Why, Still, Is the Black Caribbean Child Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System?

• In Event: Movement in Black Education Studies: Futures for the Field

Abstract

The release of British filmmaker Steve McQueen’s critically acclaimed anthology series, Small Axe in November, 2020, brought wide-ranging international attention to the complexities of Black education in mid-to-late 20th century Britain. The fifth installment in the series, ‘Education,’ tells a painfully haunting story of Kingsley Smith--a Black Caribbean boy disadvantaged socially and academically in a London comprehensive school. Kingsley is disciplined by teachers for mischief that his white and Asian peers get away with, bullied by some of his peers in class due to the limits of his reading abilities, pushed out of the school in his catchment area, bussed to a school purportedly for children with extreme behavioral and psycho-social problems. Eventually, Kingsley is mislabeled as ‘educationally subnormal’ by school officials--an official term used in British educational policy from the 1940s to the 1970s to refer disproportionately to immigrant and second-generation Black Caribbean and African children with learning and linguistic differences.

Small Axe’s cinematic exploration of Black Caribbean people historically labeled as “educationally subnormal” in Britain takes its cue from educational research that examined the ways in which Britain’s anti-Black socio-political context contributed to the social construction of Black Caribbean pupils’ educational disadvantage (Mirza 2009; Rampton 1981). Chief among these works is Bernard Coard’s How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System (1971). Coard (1971a) argued that Black Caribbean children were constructed as subnormal through British schools’ misuse of culturally biased assessment tests, the misallocation of Black Caribbean and other immigrant minorities to educationally subnormal schools, and the misrepresentation of Caribbean cultures, communities and languages as not merely different, but deficient.

In this paper, I argue that How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Subnormal is just as relevant today as when it was first published on May 6, 1971. This continued relevance is revealing of the intransigence of the anti-Black institutional racism that stymies Black Caribbean schooling. 50 years after the publication of this canonical text, Black Caribbean pupils in Britain are still regularly framed in discursive terms as an ‘underachieving group’. And although educational research has built upon Coard’s work to further document the causes and consequences of Black Caribbean underachievement in the British school system, there has been insufficient improvement in the educational experiences and outcomes of Black Caribbean young people at the secondary and tertiary levels (Alexander and Shankley, 2020; Gillborn 2013). Black Caribbean pupils are awarded comparatively low grades on General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) and A-level assessments, frequently overrepresented in special education programmes (Gillborn 2016), disproportionately allocated to lower-ranked and less academically rigorous classes in schools (Strand, 2012) and underrepresented at Russell group universities (Bhopal 2018). Such indicators are usually proffered without due attention to the historical, political and institutional policy arrangements that influence these results (Mirza, 2009). That was Coard’s central argument in 1971--one that remains relevant and significant in 2021.

Author

• Derron Wallace, Brandeis University