going to check that the reasons for these exclusions are genuinely educational and not in some cases partly down to a lack of cultural understanding and with funding cut for social programmes what are they going to do once they are permanently excluded?

"Black pupils are disciplined more frequently, more harshly and for less serious misbehaviour than other pupils; that they are less likely to be praised than other pupils; that this differential treatment by school staff can be observed very early on in a child’s education; and that such a differential approach is likely to be unwitting on the part of teachers." DFES Exclusion of Black Pupils Priority Review

Not all doom and gloom

2010-11-11T11:13:00.004Z

As the cuts bite deeper it can seem hard to find anything remotely resembling 'good news' stories in our sector.

Only last week we had two pre-applications refused. These are not grant applications as such they are effectively a request for permission to apply for a grant. Back in the old days these would have sailed through. To say that grants are going to become harder to get is something of an understatement. What's a social enterprise to do? How do we keep going in the face of the most savage cuts for a generation?

Well I think the answer is in the 'enterprise' part of social enterprise. It is phenomenally hard to trade well as a social enterprise because the 'social' part of our mission takes up so much of our time, leaving precious little for the enterprise 'bit'.

We're adopting a threefold strategy. Firstly streamlining our back office procedures so that more work can be delivered with less staff, this involves building bespoke online quotation and ordering modules which enable our customers to get information easily themselves rather than call us.

Secondly we have simply had to stop selling goods and services that made a loss (and could not be streamlined into profitability). The booking system for our Theatre in Education has undergone a major overhaul and now works like a dream. (Yes I know it's a plug but you really should try out our online quotation engine - works out mileage, vat, show timings, everything.)

And thirdly we have made a real effort to shout about our successes. In the past we just got on with the work and hoped people would notice. But in a crowded marketplace things don't work like that. We don't have a huge marketing budget but we are getting better at getting the word out. We were short listed for the Black Business Initiative Awards in October and on Monday we won the Social Enterprise category of the Precious Awards. It's not all doom and gloom.

2010-10-28T12:17:00.005+01:00

Well we are coming to the end of the busiest month in our calendar; October Black History Month. Our team of actors have done fifteen performance days at schools ranging from Luton to Blackpool and have performed four different shows on each of the days; clocking up and incredible sixty performances in the month.

The most popular play has been Rock 'n' Roll Play about Rosa Parkes and the civil rights movement, to the soundtrack of Elvis Presley, Big Mamma Thornton, Chuck Berry, The Beatles and many many more. The play has gone down so well, I think because it combines music, dance, role play, hot-seating and (of course) prizes. The actors set the scene (on the bus) with the audience as the passengers and a child is eventually given the role of Rosa Parkes after the actors have played the background scenes. Some of the speeches given by our mini-Rosas explaining why they will not get up and give up their seats have moved audience members (and staff - and sometimes the actors themselves) to tears.

But what gets me every time is the number of children who come up to the actors and ask if the story is true, if it really happened and black people really had to sit at the back of the bus.

Although it is great to see that Black History Month is now a mainstream part of the curriculum for many schools it's clear from the reactions of our 5445 audience members this month that Black History Month remains as necessary as ever.

The Spending Review; how we fare.

2010-10-21T11:32:00.000+01:00

So the long-awaited axe has finally fallen. We, along with all other arts organisations, have been waiting with baited breath to see how deep the funding cuts are going to be. Our interest in the level of the cuts is two fold. Firstly how much is our funding from the Arts Council going to fall by and secondly how much is the funding that our clients (mainly schools and local authorities) going to fall by.

This second figure is in some ways more crucial for us as we don't recevie a huge amount of 'core funding' from the Arts Council (just over 10% of our total turnover). Depending on who you believe the 'core' funding cut could be anything between 10% to 19%. The biggest impact on Primary Colours will be the ability (or inablity) of our clients to buy our services. If we split our clients into two main groups; schools and local authorities, it's clear that the former have done better than the latter. Local government spending is down by 27% - a huge figure, and we have already seen a drop in bookings from Local Authorities.

Direct funding to schools has been ring fenced, although capital spending will be cut by 60%. In theory, therfore, schools will still be able to afford our products and services but theory is very different from practice. If schools feel threatened they will cut back on what mght be seen as non-essential spending, whether or not they have access to the £2.5bn "pupil premium" for teaching for disadvantaged pupils. We can, and will however contnue to make the case to schools that culturally diverse resrources, INSET and Theatre in Education are an important part of community cohesion in an increasingly culutrally diverse society.

2010-10-05T11:27:00.001+01:00

Left Harry Tran & Marcia Hutchinson at the Launch of the Going & Coming teaching pack.

It’s funny how you stumble upon what turns out to be your life’s work. Back in 1997 I created a photographic exhibition called, The Journey, documenting the journeys made by people like my mother to England in the 1950’s. The following year we turned the exhibition into a book and two years after that into a teaching pack. The pack is still one of our best-sellers. The play of the book, Olivia’s Journey followed and even a sequel, Should I stay or should I go, about the children she left behind.
The theme of Journeys both physical and emotional, has returned again and again in our work. The journey from enslavement to freedom (Adventures of Ottobah), from urban to rural (Are we there Yet!) and even from ignorance to knowledge (The Did You Know? series).

Back in 2007 I had an idea, and that idea was that children, nine year olds to be specific, could create websites to celebrate the journeys their families have made. With funding from the Heritage Lottery we created Going and Coming which enables children to create web pages which include audio, images and text. To date over 250 children have added stories and the website has been viewed in 33 different countries. As the Project Manager I rarely get to meet the children who take part in the projects, so I was really excited to meet some of the children whose voices I had heard online.

On 15th September 2010 we launched the Going & Coming Teaching Pack and I got to meet some of the children who took part. There are some fantastic stories on the site but one of my favourites is Harry Tran whose father left Vietnam in 1979, the story is funny, heart warming and very informative but what comes over in the interview is the affection that both father and son have for each other.

2010-09-23T10:27:00.000+01:00

Left: New actors Andrea and Joanne with the new company van.

Growing a company is not an easy thing to do. It can feel a lot safer to stay in your comfort zone, do the things you always did and hope for the best. But especially in these financially challenging times standing still is not an option. Our Theatre Department is a case in point. I used to deliver the theatre shows to schools all over England along with the Creative Director. This was great for a while but then the company needed to be managed on a day to day basis and I could not do this from ‘the road’whilst still staying sane.

We considered hiring other actors but baulked at the thought of having to write down scripts for the eight plays in our repertoire, all of which we had devised ourselves and knew off by heart. It was hard work but it had to be done. I stood down from the day to day acting and a new Actor was hired to replace me working with the Creative Director on tour. The final step was when the Creative Director became ill and had an operation which meant he could no longer talk.

I considered closing the Theatre Department but a quick chat with business advisors convinced me that with over thirty future bookings in the diary it made financial sense to hire new actors and continue. The summer of 2010 was a trying time. Running the company on my own while organising national auditions for expert improvisational actors with Theatre in Education experience and generally keeping the proverbial show on the road was one of the hardest things I have had to do.

The recession has meant that some schools have cancelled shows and so now for the first time we have decided to take deposits. (Something we should have done earlier but we were just too nice.) I had to buy a van as their cars were too small to carry the kit, sort out props, equipment and find friendly schools for dress rehearsals (Thanks to Paddock, Spring Grove and Lightcliffe Primary Schools.) The Creative Director managed to run the rehearsals as his swansong.

The proof of the pudding, as it were, was Tuesday when after two months of rehearsals the new actors performed their first solo shows at All Saints Primary School in Doncaster. The evaluations were glowing, the children and teachers loved them, they came back to the office beaming. We got the show on the road. I’ll leave the last word to Karen James the teacher who booked the show almost a year ago. “It has been a fun, interesting, thoughtful day. The brief snatches of conversation from the children show that they are really thinking about the issues.” Nuff said.

What is creativity in the classroom?

2010-09-03T13:57:00.000+01:00

What is creativity?

I asked this question as part of my INSET for St Thomas' Primary School, St Annes Lancashire on 31st August 2010. The group of 30 delegates was split into five tables and disucssed the question for five minutes before answering in groups. I thought you might like to read their answers, as The Creative Curriculum means so many different things to differnt people. You can also hear some of their comments on audioboo

Table 1
We actually found it a very difficult question to answer. Its all things to all people. We felt that how does one define creativity? I could get my brother to try and write a book and he couldn’t do it. But he can build some absolutely beautiful furniture. I would consider him more creativw than somebody who can write a book. But then other people would argue, that to create words out of nothing and make a story is creative, and we find that a problem in the classroom. To get children to believe that they are being creative. They may think that oh this is rubbish. Whereas we as a teacher may think we actually that’s really good, that’s very creative what you’ve done there. But that can have a negative as children may want to be creative all the time. But in this environment we have to sort of have rules. Because if we said to the children "do what you like be creative", then it would be chaos really. So we’ve been discussing what one person sees as creative others may not.

Do you mind giving me an example of something that you’ve seen or done with your class that you would consider creative?

Well I think arts always one that children like. As the children get to be creative but again it’s always following a theme. I’ve come up with, in the past I’ve given them a word, and said draw what this means to you.

Table 2
One person said "messy", because you do tend to think of the art side. But then we actually think of it more as giving the children to ability to think creativity rather than just be creative. It’s actually giving them the tools to think outside the box and take their learning off in different directions. It’s also giving them the skills to achieve at various different stages in their learning when they're ready to learn and not targeting everybody all the time. Because not every child is going to achieve at everything you want all of the time. It’s encouraging them to think creatively and then learn for those experiences that they create.

Table 3
We went down a similar route to this table where we talked more about creative thinking. Where you open things up for the children. It’s not all coming from the teacher and also helping them to make links between different things. You know using the arts and different sides to enhance things that’s your doing. Also we talked about team working and problem solving to help them. Thinking rather just giving them the text books. Thinking about the different learning styles.

Table 4
We thought of creativity as to be able to use their strength, in whatever they thought there strength was. On whatever subject was being taught for them to be able to find motivation and things for themselves in the way that they where comfortable with, as there’s all different aspects in one topic, individual expression because every child learns differently, empowering children to be able to use theire own imagination, thinking outside of the box hands on doing things. And making things run.

Table 5
We were very much similar to what a lot of people have already mentioned. Using the environment more creatively like going outside or changing the way you use the classroom to get children to think differently. Approaching something’s without an idea of how something will turn out. I suppose children in a sense can be naive so sort of understanding how they going into things. Being flexible and be able to change your teaching styles for different children who learn differently. Thinking outside of the box. I'm going to say that again.

2010-08-20T14:47:00.000+01:00

So what are you expecting when you get back to school in a week or two? Loo paper replaced by squares of torn up newspaper; two extra classes to teach; abolition of PPA time or the building razed to the ground and not rebuilt due to the cancelling of the Building Schools for the Future project.

I know the picture looks grim and anyone who says front line education services will not be affected by cuts of up to 30% in public spending is either in cloud cuckoo land or in the Cabinet.

But you can still do good work with your children, the trick, I think is finding projects and services for your school that deliver on more than one policy agenda. Theatre in Education for instance, can help you to deliver on Community Cohesion, Excellence and Enjoyment, Every Child Matters (enjoy and achieve) as well as speaking and listening, (if it is interactive).

I declare an interest here as that’s the kind of TiE we deliver and we’re as busy as ever. Schools will be looking more closely than ever at value for money for every pound they spend and we in the Social Enterprise sector can really deliver on that.

Iceland - Yorkshire dales with Whales

2010-07-23T13:15:00.000+01:00

Will you be asking your children to tell you about what they did in their summer holidays? Well this is a great opportunity to address community cohesion and cultural diversity. Remember community cohesion includes not just the school community but also the local community as well as well as national and international communities. The place where your children go on holiday (local national or international) is part of their 'albeit extended' community and finding out more about such places is a subject for more than just geography.

I am writing this from Reykjavik Iceland, it's my first ever trip here and it's fascinating. At first glance it seems like any European Capital city, if a little on the small side. But delve a little deeper and this is a very strange place. For one, the country seems to be made up of two thirds volcano and one third iceberg. On a trip to see the Geysirs our guide had to remind us not to stay from the path or we might fall into one of the many fissures created by the shifting tectonic plates which are slowly pulling Iceland apart

Then, there are no surnames, not just by custom but by law. You can only have the 'surname' Jonsson if your father's first name is actually Jon. If you're female it's Jonsdottir, so you can tell someone's gender by their name. Some people are now taking their mother's name but this is quite new. Until recently if you migrated to Iceland you had to 'Iclandicise' your name and if it didn't conjugate well in Icelandic you had to change it.

But food is always a great way of exploring new cultures and we're making the most of it. We tried 'fish cheeks' with some trepidation. They're great, but you really do have to be a fishing nation to spend all that time catching enough fish to get enough cheeks from them to make up a meal. Haven't gotten around to the cured shark yet, that, apparently is an acquired taste.

But I'll eave the last word to my daughter who reckons Iceland is 'like the Yorkshire dales but with Whales'.

Marcia Eureilsdottir

To BE or not to MBE?

2010-07-15T12:56:00.001+01:00

I have had lots of congratulations since being awarded an MBE but one email from a good friend brought up a subject I had been expecting…

“Well my my, wow an MBE. First of all I must say congratulations. Sending kisses with cherries on top...but then comes the question.. How does it feel in terms of how this all ties into the colonial attitudes and entitlements? Of how we got to the UK, how we had to find our place, no automatic entitlement and when you do something you are passionate about (after you struggle) you are awarded an MBE! A recognition of colonial past.

Am I being radical? Should I hang up my post 1985 attitudes or has things changed? Don’t get me wrong, these questions do not in any way detract from my sincerest well wishes but I think I am still stuck in London of my days when we had to struggle, struggle for everything and didn’t understand this hierarchy.”

So what should my response be? Well black poet Benjamin Zephaniah famously refused an OBE on because:- “Benjamin Zephaniah OBE - no way Mr Blair, no way Mrs Queen. I am profoundly anti-empire” I respect his reasons for refusing the Honour , as he points out that an ‘Empire’ that enslaved our ancestors can’t honestly now seek to make us members of it. It was also a shrewd move as he got much more publicity in refusing the Honour than he would have done by accepting it. I edited a teaching pack on Slavery in 2007 and the time I spent researching it was a tear-filled and angry six months. I already knew a lot about enslavement but the detail I researched turned my stomach at times.

But I believe that the British, both black and white need to know exactly what was done in the name of their ‘Empire’ and ironic though it may seem, my accepting an MBE will give me a better opportunity to educate people about the horrors of slavery, which I shall continue to do proudly. Since the publication of the award I have been invited to speak at numerous events which I might not have done before. At all of them I have (and will) talk about what can be done to promote cultural diversity in Britain in 2010, and one of the things that we need to do is acknowledge what was done in the name of ‘Empire’ and the debt this country owes to the descendants of those enslaved.

To ‘B’ or not to CRB?

2010-07-06T12:18:00.000+01:00

I arranged to take my mother to a local school to give a talk to the pupils, something she does occasionally to give her perspective as a migrant to England. The school called up the day before and asked me to bring my CRB check and my mother to bring her passport to verify her identity.

When I asked her to do this she was outraged and refused to attend. She assumed that the passport request was immigration related (given the nature of her talk) and felt, quite rightly that if she was giving up her free time to come and talk to pupils she should not have to provide passport ID. The school in question quickly backed down when faced with the prospect of 60 children in a hall with prepared questions and no one to ask them to.

When we got to the school the entrance procedure included my having to typing our full names in to a touch screen computer along with the name of the organisation, our car registration number and the name of the person we had come to visit. We then had our pictures taken by a camera attached to the computer which printed a badge with a unique ID number which we were required to stick to our clothes and keep visible the whole time we were in the building. We were also supposed to sign out using the touch screen on exit.

Now as a professional working in education I am well used to being asked to produce my CRB check and sig-in on entering and exiting schools, but I have found it easier to get into the Houses of Parliament than this school, and I know it is by no means an extreme example. How long before fingerprinting and iris recognition?

Michael Morpugo and others have complained about the introduction requirement for those who go into schools to be CRB checked, but it’s not just the CRB check. It seems that in the name of child protection a very valuable baby is being thrown out with the bathwater.
The ‘baby’ in question is Community Cohesion. If an arthritic 80 year old is required to go through this kind of procedure before being allowed into school, how many would willingly do it twice? Schools are crying out for people to come in and talk to the children about all sorts of matters but how are you gong to get them to come if your procedures require you to treat them as if they were a child molester until proven otherwise?

2010-06-26T12:36:00.000+01:00

I watch the odd football match but I’m not obsessed, unlike my husband who has actually built a world cup shrine in the spare bedroom; complete with vuvuzela, all his old football trophies, team shirts for all the teams still in the competition and newly purchased flat screen TV and matching hideous electric leather massaging armchair. Before I call NHS Direct to discuss his delusional symptoms and see if I can get him sectioned (what if England actually beat Germany – what then? A Wayne Rooney lookie-liky at the breakfast table?) maybe I should try to condemn less and understand more.

Maybe it’s worth trying to understand the football obsessives rather than just dismissing their lunacy. After all I suspect around half the population of England will be watching tomorrow’s match and the outcome really, really matters to them. For primary school teachers, the majority of whom are female, it might feel like the World Cup can’t end too soon but this is a great opportunity to engage with football fans in your classrooms.

Boys achievement is a real issue and this might have something to do with the subject matter that is used to teach them. Biographies are a genre of writing that is part of national curriculum literacy, why not look at biographies of footballers. Geography is an obvious link as is food from South Africa and other World Cup countries, not to mention maths as you work out who has had more possession of the ball and how on earth the ref can have found four minutes of extra time to add on.

Did You Know?3 is a series of biographies of black and Asian footballers edited by Marcia Hutchinson and published by Primary Colours.

A literacy excercise with a difference

2010-06-24T14:01:00.000+01:00

How can schools really address cultural diversity and community cohesion in an already packed curriculum? Well it’s difficult but the honest answer is that there is no quick fix. Gone are the days when you could just have a quick Caribbean Day in Black History month and still keep your ‘outstanding’ Ofsted status. My children’s school meant well but after I was asked to come and cook the Caribbean food along with the other black parents (for the third year running) I realised that this was my main value to the school.

The cross-curricular teaching pack that I edited, specifically dealing with post war migration which was just perfect for ‘Britain Since 1948’ was still gathering dust in the head’s office since I gave the school a complimentary copy. A token day (or week even) is not enough, embedding diversity is what it’s all about.

An exercise I carried out at a primary school yesterday illustrates what I mean. We passed around Caribbean food in a ‘pass the parcel’ type game. When the music stopped the child holding a piece of food had to come up with as many ‘describing’ words as they could. The children loved the game and came up with adjectives galore.

2010-06-17T09:14:00.001+01:00

“Being British is about listening to Jamaican music while driving a German car containing African metals to an Irish Pub for a Belgian beer, then grabbing a Bengali curry or a Turkish Kebab on the way home, to sit on Swedish furniture and watch and American show on a Japanese TV. And the most British thing of all? Suspicion of anything foreign.” Source unknown, but I added the Jamaican music bit myself.

This love hate relationship with foreign stuff is very much what defines the British and the English in particular. But it’s also the clue to how to include cultural diversity in to the school curriculum.
In my INSET training I am often asked how teachers can incorporate diversity in to their teaching when their children in the school mix so rarely with children from other cultures. Part of my answer is that the children are already steeped in other cultures you just need to know where to look for it and a few ideas on how to incorporate the melting pot that is British Culture in the 21st Century, into your curriculum.

Take music – Bob Marley’s Buffalo soldier is a song many children know but this could also be used to introduce them to trans-atlantic slavery as the eponymous hero was “Stolen from Africa” and enslaved in the Caribbean – yes the very same one that they have watched Johnny Depp et al cavorting in for the last five years. Oh and a good one third of pirates were black by the way…
A quick trawl around the house would demonstrate that a lot of their white goods made their way here from China (and will make their way back to be recycled at the end of their useful life). Food is just brilliant for diversity – how many of your children have had a curry do they know where it comes from what is their favourite dish. Maths, lets create graph and see which take-away dish comes out top, my money is on the curry with fish and chips a close second. What are their favourite TV shows – where are they made? – Doh!

Will they be watching the World Cup – which countries do their favourite players play for, can they point to that country on a map? What else do they know about the country? Which country does the England Teams’ manager come from?
See it wasn’t that hard was it?

The Harder They Come

2010-06-06T16:01:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I went to see one of the best performances I have ever seen in a theatre. The Harder They Come is a musical based on the film of the same name starring Jimmy Cliff. The first half of the play was a veritable romp through my childhood with the perfect soundtrack. Most of the songs in the play were played by my dad when I was a very young child, the rest were sung in church by my mother. The cast contained all the stock Jamaican characters from right down to the duplicitous preacher and the 'good time' girls.

The play opens with a Nine Night, the traditional Jamaican 'wake' which lasts for nine days and is as much a celebration of the life of the deceased as mourning his or her passing. I have been to many night nights starting with my own father's and they always leave me thinking deeply about the meaning of life and how we would like to be remembered. Jamaicans almost revel in their mourning. I know funeral junkies who turn up at anyone's funeral just to be part of the emotional outpouring, it's the ultimate weepie. One part of the play has the hero telling his mother that his grandmother (her mother) has died and all the money has been spent on a big funeral. She is aghast, not at the loss of her inheritance, but at the fact that she didn't get to go to the big funeral.

What was (and still is) most striking about the musical though is how closely the plot mirrors that currently playing out in Jamaica of suspected drug dealer Christopher Coke. The 'hero' in the play is a drug dealer who falls foul of the police, (his former accomplices), who then hunt him down in gun battles all over the Kingston.

The locals protect him rather than hand him over to the authorities. It begs the question why so many people are willing to fight (and die) to protect Coke? My sister, a teacher, lives very close to Tivoli Gardens the epicentre of the violence that has so far claimed over 70 lives. She says things are not as bad as the international media make out but life is still hard. There have been a number of accusations that Coke has, until now been protected by his links to the Prime Minister Bruce Golding but the pressure from the US has become so great that Golding has to be seen to be 'doing something'. One thing is clear Coke cannot have managed to run a huge international drug operation without the complicity of many in authority.

The question is, will they catch him alive and actually manage to extradite him to the US, or will he, like Rhyging the hero of the Harder They Come, go out in a blaze of gunfire like his father and brother before him, because, of course, dead men tell no tales.

GTC RIP?

2010-06-04T17:22:00.000+01:00

I was one of those who condemned the GTC (General Teaching Council) for failing to strike off a teacher who was a member of the BNP and posted extremist comments on websites while he was supposed to be supervising pupils. The GTC made sure that the issue of whether BNP membership should be banned for teachers was never even debated as they refused to put the matter on the agenda.

Now their chickens have come home to roost as new Education Secretary Michael Gove has announce that they will be scrapped and used their failure to act over the BNP teacher as one of the reasons. Now this may not be the real reason for their demise but they certainly gave the new government a stick to beat (and kill) them with.

2010-03-22T10:42:00.001Z

2010-03-12T13:32:00.000Z

So the government sees no need to ban BNP membership for teachers on the grounds that doing so would be using a sledge hammer to crack a relatively small nut. The problem here is that they have banned BNP membership for prison officers and the police so the principle of banning membership of an organisation for certain civil employees where the organisation itself is not proscribed has already been established.

The publication of the BNP membership list showed that there were 15 teachers who were members, this may seem like a tiny number and indeed seen in isolation it is. But for every person holding racist views who goes so far as to join a racist organisation like the BNP there must be hundreds of sympathisers who share the views of the BNP but are not members. This is clearly borne out by the election of BNP MEPs in the last European elections as well as numerous BNP councillors in areas such as Barking and Dagenham.

Studies have shown that in areas where the BNP have made electoral gains there is a rise in racially motivated attacks. It is as if the election of the BNP in an area legitimises race hate in that area. After all if you know that many of your neighbours share your anti-foreigner views you are more likely to think that you can attack foreigners with impunity.

The government does not seem to have been very far sighted here. Banning BNP membership for teachers is not about the 15 who are actually members. It is about sending a message to would-be members or sympathisers that in a society which is multicultural (whether you like the term or not) such views are incompatible with a duty to promote race equality and to promote community cohesion, both of which are schools (and teachers) are legally obliged to do.

The First Apple!

2009-08-08T13:23:00.000+01:00

We planted a pair of apple trees in our garden earlier this year and here's a picture of the first ever apple. I'm so pleased I think we'll have a ceremony to celebrate the eating of it. Actually I don't really want to eat it as I'll be so dissapointed if it doesn't taste good. Our garden is north facing with lots of tall trees so I didn't think there would be enought light to ripen the apples (let alone grow them in the first place). The soil is very poor, basically builders rubble with a light sprinkling of sand and stones. I didn't belive the gardener when he said it would bear fruit this year. There were thirteen apples a month ago, small and green but most of them fell off. Now four are left - well it's a start. Isn't nature wonderful!

Michael Jackson - long dead?

2009-06-26T19:51:00.000+01:00

For those who came of age in the sixties the question was; “ where were you when Kennedy died”. For those who came of age in the ‘noughties’ the question was; “where were you when Obama was elected.” For those of us black kids who came of age in the eighties the question was; “where were you when you saw the ‘Thriller’ video.” It might seem heretical to compare the three incidents but for a nineteen year old about to leave home and go to university the summer of ’82 was my year. The constant refrain amongst my friends was; “Have you seen it yet?” The build up was incredible, nightclubs opened at midnight to screen the video. The song was a hit overnight and we watched in awe as the album which spawned it became (and still is) the best selling album of all time.

The songs were just bewitching, the voice almost ethereal, the dancing mesmerising. We spent as long as it took to learn the thriller dance and to faithfully recreate it on dance floors all over the country. Michael Jackson was, simply, the sound of my youth. The comparison on with Obama may seem facetious but he did, at first, do so much to break down racism. His talent was so great that he stormed the all-white citadel that was MTV, becoming the first black artist to get airtime. He crafted some of the best pop songs of all time and danced like an angel, the moonwalk looked like magic.

Then the cracks started showing, the slowly whitening skin seemed to betray his blackness; the surgery making him more bizarre looking by the month; the odd marriage to his nurse, the shadowy blond children and finally the child sex abuse allegations. It’s as it there was a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ Thriller, Michael Jackson. Our hero was flawed, badly so.

I never bought any more of his songs. His talent, it seemed, consumed him and left a husk of a man with a high pitched voice dodging creditors all over the world. His fall from grace reflected a loss of innocence that we all felt saddened by. But I feel no sadness now, for me the real Michael Jackson died a long time ago.

Translating Doncaster

2009-06-24T12:17:00.000+01:00

So Doncaster’s new Mayor thinks any migrants to Britain should learn English and therefore is planning to cut funding to translation services in Doncaster. Do all Brits abroad speak the language of the country to which they have emigrated? Do they adopt local culture and dress? On the whole not. Whole swathes of the Costa Del Sol have become little England; with English people living there for over ten years who have not bothered to learn Spanish.

Did the British in India, China and other parts of the British Empire learn local languages. Again, not much, the Empire’s peoples were required to learn English language and customs (if they wanted to progress) but this was not a two way street. When I listen to foreign football players expressing themselves in English, their second (or sometimes third, or fourth language) considerably better than their English colleagues I do wonder who really needs the English classes.

There was no mention by the Mayor of providing more English classes in Doncaster or helping non-English speakers learn English. It would be a good idea if people living in a country did learn to speak the language of that country but this is a two way street. Encouragement is better than coercion.

The exchequer does not refuse to accept taxes paid by non-English speakers and if they are contributing to the economy they should receive local services, whether that is EAL (English as an Additional Language) classes in local schools or signs in community languages in hospitals.

BNP Teachers - is that OK?

2009-06-23T16:40:00.000+01:00

After the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence the McPherson Inquiry concluded that despite best intentions organisations could still end up unintentionally discriminating against ethnic minorities. ‘Unintentional’, is the important word here. Organisations are made up of the people who work for them. In the case of public organisations these people come from all colours of the political spectrum. If people with good intentions can end up discriminating against ethnic minorities what of those who hold racist views?

The idea that a person can be a member of a far right political party like the BNP, which belives in repatriation of ethnic minorities; and still treat all children fairly would be a joke if it were not so serious. A great deal of what a teacher does is at his or her, own discretion; which children to pick to answer questions, where they sit, what grades are given for work; who is punished and for what. These are all powers that could easily be used to discriminate against non-white pupils.

An illustration if I may; a young relative of mine was constantly getting in trouble at primary school. He was one of a handful of black children at the school. He thought he was being picked on. His mother spoke to the teacher concerned. The teacher admitted that sometimes a group of boys were misbehaving and she couldn’t identify each on but she knew Roy was part of the group because; “he does stand out with that hairstyle doesn’t he?” Roy’s hair was styled in mini-dreadlocks. He was also the only black boy in the group.

The teacher probably did not intend to be racist in singling out Roy but as the only black child he was easy to identify, (and therefore blame) for the bad behaviour of the group. Until Roy’s mother pointed this out the teacher had no idea that she was effectively discriminating against Roy. She was almost certainly not knowingly racist, but this is exactly how institutionalised racism works.

The Metropolitan police, who were deemed institutionally racist by the Mc Pherson inquiry, have attempted to clean house by banning BNP membership. The GTC (General Teaching Council ) have decided not only that they will not ban BNP membership for teachers but that they will not even debate the issue. It is quite simple, membership of the BNP is incompatible with the implementation the Race Relations Amendment Act and the Community Cohesion Act both of which impose legal duties on teachers to promote cultural diversity. This alone would be sufficient grounds to ban BNP membership for teachers.

It’s a relief to see the Equalities Commission today taking them to task over their membership (non-Caucasians are not allowed to join- yes I know they wouldn’t want to but that is not the point). It’s time to take the bull by the horns and deal with the creeping extremism in our political system. The leaked BNP membership list contains the names of a number of teachers so this is not a theoretical question. How would you feel it they were teaching your children?

How Labour let in the BNP

2009-06-16T15:56:00.000+01:00

While we are hand-wringing about the BNP we need to really look at why they were elected. In a proportional representation system what is important to fringe parties is that they get a certain percentage of the vote. If voter turnout is low and they get their vote out they will get elected. So they key issue in the election of the BNP was not so much the fact that so many people voted for them but the fact that so many people did not vote at all. This meant that they were able to secure two seats in Brussels with just a tiny proportion of the electorate voting for them.

Many people did not realise this would happen. In a PR system not voting at all can be worse than casting your vote for the least-worst party. If only 100 people vote and 30 of those vote for the BNP, they will get a seat as they will have 30% of the vote. However if 10,000 people vote and the same 30 of those vote for the BNP they will lose their deposit; simple as that. Turnout is everything.

The issue then becomes why did so many people stay away from the polls? Three words; Expenses, expenses, expenses. People were utterly disgusted at the way our elected representatives have been creaming off as much as they could. Duck houses, moats, non existent mortgages, the list is endless. The BNP saw their chance and they went for it. They mounted a good well organised campaign. They targeted their meagre resources at seats they were likely win. Too many people have written them off as fascist nutters. They are not nutters, they are well organised and dedicated and willing to put the hours (and years into their campaign) and this is a war. To fail to understand your enemy is to lose the first battle; as the West has repeatedly shown with Al Qaeda.

Labour were too busy fighting amongst themselves, plotting coup and counter-coup, to mount a half decent campaign. Many people in Yorkshire (where the BNP won a seat) report that they did not see Labour MP’s campaigning in their constituency while the BNP were all over the shop.

By betraying the trust of those who elected them our MP’s have let in the extreme parties. The collapse in the Labour vote in particular was appalling; even though Tory MP’s had the most outrageous expenses claims. I could not bring myself to vote Labour but I did vote. Labour are in government and were seen to be avoiding the issue, delaying publications of MP’s expenses for as long as they could before the Telegraph got hold of the facts and eviscerated them, in what is probably the best political scoop this decade.

The European Elections allowed voters to make their voice heard. Ironically, had Labour published the results way back when first ordered to do so by the courts and done something about the worst culprits they might have restored public trust before the elections. Even now, after being crucified at the polls, they still don’t get it.

Claiming for a non-existent mortgage is fraud. Fraud is a criminal offence and ignorance of the law is no defence. As MP after (legally trained) MP trots out the lamest excuses seen since ‘the dog ate my homework’; I see no criminal prosecutions. Why? Is it that our ‘there-but-for-the-grace-of-God’ politicians are unwilling to indict their own. Had a single mother on benefit claimed for months after she got a job she would be before a magistrate before you can say “42 inch plasma screen.” Pleading ‘oversight’ would have gotten her nowhere except a hollow laugh and six months in Holloway.

If our MP’s do not clean house – and that means guilty heads rolling (to jail not just the House of Lords), we can look forward to more voter apathy, more low turnouts and more BNP, MEP’s and possibly MP’s. Remember, “evil to flourishes when good men to do nothing;” and, because of disgust with the politicians, on polling day too many voters did nothing.

Freedom of Speech for the BNP?

2009-06-14T10:46:00.000+01:00

I just watched a TV programme which asked if the BNP have the right to be heard? This defined the issue as one of freedom of speech. The answer is not that simple. The electorate are not that simple. The democratic principle of freedom of speech is not that simple. The most important thing about the right of freedom of speech is that it is not, has never been and never will be absolute. No one has the ‘right’ to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre.

There are, and always have been limits to the right to ‘free speech’ one of those limits is the one is not entitled to incite racial hatred; the BNP aim to do just that. In any economic crisis extreme parties tend to flourish. Hitler was elected (democratically) in a depression era Germany. Lots of people who have lost heir jobs through no fault of there own are angry about it and want someone to blame. It is easy for the BNP to portray non-whites as the culprits. The black family down the road are much more accessible than the bankers who got us into this mess.

To say the major political parties only have themselves to blame is something of an understatement. I have written before that Gordon Brown’s “British Jobs for British workers” rallying cry would come back to haunt him and here it is in the form of not one but two BNP MEP’s. In an economic crisis it is easy to score a few cheap votes by demonising ethnic minorities but it’s a very nasty and very fine line to tread. Yes you might garner a few votes from disaffected whites, but how many do you give to the far right by seeming to legitimise their policies.

All the major political parties have been guilty of playing this game. As it turned out we had much more to fear from the bankers and the politicians who were beholden to them than we ever did from ethnic minority immigrants. How many ethnic minorities brought down Northern Rock, how many crashed Bradford and Bingely, and Woolworhts. If you have just lots your job because our company has gone bust – ethnic minorities are hardly to blame

The BNP discriminate on the grounds of race (non-whites are not allowed to join), they are not interested in freedom of speech per se, they want access to mainstream media, to television and newspapers which will allow them to spout race-hate to a wider audience. It’s sad to see so many media outlets clambering over each other to give it to them.

Can St George help us slay our national dragons?

2009-04-21T20:27:00.001+01:00

The Irish celebrate St Patrick’s Day, the Scots Burn’s Night and the Welsh St David’s Day. Why do the English feel awkward about celebrating St George’s Day? Since Boris Johnson announced that he will be holding St George’s day celebrations in London there has been a bit of a fuss and a flurry. The problem it seems is not so much with St George’s Day itself but with what it means to be English and to celebrate the fact. Sadly elements of the far right seem to have hijacked not just the British flag but to some extent the English flag and St George’s Day along with it.

Many people feel uncomfortable about marking the day because it might associate them with far right political parties; with jingoism, nationalism and all that unpleasant wasn’t-the-British-Empire-Great, stuff. We want to feel proud of being English (and British) but we’re not sure how to do it without seeming to put other counties and communities down. We really need to find a way to celebrate Englishness to which we can all subscribe.

St George’s day is a great opportunity to rehabilitate our idea of Englishness. After all he is the ultimate multicultural Saint (I know the word multicultural is now deemed ‘unfashionable’ but bear with me). For a start he wasn’t even English. He was Roman soldier whose father was Turkish and whose mother was Palestinian – yes he has a closer link to the Gaza strip than to England and he’s their patron saint too! He was executed for refusing to kill Christians. He is also the patron saint of many other places, Ethiopia for one. There are almost as many St George’s churches in Ethiopia as there are in England. He is also the patron saint of the Georgia, (formerly part of the USSR) and Russia as well as Greece and Lithuania to name a few.

So if St George isn’t the quintessential English Saint, what is ‘essential’ Englishness. Cream teas, cricket and Morris dancing are what might spring to mind but this does seem to hark back to the past. More people go to carnivals than participate in Morris Dancing. The Notting Hill Carnival is the biggest annual celebration in Western Europe, and it’s origins are in the Caribbean. Whether we like it or not, England is (and always has been) a country made of up of many cultures.

The PSHCE National Curriculum requires children to be taught, at Key Stage 2, as part of preparing to take and active role as citizens; “to appreciate the range of national, regional, religious and ethnic identities in the United Kingdom”. Many children do not appreciate that the United Kingdom is a State made up of countries and that England is one of those countries. St George’s Day is a great starting point for teaching them about their identity as English Citizens. They could look not just as St George and his life but they could research other countries (and cities) of which he is patron Saint.

They could also examine the myth of George and the Dragon. Did he really slay a dragon. What does the dragon symbolise? What are their own dragons, how can they ‘slay’ them. We English need to learn to be proud of our heritage, to accept that there was good and bad in our country’s past. To accept and embrace the good but not deny the bad; loose the bathwater but keep the baby. Perhaps learning to love our country warts an all is the dragon we need to slay.

Mamma Jeffrey

2009-03-20T14:55:00.000Z

I’ve just come home from a funeral. A proper, a black-people, Jamaican, church packed, dress to fowl-foot, sing-till-you-drop funeral. When I was little I hated these affairs, they lasted too long, It was too hot, my new black mourning clothes itched and scratched, I didn’t want to go and pay my respects to the body, and ‘big people’ were always turfing you off the chairs that that they could ‘rest them weary legs’.

But this was different. This was back in Mannignham, Bradford where I grew up; Riot torn, Ripper ridden, Little Pakistan, Bradford. I saw people I haven’t seen for twenty to thirty years and I was glad to see every one of them. They re-connected me to a past the Oxford and London seemed to have taken from me. My sister sang ‘Peace in the valley’ with one of the granddaughters and everyone just joined in, we were raised on these songs, like food and water they nurtured us. If you grew up in a black church whether you stop going or not there is something there that is always part of your soul.

Mamma Jeffries died. I knew her for as long as I can remember, my mother knew her before I was bon. She was one of those Jamaican women who propped up the National Health Service, who washed the dishes, made the beds, cooked the food and all un-thanked, unnoticed and un-remarked upon. She was loud, she was raucous, she would hug you so tight your bones felt like they were going to break. She was tactless would, in that unique Jamaican way comment on your appearance whether you wanted her to or not. “Lord, you get fat eh?” When you thought you’d slimmed down a treat. She spoke as she found and people loved her for it. The church was packed with less than standing room only.

I nipped outside to the newsagents for something to stop the grumbling in my stomach two hours into the marathon (and despite the pleading of the Pastor people were still coming up to ‘say a few words’) and a woman asked what all the commotion was about, (There were so many people on the sidewalk that traffic was slowing to a crawl to swerve around us all.) My mother gave the Eulogy and spoke of their, near 50 year, friendship. They evangelised their way around England and were planning a trip to Florida when Mamma Jeffries died. They would tell anyone who asked (and plenty who didn’t) about the one Lord God Jesus Christ.

I realised as I read the funeral service that although I knew her all my life I never knew her first name. I always knew her as Mamma Jeffries. It would have been considered the height of rudeness to ask her name, you always addressed ‘big people’ with a title. ‘Mamma’ this, ‘Sister’ that, ‘Evangelist’ the other. So now I know Myrtella Icema Jeffrey 19th October 1924 – 3rd March 2009, rest in peace.

2009-02-22T10:46:00.000Z

English jobs for English workers?

“British jobs for British workers!” Even as Gordon Brown uttered the words he knew that he couldn’t enforce them. But now they're back, being shouted by picketing workers, back to bite him on the bum. As a member of the EU we cannot exclude any EU nationals from jobs in the UK. The main impact of such slogans is to whip up resentment against foreign workers, not to actually stop them from working here.

In boom times, when the British don’t want to pick strawberries at £2.50 per hour, we are prepared to turn a blind eye to the droves of migrant workers literally coming to do our dirty work. But now we’re nicely bedded into what could be one of the worst recessions in living memory we want our jobs back.

Politicians can’t have it both ways. You can’t have the rhetoric without the reaction. How long before foreign workers are attacked by those whose jobs they have ‘taken’? If you were an Italian or Portuguese oil worker in Immingham right now would you be popping into your local for a pint? I doubt it. Gordon Brown and politicians who use ‘xenophobia’ as an electioneering tool should be held to account when their rhetoric is interpreted literally.

When Margaret Thatcher talked of Britain being ‘swamped’ by immigrants in 1979 it became part of the National Front propaganda. I know this because they leafleted my school at the time. When Jack Straw suggested Muslim women remove their veils, there was a spate of veils being ripped from the faces of women in the street.

I know the British on the whole are a tolerant and welcoming nation, but things can get very ugly in a recession. I have worked with children in schools in Immingham and Grimsby and I know that teachers are worried about some of the attitudes around race that are emerging. Slogans like ‘British jobs for British workers’ don’t help. They suggest that it’s OK to target outsiders, that it’s OK to exclude them and never mind any idiotic EU directives we’ve signed up to that say’s we can’t.

This recession will get worse and as it does people will look for scapegoats. They won’t be looking for the bankers who got us into this mess but to the black school cleaner they see when they pick up their kids of an evening. The fact that they wouldn’t have touched her job with a ten foot mop a year ago is irrelevant, times are hard. Gordon ought to be careful that people don’t start interpreting him too literally. After all, if people started demanding English jobs for English workers, where would that leave him?

When is 'Paki' an offensive term?

2009-01-12T15:07:00.000Z

Those who have defended Prince Harry’s use of the words ‘paki’ and ‘raghead’ do seem to be missing the point. The Mc Pherson report into the murder of Black teenager Stephen Lawrence defined racism subjectively. If the ‘victim’ of a racist remark finds the remark offensive then it is offensive. The fact that other people of the same ethnic group do not find the word offensive is irrelevant. That a Welsh man did not object to being called ‘taffy’ is not material. For any racist remark it will be possible to find someone of the ethnicity referred to who will state that they did not find the remark offensive.

The question is; are there people who do? The word ‘paki’ has long been used as a derogatory term and it is disingenuous to say that it is simply an abbreviation of the word ‘Pakistani’. That would be like saying ‘abo’; is not an offensive word to use about Australian Aboriginals or ‘gypo’ is not an offensive term to use about Gypsies’ as they are abbreviations. In this case the soldier to whom the ‘paki’ remark was addressed did find it offensive. Under the circumstances it was probably very difficult for him to say anything at the time, but offence was caused, and taken. Many people seem to think that the fact that they did not mean to cause offence means that offence should not have been taken. That is like accidentally shutting a door on someone’s hand and objecting that they say they are hurt. The fact that you did not mean to hurt them is immaterial, they have been hurt. The least you can do is, like Prince Harry, apologise.

2008-12-17T13:51:00.000Z

From Rosa Parks to Barack Obama
“Martin Luther King had a dream and now it’s come true!” was how one ten year old, in a school we work in, described Barack Obama’s election as the 44th President of the USA. Even now, in the run up to the inauguration I still have to resist the urge to pinch myself that it happened. It’s real, he will actually become President. As a pessimistic optimist, I also have to suppress the dread that someone might assassinate him. After all four American presidents have been assassinated in office, not to mention numerous civil rights leaders; and right wing nutters have already been caught in a plot to do just that.

When I saw him up on the platform alone on election night, nothing but a glass screen between him and the crowd I worried about snipers. Can a country that elected George Bush (twice) also elect Barack Obama, one of the most thoughtful and intelligent politicians of recent times. His two books are some of the most lucid writing I have read in a long time and make the complexities of modern US politics comprehensible to the average reader. Can he actually realise his promise or will they get to him. Not just the assassin but the day to day compromises that politicians have to make to get anything done. The question is, will power corrupt him.

The child who said Martin Luther’s dream had come true is in some ways right. Barack Obama was, in the end judges by the content of his character and not by the colour of his skin. The naysayers who kindly tried to explain that America wasn’t ready for a black president were wrong. That a majority white country with the blood of so many black people on its’ collective hands has put it’s trust in one of their descendants is in some ways what the country is all about. A country that can reinvent itself and draw on the energy of its’ immigrant populations to become more than the sum of it’s parts.

I write school text books among other things and right now I’m busy producing a teaching pack that tracks the journey from Rosa Parks and the Civil rights movement to the Election of Barack Obama. There are too few school history books which feature positive images of black people, (both in the US and here). Rosa Parks and Barack Obama are part of a continuum but we need to remember that Martin Luther King’s dream had not come true just yet. There’s a long way to go, but what a milestone we’ve just reached.

Marcia Hutchinson is the Managing Director of Primary Colours – whose mission is to create a better world for our children by helping them understand and embrace cultural diversity in our society. Did You Know 2 (a follow up to the successful Did You Know 1) a series of biographies of black and Asian Achievers will be published on 20th January 2009 to coincide with Barack Obama’s inauguration. If features Lewis Hamilton and Amir Khan as well as Barack Obama.

2008-11-20T11:54:00.001Z

Is UKIP the middle class wing of the BNP?
Is UKIP the middle class wing of the BNP? The recent revelation that there is a UKIP/BNP pact not to both contest seats that would divide their vote makes one wonder if UKIP is in fact the part of the polite racist. The BNP argument for the repatriation of immigrants is that ‘Britain is full’, at heart UKIP seem to be arguing the same thing, although they slant it more toward objecting to interference from Brussels. The proliferation of right wing parties whose main platform is anti immigration is a worrying trend.

But the main political parties only have themselves to blame. Michael Howard ran one of the most divisive election campaigns I have ever seen with his; ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking’ (about immigration) posters. This backfired spectacularly, why vote for racist-lite when you can vote for UKIP or the BNP and get the real thing? And if those parties get a high proportion of the vote the media will descend on your town so that you can air your concerns on national TV.

The trouble with a lurch to the right is that you bump in to the parties who are already there as the conservatives found to their cost. They couldn’t even beat a party whose primary Minister was so unpopular that his own MP’s omitted him from their election publications. To their credit the British public didn’t go for it. But there is a tendency to blame social problems on immigrants, problems which should rightly lie at the door of the government. Immigrants are, quite frankly, a convenient scapegoat that many politicians find it hard to resist. They should be ashamed of themselves and not at all surprised when their words come back to haunt them, suitably rephrased by the far right. I was at school when Margaret Thatcher talked about immigrants ‘swamping’ Britain. There were many in her own party who felt she had gone too far with that speech. A week later the BNP leafleted my school and her speech was quoted in their leaflet.
Jack Straw – a labour MP – really should have considered the effect of his speech about asking Muslim women to remove their veils when in meetings with him. In context his comments might have been reasonable, but he should have known they would have been taken out of context. A direct result of the publicity surrounding his speech was Muslim women having the veils ripped from their faces in the street. Now only a tiny minority of Muslim women wear the veil in the first place – why pick on them? They seem like a very easy (and highly visible) target.UKIP and the BNP need to do very little if the major parties will do their leg-work for them, just continue to demonise immigrants and the drift to the right will continue. Fail to mention the contributions of immigrants to this country, the cuisine, the NHS workers, the Care home workers, the fact that the hospitality/ hotel industry would collapse overnight if foreign born workers downed tools and left. The simple truth is we need immigrants, and we feel uncomfortable about that need. But the answer is to face it head on, to debate it, and not to leave the argument to the far right.

Should BNP members be excluded from public office?

2008-11-19T19:07:00.000Z

The publication of a list of 10,000 BNP members has those named worrying that it might affect their job prospects. They should be worried. Membership of the BNP is banned for police officers but not for many other professions teachers included.
The question is should membership of the BNP exclude someone from public office? This is a no brainer, of course it should. There are many people who hold racist views but don’t feel it necessary to join political party whose only policy that most people can name is the repatriation of immigrants. Those people who feel so strongly against immigrants that they join a political party whose sole policy is to reverse immigration have no place administering a country which is becoming increasingly and despite their efforts irreversibly, culturally diverse.
If for instance my garage mechanic was a member of the BNP, I could go to another garage but if my child’s teacher was a member I could reasonably suppose that my child might not be treated fairly in his or her class. The Mc Pherson Report outlined the damage that could be done by institutional racism, which he defined as; ‘The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin.
It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which
amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.” He was writing about the police in the first instance but their institutional racism was a matter of life and death for Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager whose murder prompted the Report.

This is what happens when individuals in an organisation are racist unconsciously. Imagine how bad it can get if they know that they are behaving in a racist manner and indeed intend to do so. Would you want a sick relative cared for by a Nurse or Doctor who was a BNP member? How could you be sure that person would care properly for a helpless black patient? How could you be sure that they would not use every opportunity they got to mistreat that person. The holding of extreme racist beliefs is quite, simply incompatible with public office in a country that prides itself not just on tolerance but acceptance of difference.

I work in the area of diversity. We promote cultural diversity in primary schools. We often get calls from head teachers because far right parties like the BNP are active in their area and they have noticed a change in the attitudes of children in their school. We provide a range of teaching resources, training for staff and creative activities for children to promote diversity and counter the disinformation they are getting outside school. Although our work is primarily creative and might be seen as a ‘soft’ response we see it as a part of the greater struggle against racism. We’re in the battle for hearts and minds. For BNP members I fear that battle has been well and truly lost.

2008-11-18T10:40:00.000Z

As the first black president is elected in America, Bernie Ecclestone is accused of condoning the racist abuse of Lewis Hamilton. Has it all been blown out of proportion or is racism still rife in 21st century Britain asks Marcia Hutchinson?
Thirty years ago, white actors donned black wigs, smeared boot polish on their faces and performed on TV on Saturday nights as the Black and White minstrels. I was a child then but I knew this was offensive and very wrong. At my school we had a fancy dress party. One of my friends put on boot polish and a black wig and came as me.
The Black and White Minstrels came off the air for good in 1978 – a generation ago. This year the first black president has been elected in the USA and the first black Formula 1 champion has been crowned. How times have changed. But not for one Bernie Ecclestone, boss of Formula 1. Fans dressing in black wigs and painting their faces black at Lewis Hamilton’s Spanish training sessions are ‘just expressing themselves’ he says. Just a bit of harmless fun? What would they have to do for Bernie Ecclestone to acknowledge that they are behaving in a deeply offensive racist way? Shout racist abuse at Hamilton? By not making a stand Ecclestone is effectively condoning their behaviour. His views are appalling to say the least and belong to what I had sincerely hoped was a long-bygone age. What is sad is that Ecclestone is perhaps the one person who, individually, since he owns the sport, could stop this overnight.
The point about Ecclestone’s fans ‘expressing themselves’ is that the right to ‘express oneself’ (or free speech to give it another name) is not absolute. In Britain, the right to free speech is limited by the need to respect the rights of others. In this case, the right of Lewis Hamilton and other sports people, to not be racially abused. Some have argued that ‘sledging’ is part and parcel of sport and sportspeople should have the strength of character to deal with it. Sledging, for the uninitiated, is the deliberate verbal abuse of a sportsperson before or during the game or event in order to try to negatively influence their performance. But why should black sports people have to put up with being called the ‘n’ word. This kind of behaviour is not limited to Spain.
On Monday night Joey Barton is alleged to have made a racist comment to Aston Villa striker Gabriel Agbonlahor. Agbonlahor and Villa have decided not to take the matter further. Why not? There is footage of the incident and a lip-reader could easily work out what Barton actually said. Would Ecclestone argue that Baron is simply ‘expressing himself’? Would this be the same Joey Barton who pleaded guilty to kicking his black team-mate Ousmane Dabo in the head? Would this also be the same Joey Barton whose brother murdered a black stranger Anthony Walker by burying an axe in his head? (A point none of the media seems to mention much these days.) Surely we are entitled to ask whether Barton shares his brother’s racist tendencies?
The 2002 Race Relations Amendment Act (enacted in the wake of the McPherson Report into black teenager Stephen Lawrence’s murder) placed a positive duty on public bodies to promote race equality. This was because it was accepted that the holding of racist views, even if they are unexpressed, can negatively impact on a person’s ability to do their job fairly. In the case of Stephen Lawrence the police barely attempted to investigate his killing. Would those F1 fan’s who ‘black-up’ at the trackside treat their black colleagues fairly? Would they confine their racism to their spare time?
The Mc Pherson Report defined racism as behaviour which the victim found to be racist. McPherson sensibly defined racism using a subjective test. Based on this test, the question of whether the actions of the blacked-up fans is racist should be defined by the victim, Lewis Hamilton. He has clearly stated that he does not find it funny, and in his opinion it is racist.
Ecclestone's comments remind me of those made in the 1970’s when racism was rife in football when John Barnes had to suffer the indignity of bananas being thrown at him on the pitch and worse. I heard many pundits like Jimmy Greaves say at the time that the comments were ‘just a bit of fun’. They were never fun for those subjected to them. While racism has not been eliminated from football, the sports governing bodies are at least paying lip-service to the idea that the sport should be free of racism. Behind closed doors there are those like Ron Atkinson who are still spouting offensive remarks about black players (while not aware that their microphones are still switched on) but I doubt if anyone in football would say such things in public.
Some clubs are serious about rooting out racism. For the last ten years I have worked to promote cultural diversity in education. My company, Primary Colours, has worked with over 100,000 school children all over the country coming up with creative ways to celebrate the many cultures that make up modern Britain. We recently took part in Doncaster Rovers 2008 ‘Kick Racism out of football’ campaign. Players, management and staff at all levels of the club participated in the activities in partnership with the Children’s Fund and schoolchildren from all over Doncaster. Ecclestone’s comments undermine the work of many people who are fighting to promote community cohesion.
This is 2008, the world has changed; tennis, golf, Formula 1 now all have black champions. The most powerful politician in the world is of African Heritage. Ecclestone has cast himself in the role of King Canute; but he can’t hold back the tide. He has simply revealed himself to be yesterday’s man, out of touch with a rapidly changing world.

This post has also been published in the Voice Newspaper on 17th November 2008

2008-02-23T20:22:00.000Z

Yorkshire Television have just made a video about my life and work. It was screened on 7th February 2008 and you can see an online version at http://www.youtube.com/diversityeducation. If you are interested in the work we do you can also have a look at my compnay website at www.primarycolours.net.

My yorkshire filming

2008-02-02T23:06:00.000Z

Education for Diversity

2008-02-02T22:44:00.000Z

I am writing to announce that my work and my company Primary Colours will feature in an upcoming ITV documentary “My Yorkshire” to be screened on Thursday 7th February 2008 at 7.30pm.
Presented by Ian Clayton, “My Yorkshire”, now in its fifth and longest series yet, explores the Yorkshire of today by talking to a cross section of people who live in the county, whether they were born here or those who choose to make it their home. They share their experiences, their love of the county and explore how Yorkshire has chanted over the years.
The programme-makers shadowed me for a number of days, filming in various situations to gain an insight into my life. Viewers find out about my childhood in Bradford, move down south to study Law at Oxford University and her years practising as a solicitor in London and Leeds before exploring the reasons behind her setting up Primary Colours.
A large part of the programme shows Primary Colours in action; my colleague Pete and I are filmed delivering one of the ‘Theatre in Education’ shows to pupils at Fairfield Primary School in Grimsby. The show, entitled Olivia’s Journey, tells the stories of those who travelled from the Caribbean to settle and work in post-War Britain. Pupils find out how these people felt about leaving their homes and families, how they fared on the journey itself and how they often encountered difficulties on their arrival in England – in one scene for example, Olivia (played by me), can’t understand why leaves fall off the trees here in Winter.
My Yorkshire gives a great insight into the work that Primary Colours does and accurately reflects how we tackle culturally sensitive issues such as slavery and human rights. Viewers will see that are shows are loud, lively and anything but boring - we encourage pupils to have fun and play starring roles themselves and include plenty of drama, dancing and music. While there are serious moments requiring thought and reflection, for the most part fun is the order a Primary Colours show!
For those who want to see us in action before booking, My Yorkshire offers a great sneak preview –anyone keen to know more both about our company ethos and our approach to teaching cultural diversity should watch it.”
For more information about Primary Colours Theatre in Education click here www.primarycolours.net or contact Pete Tidy on 01484 421620.