I felt for Chichi, especially if she wanted to do well and was excluded at a crucial time. I couldn’t believe it when she wasn’t allowed to go to the revision class either. If she was to do a detention I would have asked her to do it at a time when it didn’t interfere with her learning.

Having said that, I did feel that she wasn’t very respectful and lacked the expected deference to her teachers. It was as though she treated them as she would treat a friend. We do tell our children that we are equal, but it then turns out that “some are more equal than others!”

The teachers did change their attitude when Chichi was crying and showing more vulnerability and less self assurance. At the end of the day they all wanted the same thing, that Chichi did well. She just had to follow the rules and respect her teachers.

I didn’t read it as the teachers being racist either. We mustn’t forget that she’s been at the school for a while and that her teachers have known her for a lot longer than we have by watching what the director chose to show us.

Salsa

The reason she was excluded was because she was involved in a playground incident where a teacher got hit. DG

Not racist but maybe guilty of racial stereotyping?
Who knows what the teacher's views are and she certainly isn't going to reveal them on camera. That teacher IMO is just a symptom of what's is wrong in secondary education

I couldn't tell from the footage, but we all know that there are all sorts of unconscious biases.

My son is convinced that white students got treated differently by one of their teachers. They even did "experiments" by arriving late as a group of white students and seeing how they didn't get told off and then getting a group of non-white students to do the same and watch how they got a detention. Did they report it? No, but they were all united. We don't know what goes on in people's minds and you may be a lot more perceptive than I was when watching the programme. What did transpire was that Chichi "had form" and maybe the teachers had that in mind. Moreover, it is difficult to help someone who comes across as defiant. They did soften when she showed how worried she was about her learning.

Salsa

Oh dear, we are approaching the 'I don't see colour stage, aren't we

Could you please elaborate?

I believe that we should be "colour blind" and treat people as people without following any stereotypes. No matter whether these are positive or negative.

A Chinese student may be expected to have a tiger parent at home and people may believe that this is why he/she obtains good results.

My son's friend is of Chinese heritage and actually studies a lot because he loves learning. However, people keep asking him if his parents are making him do it!

Salsa
Edited the typo!

Loving that image.

I began my teaching career in a Reception class in north London. There were 23 children in the class and they were pretty much from 23 different ethnic backgrounds. Almost the first thing I had them do was to paint a self portrait for us to put up on the walls. I was absolutely horrified when I got 23 portraits of white children! Not one of them thought to see themselves differently, it was very shocking to me. So the second thing we did was to discuss how these pictures didn't look quite right, and then what we could do to improve them. The next task was to teach the children about mixing paints to make their own skin tone. I ended up with 23 gorgeous portraits - all different - and a visit from the LEA advisor who used it as an example of good practice after one of the parents rang to report me (in a positive way!). This was in the 1980s and it makes me terribly sad to think that there might still be a white bias in some education circles.

My children went to a very ethnically mixed primary school where they seem to see themselves as equals. They may have made their pictures ignoring the skin colour whilst in reception. However, they became aware of race and religion later on when they were in year 5 and were discussing apartheid. The teacher separated the class and made two groups: white and non-white children. He then explained how the non-white group would be treated. After that lesson, one of my son's friends, who was of a mixed white and black heritage, was very distraught and started worrying about something he had not thought about before. The teacher was illustrating a point and full of good intentions, but I wonder if he knew the deep impact it had on this boy.

Salsa

In my opinion, Y5 is too late to 'become aware of race and religion', and far too young to have an Apartheid-style experience foisted on them. I imagine that most of the children - white or otherwise - would have found that upsetting and on the face of it it sounds inappropriate to me. I find it hard to believe though that a 9 year old had never thought about his skin colour before - the little ones I taught were very happy to have theirs recognised as it was at a time when there was a lot of tokenism in reading schemes etc and very few images in school materials which acknowledged difference. I believe that children should be comfortable with their own heritage from an early age, which does not mean 'whiting out' images they either see or create and does mean learning to accept difference without prejudice. I should add that my own children are mixed race, though not visibly so.