This month marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of the groundbreaking Swann report “Education for All”. The first of its kind, the report was commissioned to examine disparities in educational attainment and experiences among ethnic minority pupils, and made recommendations to tackle institutional racism in the education system. The inquiry, led by Lord Swann, was launched in response to a number of campaigns against racism in education, in particular the high-profile scandal of educationally subnormal—ESN—schools that disproportionately removed higher numbers of black Caribbean children from mainstream education settings, and wrongly labelled them educationally subnormal.
A mixture of education policy and racist attitudes was responsible for this shocking discrimination. The 1960s was a time of rising immigration, with the post-war British empire’s invitation to the Windrush generation of workers from the Caribbean and its other colonies to rebuild Britain. It was also a time of significant racist backlash, with the overt racism of Enoch Powell and the notions of racial superiority that gained traction in the political mainstream. These ideas worked their way into our national education policy, with the aim of creating and maintaining a two-tier labour force and a deliberately under-educated black population to fill all the menial jobs that white Brits did not want.
This significant miscarriage of justice took place in the 1960s and 1970s, and saw hundreds of black—mostly Caribbean—children wrongly sent to schools that were meant for pupils with severe physical and mental disabilities. These schools had existed since the 1940s, due to the provision, under the Education Act 1944, of appropriate schools for pupils with severe mental or physical disabilities. But by the late 1960s, almost 30% of pupils in ESN schools in London were black immigrant children, compared with 15% in mainstream schools.
It was clear that decisions were being made by teachers, educational psychologists and local education authorities to place these children in ESN schools for reasons other than mental or physical disabilities. Although parents were aware that their children were being forced to struggle against a racist system, most were isolated and not given the information that they needed to make informed decisions about their child’s education. It was not until an Inner London Education Authority report was leaked that the true extent of this shocking discrimination was revealed.
Grenadian educator Bernard Coard took the initiative to write and publish the groundbreaking pamphlet “How the West Indian child is made educationally subnormal in the British school system”, making the leaked ILEA information accessible to parents and communities. Mass community mobilisation as a result of Coard’s pamphlet inspired parents and community organisations to campaign against the now undeniable institutional racism in British schools. That forced the Government to respond, and these schools were eventually shut down in the early 1980s.
Published in March 1985, Swann’s report confirmed Coard’s analysis: the persistence of racist stereotypes, biased IQ tests, a deep misunderstanding of culture and language, and biases in teacher expectations, disciplinary practices and curriculum content were creating significant barriers to education for black children. It challenged the racist myths that black children were less intelligent than their white counterparts, and recognised instead that the structural racism embedded in the British education system was disadvantaging them. Inadequate support for pupils with English as a second language, a lack of diversity in the curriculum, and a significant disconnect between schools and parents from ethnic minority backgrounds were identified as further barriers to black children achieving their full academic potential.