Close to two years since the murder of American George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, and the start of the global pandemic, how has the high profile Black Lives Matter movement affected FE staff of Afro-American origin? As a follow-up to our Black History Month feature, we ask the director of diversity at the AoC and a curriculum leader in textile design for their progress reports on diversity in colleges.
“We’ve had a bit of a rude awakening,” says Jeff Greenidge, director for diversity for both the Association of Colleges (AoC) and the Education and Training Foundation (ETF). “Events have really brought a lot of things to the fore and then you’ve got the pandemic on top of that. There’s a realisation across the FE sector that the status quo can no longer persist.
“I’m hearing college principals say we need to ensure our organisations are reflective of our communities - and that’s a fundamental shift. Ultimately no one can do that for us but ourselves because we are autonomous organisations and we run our teaching and learning and workforce development in partnership with our communities. I won’t say it’s across the board - but where I’m seeing change is hearing principals say: ‘We own this issue.’ ”
Ian Pryse, chief executive of the Bedford College Group, wrote this summer in the Times Educational Supplement about the need for change and his decision to lead his college on race equality. He asked himself if his college - whose student, staff and governor populations had become ‘more diverse than our patch’ - had changed course to reflect its increased diversity: “Based on a few conversations with staff, it was clear we had not. We were doing well on admissions but otherwise, we were the same college. Staff from minority groups felt safe and welcome but still reported lower levels of belonging. We clearly have a way to go to move to inclusion.”
Yes, he said, the college had made progress in tackling inclusion by creating specific forums to cover gender, disability and race, each led by staff volunteers. But most changes made were about involvement and visibility - which still felt like improving admission levels. “Getting more people into positions of influence and listening harder seems to be the main changes that our staff want to see.”
The good news is that moving people from diverse backgrounds up the leadership ladder is now a key training priority for the ETF and AoC. For the past two years they have been “promoting the development of middle and senior leaders to get them to the place where they want to feel comfortable progressing to,” says Jeff Greenidge. “That may sound a bit strange, but when you are in a middle management position, regardless of whether you are black or white, it’s quite a big step to go to the next stage.”
Recruitment processes are also changing with a push by AoC’s in-house recruitment company to work out how to make its own processes even more inclusive to attract new leaders and governors. But as Jeff points out: “Getting a black person onto a governing board is only the first step; what’s more important is how you make the most of their talents around the board table.
“I was recruited as a college governor for my knowledge of the education sector across the board. But if anyone gets the sense they are being recruited just because they are black, they won’t come forward. It’s about a person’s skills, not what they look like!”
Jeff is optimistic: “Change is slow but it’s now getting depth. We can’t keep reacting to incidents; something has to be sustainable.”
Isatu, originally from Barbados, cannot stress enough the need for more black candidates to apply for lecturing jobs in her own speciality, textile design, and in the arts as a whole.
Currently, curriculum manager in textile design at City and Islington College, Isatu came to Britain aged 15, studied design at Brighton University, and then worked for eight years in the textile industry, at first full-time and then part-time to fit in around a young family. At the same time, she wanted to teach and give something back. She applied to several colleges but had very little teaching experience. She persisted and, after reading Isatu’s CV, her current manager offered her two hours’ teaching a week. It was a start that morphed into two days a week and finally posts as a full-time course tutor, lecturer and, after 12 years teaching, curriculum leader.
Isatu illustrates a situation often facing young UK immigrants from different ethnic backgrounds. “I remember the time my mum first put me on the no 46 bus and told me to get off when the other kids did. Walking into school I suddenly thought how was I going to tell all these kids apart? I’d just come from a country where everybody effectively looked like me; I thought at first that everyone else was blond in class - I’d never been in a space with so many Europeans before.”
In fact, she was never taught by anyone with similar experiences to hers, so things she could recall or remember did not resonate with anyone. That struck a chord early on in her own learning: “My art school education was very much through the eyes of a European. I made some fantastic friendships with my peers but their whole experience and the things we drew on often felt very different and unfamiliar. I not only had to learn a lot about being in a different country but also what it was like to be British as I did not always identify with it.”
She says it’s really important that teachers at some point resemble or have some similar experience to those students from the same ethnic backgrounds. “It’s naive to say having cultural awareness has no impact on how we access education, now that we know how people learn.
“I’m personally very proud to be part of such a diverse group of teaching colleagues in ethnicity and gender working together at college. Art and design is perhaps an area of concern as traditionally it’s not been very diverse in staff, content and means of delivery, so we need to recruit more black and Asian role models.”
“When I worked for a design company, I often felt I had to perform and learn to be a kind of chameleon, so there was not that disconnect - and this is something we try and prepare our students for. It’s not just to do with blackness but also about having very different cultural and class experiences. Art is very much the territory of the middle class and if you are not from that background - whether black or working-class white - you could have a very similar experience to myself.”
But things are changing, says Isatu. “Frieze London Art Fair appointed its first artistic director of mixed heritage, Eva Langret, a Paris native, in 2019; it feels really ground-breaking for me to see for the first time a woman of colour in such a prestigious role in mainstream fine art.”
Isatu cannot speak highly enough of her manager. “I have a very supportive manager and mentor. My manager doesn’t micro-manage but allows me to blossom and grow, and because of that I’ve developed within the department and furthered my career. And I have always had a positive experience with all five centre directors I have worked under. I’ve never felt unfairly treated.”
How has she raised Black Lives Matter in class discussion? “I felt qualified to talk about it, but in a class where some students were potentially Jewish and others ethnically Afro-Caribbean, for instance, I felt I would not be able to touch on every culture and yet I also didn’t want to exclude anyone culture. I’m still trying to figure out how I can present this in a meaningful way that feels fair and inclusive to all students and is not just tokenism during Black History Month.”
So much of ethnicity is tied into poverty and where you live, she says - from schools that do have resources as opposed to those that don’t; it’s about being fair to all students. “One of the biggest gifts I can give my students is to show myself as a really positive example of blackness, and hopefully my students will learn things about me that they will share with others.”
Further education does have barriers - but not along ethnic lines so common to so many other sectors, says Isatu. “Teaching in FE is a wonderful profession and an area where you can really give back to students of all backgrounds. In a very small way, I guess that’s my contribution.”
AoCJobs, part of the Association of Colleges, connects teachers and support staff with schools and colleges for online job opportunities.