3.3 Intervention 3: Culturally competent approaches
What is cultural competence?
Cultural competence is a continuous process of reflecting on your own identity, values and assumptions, and learning how to work respectfully with people whose experiences differ from your own.
The Culturally Responsive Pedagogy Toolkit (Diverse Educators, 2023) describes this as beginning with identity. Before you can talk about what others need, you have to ask yourself:
What lenses do I bring into this space? Whose knowledge do I centre? Whose do I ignore?
Think back to positionality from Session 1. Your identity affects how you see the world, interpret children’s behaviours, and respond to their needs. Being culturally responsive means staying aware of your own positionality while making room for children and families to be fully seen in theirs.
From cultural awareness to anti-racist action
Anti-racist training builds on cultural awareness by asking: How does racism show up in our setting? Who is affected, and how? What are we doing about it?
As Dr Tembo noted in the panel, the challenge is building whole-setting cultures where anti-racism is essential, not an ‘extra’. Dr Mngaza added that learning must change practice, reflection without action isn’t enough.
What this looks like in practice
In schools: Staff regularly examine exclusion and referral data by race, challenge policies that create disparities, and adapt teaching to reflect diverse cultural strengths.
At home: Families have conversations about race and identity, seek diverse perspectives in books and media, and examine their own assumptions about other communities.
In professional settings: Practitioners reflect on decision-making patterns, seek supervision to examine potential bias, and focus on cultural strengths rather than deficits.
Cultural competence training can cause harm when it:
- becomes performative rather than transformative
- reinforces stereotypes through cultural generalisations
- centres white comfort over improved outcomes for racially minoritised children
- substitutes reflection for action.
Activity 5 Assessing and planning cultural competence
Task 1 Scenario analysis
Read these situations and consider your responses.
Scenario A: A Black father becomes frustrated during a meeting about his daughter’s exclusions. Other staff look uncomfortable. How would you respond?
Scenario B: You notice most SEND referrals are racially minoritised children, while gifted referrals are mostly white. What questions does this raise?
Scenario C: A colleague says ‘these families don’t value education’ about attendance issues. How would you respond?
Choose one scenario.
Discussion
Scenario A: Recognise his frustration likely reflects not being heard previously. Stay calm, acknowledge his concerns as valid, focus on solutions rather than tone, examine whether your setting contributed to his frustration.
Scenario B: Examine referral criteria for bias, review how needs and gifts are identified, consider if cultural differences are being pathologised, implement changes for more equitable processes.
Scenario C: Challenge the stereotype, ask for specific evidence, discuss structural barriers, share research on diverse families’ values, propose understanding what families actually need.
Task 2 Personal action planning
Answer the following questions:
- What knowledge gaps do you have about communities you serve?
- Which conversations about race do you avoid and why?
- How confident do you feel discussing racism rather than just cultural differences?
Make three specific commitments:
- One thing you will learn (by when?)
- One conversation you will have (with whom?)
- One practice you will change (how will you measure it?)
Task 3 Matching interventions to challenges
Match each intervention to these challenges:
Challenges:
- High exclusion rates for Black students
- Staff discomfort discussing racism
- Families feeling unheard in meetings
- Incidents of racism between children
Interventions:
- a.Restorative approaches
- b.Trauma-informed practice
- c.Cultural competence training
Discussion
Suggested matches:
- B + C (understand behaviour as communication while examining bias)
- C (directly addresses training needs)
- A + C (collaborative approaches with cultural awareness)
- A (focus on repair and understanding impact)
Most complex challenges need multiple interventions working together.
Which intervention feels most relevant to your setting? Why?