Parallel Session 2
Convenor: Andy Goodwyn
Discussant: Uvanney Maylor
This symposium reports on a regional research project, with a number of interrelated strands, seeking to investigate and understand the motivations and career trajectories of members of the BAME communities in the South East Midlands. It also includes a complementary study of the career trajectory of a BAME police professional who was a pioneer representative of BAME role models. The research was qualitative and the findings confirm many national issues but provide some original insights into the particular significance of regionality.
BAME regional reflections on the national situation
Samson Tsegay (Anglia Ruskin University)
England is an ethnically diverse country (ONS, 2022) with 34.5% of pupils from minority ethnic groups (GOV.UK, 2022). However, in 2021 only 13.94% of teachers in England were from a minority ethnic group, and these teachers are unevenly distributed across the country such that 46% of schools have no minority ethnic teachers (Tereshchenko, Mills, & Bradbury, 2020), whilst in London there is an over-representation compared with an under-representation in the East of England, where over 20% of pupils are from minority ethnic communities (Haque, 2017; GOV.UK.2022). Further, less than 10% of school leadership positions are held by minority ethnic teachers, who like teachers are clustered in London (Department for Education, 2022).
Minority ethnic teachers not only contribute to improving the educational experiences and future aspirations of minority ethnic students (Lindsay & Hart, 2017), but are essential in meeting the needs of all students (Worth et al., 2022). Yet, minority ethnic teacher recruitment and retention remains challenging (DfE, 2018; Worth et al., 2022).
Investigating BAME teacher careers within a regional framing
Andy Goodwyn (University of Bedfordshire)
This paper reports on the teacher, teaching assistant and senior leader strands of the project. The interviews were semi-structured and supported the participants to reflect on their motivations to become teachers, their early career experiences and their later success in the profession and views about how to improve BAME interest in becoming a teacher and then developing a successful career. The themes that emerge resonate with existing research into BAME teacher experiences about frequent feelings of isolation, critical incidents of prejudice and injustice and a strong sense of a desperate need for more BAME leaders in schools. Important regional issues emerge about the need for mentorship and support, the role of BAME networks in fostering career development and the complicated nature of learning from role models and then becoming a role model.
The experiences of minority ethnic student teachers in ITE in the East of England
Steve Connolly (Anglia Ruskin University) & Uvanney Maylor (University of Bedfordshire)
In 2018 the government (DfE, 2018) set out its intentions to increase ethnic diversity in the teacher workforce. Despite having aspirations to become a teacher (Worth et al., 2022), minority ethnic teacher recruitment and retention remains challenging (NASUWT, 2017; Gov 2022). Through a series of focus groups of student teachers, this paper examines reasons given by minority ethnic student teachers for entering initial teacher education (ITE) in the East of England, their experiences of ITE (within their course, including assessment processes and during school placements) and the influence of their cultural identity on their wider development as teachers and the extent to which they consider themselves as having long careers in teaching. The findings demonstrate that while being highly motivated to become teachers, the entrenched nature of racism (institutional and individual) encountered (especially during school placements), serve to undermine minority ethnic teacher retention in the East of England. Moreover, it highlights the need for race and culture to be foregrounded in ITE and within school practice.
Embodying racial history; a signifying life after Windrush
Oli Belas (University of Bedfordshire)
Our reflective analysis is an academic supplement to a co-authored memoir project, that of Bedfordshire’s first Black male police officer, whose biography is embedded in the regional and national history of the Windrush Generation. His story provides insights into the challenges of developing a career in the face of institutional racial prejudice. Our reflective analysis considers the educational importance of memoir as a mode or genre of, and thus a way of “doing,” social history, of making it accessible and communicable to learners: this at a time when the educational significance of Windrush, colonialism, and empire are still contested (e.g. Gov.UK 2021). This is memoir as educational “vehicle” for social history. We also consider – in the ethical and phenomenological spirit suggested by the likes of Aldridge (2019), Belas (2023), English, and others – the collectivist experience of life-writing as auto-educational and, therefore, auto-poetic process rather than product, a mode of education understood as bildung.