Black history should be made compulsory in the UK to combat hate and help prevent racist riots, a leading campaigner says.
Lavinya Stennett, founder of Black Curriculum, warned of the real dangers of black history and diversity curriculum being pushed aside or implemented only in schools and districts with diverse student populations.
He pointed to the riots that broke out in England and Northern Ireland over the summer, the result of a failure to ensure that diverse teachings were widely available to all.
“Until we make black history a thing in October, until we make black history only for black people, until black history focuses only on the metropolises and denies those villages. In areas where a lot of riots have actually started, we always have incidents of youth … continuing to fuel ignorance and racism,” he said.
Stennett spoke to the Guardian during Black History Month about her upcoming memoir Skipped: Lessons from Untold Black History We Need to Change the Future. The book also explores the 27-year-old's time in the foster care and student referral sectors.
Stennett said that while interest in black curriculum increased during the Black Lives Matter protests, formal change was slow.
“There is an appetite in this country to properly recognize the importance of who we are and to recognize our full humanity. Interventions that recognize us [black Britons’] “It's more important than 'let's talk about racism,'” Stennett said.
She cited the National Curriculum as an example. “Mandatory training and curriculum for teachers that accurately reflect who we are as a people, or they won't recognize racial literacy as a security issue.”
Stennett criticized the previous government's opposition to “anti-white” rhetoric in schools, saying it had a chilling effect on their ability to teach black history.
Education Department guidance says schools must “under no circumstances” work with or use groups that promote victims' narratives that are “harmful to British society”.
“Some of the schools we were involved with we didn't know how to engage with you, we didn't have to break the law,” Stennett said.
He believes the government must be clear and unequivocal in its support for the black curriculum: “This new government must say it is compulsory for all schools to engage in it and for teachers to do this training.
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“They need to put some metrics on it. This is what we want teachers to achieve by 2027, because I don't think leaving it up to teachers to decide is going to work.
He points to the gap between pupils in Wales learning compulsory black history subjects in Welsh schools compared to pupils in England.
She has been working with the Welsh organization Diversity and Anti-Racism Professional Learning (DARPL) for the past three years. “It's amazing because there's a lot of appetite,” he said, adding that there was buy-in from faculty because “it's not only mandatory, but there's a reward culture … it's recognized from the top down.”
“In the UK, it's still down to what we're trying to do.”
A spokeswoman for the Department for Education said the government had recently launched a review of curriculum and assessment, which would “consider how we can ensure young people have access to a broad, balanced and cutting-edge curriculum that reflects the complexities and diversity of our society. “
