Compared to the proportion of Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) students in our schools, there is a relative shortage of BAME teachers and an even bigger shortage of BAME leaders. The figures speak for themselves. While 28.5% of primary pupils and 24.2% of secondary pupils in the UK (more in urban areas) are from a BAME background, that is true of only 6.1% of headteachers (Hermitt, 2015). What sort of messages do these figures send out to our society and particularly to young people? Does our education system harbour unthinking discrimination? Are we really tapping the potential of all our teaching force?
- We need diverse role models for our young people to aspire to.
- We need to work towards real equity in promotion processes and the elimination of discrimination and unconscious racism.
- We need to ensure that we are not missing out on potential school leaders just because they do not fit the dominant pattern of the white middle-class male.
The government have recognised that there is a need to encourage diversity among senior leaders in schools and there has been a series of grants for schools to bid for in order to make this easier, e.g. the Leadership equality and diversity fund for school-led projects. National and regional initiatives are extremely valuable: they are necessary but not sufficient in bringing about change in this area. Research findings help us understand and scope the nature of the problem and its causes (see Coleman, 2018), but we need our individual schools to be aware of the issues and help to contribute to changing the landscape of leadership.
There is already good practice in many schools, and our research on equity in schools (Lumby and Coleman, 2016) identified some of the ways in which individual schools have worked towards fairness for everyone in the school community. There is never one recipe for change and improvement that suits every institution, but what does appear to be vital is the establishment of an ethos where values and unconscious assumptions are examined. Within this ethos, schools can ensure that there is an underpinning of appropriate systems and policies, that there is careful recruitment to enable the provision of role models and that professional development opportunities are truly available to all staff, along with mentoring and networking opportunities.
School Ethos
Establishing the context and atmosphere in which people work is the most important aspect of school leadership. Ensuring an ethos in the school that is about respect for all and valuing everyone provides the circumstances that foster individual development, allowing people to aspire and to reach their potential. It may be a long and on-going process to achieve such an ethos, but there will not be equity for staff or pupils without it. The tone is set from the top. In a study of Muslim teachers aspiring to leadership positions it was stated:
The role of the head teacher and senior management teams, as the main agents in establishing harmonious relationships and equality of opportunity throughout the school community, appears to be critical. A lack of cultural and/or religious understanding on the part of the head teacher/leaders was often cited by respondents as a cause for teachers’ unhappiness in a school (Shah and Shaikh, 2010, p. 26).
Individual leaders are important, but the convictions of senior staff must be shared, perhaps starting with staff development sessions that focus on identifying the shared and common values that all staff are working towards. However, examining and changing values is not something that can be done once and for all and then ignored. Instead, the values need to become part of the working fabric of the school. In one primary school I visited, the most recent iteration of the values had been undertaken by the pupils and reference to the values and principles on which the school operated were visible in classroom displays. The head teacher of a secondary school informally expressed some of the values shared in their school: