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Race and Youth Policy: working with young people
Race and Youth Policy: working with young people

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8 Policy into practice

Now watch Video 3, taken from the BBC programme Subnormal: A British Scandal. While watching Video 3, consider how these controversial policy practices in the 1960s and beyond negatively impacted young Black children’s lives in a range of ways.

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Transcript: Video 3: Subnormal: A British Scandal

NARRATOR
In 1960s and 70s Britain, hundreds of Black children were caught up in an extraordinary scandal. They were labeled as educationally subnormal by the state and wrongly sent to schools for children deemed to have low intelligence. A 1970 study of 850 teachers confirmed that West Indian children were perceived as being aggressive and creating discipline problems.
These generalisations were severely damaging the lives of Black children. And for their parents, staying quiet was no longer an option.
PAUL WARMINGTON
Increasing numbers of Black parents, Black teachers, community workers, activists began to think that something is going wrong here, something is amiss.
NARRATOR
Bernard Coard was by now a teacher in an ESN school and realised he wasn’t the only person to have spotted that Black children were being routinely wrongly placed. The leaked report from the ILEA contained a multitude of damning admissions. It revealed that the education authority was well aware that Caribbean children were being wrongly placed in ESN schools at much higher rates than their White peers. The implied reason, not a lack of intellectual ability, but the fact that they were thought to be culturally deprived and emotionally disturbed.
Armed with this evidence, Coard delivered his speech at the CECWA conference. The response was electric.
BERNARD COARD
I noticed the wide open eyes.
PROFESSOR GUS JOHN
It was really quite scandalous.
BERNARD COARD
The body language was quite shocked.
PROFESSOR GUS JOHN
Perplexed, angry.
BERNARD COARD
The silence, there was an initial hush when some of the data was revealed.
PROFESSOR GUS JOHN
It was extremely revealing. I mean, the statistics that they gave of the rate at which Black children were being sent to these schools was pretty shocking.
ERIC HUNTLEY
He was able to provide comprehensive details. It was a systematic approach towards the education of Black children.

[APPLAUSE]

BERNARD COARD
And at the end of it, just about everybody there said to me, you have to turn it into a book. We don’t have time to waste. You have to start it now. You have three months.
NARRATOR
The title of Coard’s book boldly announced his argument.
PROFESSOR GUS JOHN
How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Subnormal.
PROFESSOR SALLY TOMLINSON
Educationally subnormal.
ERIC HUNTLEY
Educationally subnormal.
PROFESSOR GUS JOHN
How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System.
PROFESSOR SALLY TOMLINSON
And that really did have an effect. That really woke people up.
NARRATOR
In just 50 pages, Coard forensically dismantled the entire system that had led to the ESN scandal. He exposed the institutional assumption that West Indian children were innately less intelligent than White children. And that teachers were mistaking the trauma caused by immigration for a lack of intelligence.
BERNARD COARD
Black kid is four times more likely to be wrongly placed in an ESN school than a White kid. In other words, there were four times as many Black children in ESN schools, who should not have been there, as they were White working-class kids, who also should not have been there. The ratio was 4:1.
NARRATOR
Using this leaked report, Coard had shown for the first time that the education system knew that Black Caribbean children were being wrongly trapped in schools for the educationally subnormal, yet continued to let it happen.
BERNARD COARD
I was able to point out to the Caribbean community that those in authority were not just doing something scandalously wrong. More importantly, they knew it. And even more importantly, having known it, were going to do nothing about it.
NARRATOR
The publication of Coard’s book now made the scandal over ESN schools a subject of national debate. Bernard remembers that at first the British education system remained in denial.
BERNARD COARD
The reaction of the establishment was very interesting. Literally on the night it was published, the leading educationist in the ILEA appeared on television with me. And the line was, it’s all rubbish, it’s all lies. So right there on the program, I quoted the statistics and said, this is your own report. I have quoted extensively from your data and from your own conclusions. Are you saying that everything you all wrote and kept hidden are lies?
NARRATOR
Bernard took every opportunity to broadcast the message.
BERNARD COARD
The school the child goes to, whether a child goes to a normal school or a ESN school is determined by these IQ tests devised by educational science. You then proceed to put children in lower streams and in ESN schools on the basis of this unscientific, unvalidated test. Then, obviously, five years from now, you can throw your hands up in the air and say, you see, we’re right. These kids are ESN, having made sure that they get less facilities, less teaching equipment, having, in short, actually engineered the environment for failure.
It took 6 months. And at the end of 6 months, they said, it’s all true. I think we should use it in teachers colleges and with it, as recommended, reading, and use it in schools of education. White kids and Black kids drew themselves as White, the Black kids, I was shocked by this. And when I did that research, again, on the orders of the Caribbean community, I read about the Black and White doll experiments.
NARRATOR 2
Two dolls identical, except for their color, just watch how the children react.
CHILD INTERVIEWER
Think very hard. Which one would you like to be like?
CHILD 1
That one.
CHILD INTERVIEWER
Why would you like to be like that one?
CHILD 1
Because it’s White.
CHILD INTERVIEWER
You tell me, which one would you like to be like?
CHILD 2
That one.
CHILD INTERVIEWER
Why would you like to be like that?
CHILD 2
Because they keep calling you names and that.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BERNARD COARD
If every time you read every story, everything you watch on TV, in the newspapers, in magazines, in books, paints everything Black, and everybody Black as evil, as the devil, et cetera. And everything White as angelic. What do you expect? Not only for Whites to believe about Blacks, but for Blacks to believe about themselves.
ERIC HUNTLEY
Through the belittling ignoring or denial of a person’s identity one can destroy perhaps the most important aspect of a person’s personality, his sense of identity and who he is. Without this, he will get nowhere.
BERNARD COARD
Black parents should encourage their children to read. Reading literature, which was inspiring to West Indian kids, which recognised and saluted their history, and their culture, and their contribution to civilisation.
PROFESSOR GUS JOHN
The publishing that Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications did, and that New Beacon Books, and John La Rose, and Sarah White, and they weren’t just about book selling, they were about providing the tools that communities could use to build an education movement in this country.
ERIC HUNTLEY
We were the first ones to import books from the States with Black images on it. We printed cards with a Black Christ. And in those days, to have photographs and pictures and posters of Black people was very unusual.
NARRATOR
In 2019, some research in a government commissioned review seemed to confirm the long held suspicions of many Black parents.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

It concluded that institutional racism, albeit unintentional, resulted in differential treatment and discriminatory practices. Until these problems are solved, the shadow of injustice exposed by the ESN scandal still looms large.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

End transcript: Video 3: Subnormal: A British Scandal
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Video 3: Subnormal: A British Scandal
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In the next activity, draw on what you have learned about the role of practitioners in implementing policy, in order to reflect on some examples from your own practice.

Activity 5: Reflecting on your own practice

Timing: 1 hour

First, think of an example from your practice and write a short account of the policy which this work sprang from, and how you interpreted and mediated it in the context of your own work. How much influence did you feel you had in acting as mediator between policy and practice?

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Discussion

Your experience of working within policy is personal to you, and you will have your own views on how far policy directives can be influenced through debate or practices. Keeping up to date with policy change, and engaging with policy discussions and consultations, is not only an essential part of professional practice; it also offers opportunities for influencing the impact and direction of policy.

In the example of the Prevent policy, it is interesting to note that, by 2009, the government had come to recognise that the focus of the initiative needed to be broadened to include extremism in other parts of society besides the Muslim community – see this article [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .

Malcolm Payne expresses the relationship between government policy and practitioners, and the responsibility this places on practitioners, as follows.

The national state provides a significant mandate for the work, sets its parameters, provides much of the funding and, through its management and accounting mechanisms, a regulatory framework. Local authorities have significant powers too, but are in many ways subservient to an increasingly interventionist national state. The stance that practitioners take in response to this scenario is critical to the practice models which emerge.

Malcolm Payne (2009, p. 216)