‘A generation of Black children’ abandoned by cuts'

Rob Berkeley national director for the Runnymede Trust has delivered a devastating broadside against the ‘Government's inattention to persistent race inequality’.

Speaking after the research findings from National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers; NASUWT, Berkeley blasted:

This Government's inattention to persistent racial inequality makes a lie of the claim that 'we are all in this together.’ The failure to protect the progress that schools, teachers and young people from minority ethnic communities have made over recent years risks leaving another generation of young black and Asian people unable to maximise their potential and their contribution to society.

In particular Berkeley and the Teachers union cited the withdrawal of the Ethnic Minority Achievement Grant in Sept 2011. The Union argued this decision is

having a major adverse impact on the help schools can give to ethnic minority pupil.

This news will not be welcomed by the Secretary of State for Education who today unveiled the first wave of new ‘Free Schools’. This policy initiative too has not had an easy ride. To date, and in spite of a large number of applications only one Black consortium was given the right to start a new school, that was to be headed by Tory favorite Katherine Birbalsingh and educationalist Tony Sewell. Their plans to open in 2012 have met fierce opposition in Lambeth and in Wandsworth. They still plan to open next year.

Whilst education remains so politicized it is too often our children who become the victims of a system which is failing them.

Simon Woolley