A personal view of the third conference on the education of Black children, held recently in London. Nearly 1,000 people filled the halls of the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre to participate in the third conference on the achievement of Black pupils in London schools on 11 September 2004. The conference was dubbed ‘reaching for
Theme: Managed migration
Resource for Black organisations published
The National Institute of Adult and Continuing Education (NIACE) has published Fail to Plan: Plan to Fail, a toolkit to help black voluntary and community organisations obtain funding. Lenford White, the author of the toolkit and NIACE’s Race Equality Development Officer, believes that the toolkit will help Black organisations by ‘suggesting the necessary ingredients of
Plans to close CRE library
Librarians and race relations workers in London are shocked at proposals to close the library at the Commission for Racial Equality to members of the public. According to current plans, management has allocated no funds to the library service in the budget, current staff members are to be redeployed and the library itself is to
Protests against separation call for Roma children
Nobel Prize-winning writer Günter Grass is among the first 700 signatories to a petition calling for the resignation of Eric Van der Linden, the EU ambassador to Slovakia. A month ago, Van der Linden called for Roma (Gypsy) children to be forcibly separated from their parents during the week and put in boarding schools. Speaking
Tribute to an ‘African rebel’
Four years ago this week, thousands of people lined the streets of Haringey, north London, to follow the last journey of one of Britain’s most outspoken political leaders. Now, an archive has opened dedicated to remembering the life and work of Bernie Grant MP. The seventy cubic feet of items held in the archive cover
Home from Home
Save the Children and Salusbury WORLD, a refugee children’s project based in Brent, London, have produced this guidance and resource pack for the welcome and inclusion of asylum-seeker and refugee children and families in schools. Around 4.5 per cent of school children in Greater London come from a refugee or asylum-seeker background. The policy of
Trial and Error: learning about racism through citizenship education
Imagine that the adults of the world have decided that the best way to deal with the planet’s problems is to ask young people how to solve them. What would they say about racism? That is the premise behind this set of information sheets and teachers’ notes, distributed on a CDROM, for use in key
Common Ground: a resource for youth workers
Aik Saath, a Slough-based youth group which was formed to reduce conflict between Asian youths, has produced a 24-page booklet and 8-minute video which aims to train young people in resolving disputes in a non-violent way. Aik Saath (‘Together As One’) was established in 1998 following a period of heightened tension and violence between different
Black and Minority Ethnic teachers miss out on performance pay rises
Is there discrimination against Black and Minority Ethnic teachers in performance-related pay? In September 2000, the government launched a performance-based pay rise package for teachers. Experienced teachers could apply for a £2,000 pay rise and, if successful, move to a higher pay scale. Teachers had to complete a form indicating how they met eight professional
England’s ‘ghetto’ schools
An analysis by researchers at Bristol University has found that secondary schools in Oldham, Blackburn, Bradford, Birmingham and Luton have the highest levels of segregation between pupils of different ethnic groups. The research, based on the annual census for schools in England in 2001, used two indices to measure segregation. A ‘dissimilarity index’ ranked the