https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3hw3Ku6PXI
I’m excited to tell you I will be doing a talk at Khembe’s Return to Your Roots on Sunday 5th May. The event will be held at the H Suite, Edgbaston, Birmingham.
The theme of the talk is “Uncovering Autism & ADHD: The Black Child’s Perspective, and it promises to be a stimulating and educational talk. People who’ve experienced my #happyinschool project talks, know, I’m not about talk for talk’s sake. I’m about taking action, discovering solutions and activating change.
Khembe’s Return to Your Roots is an event celebrating the Black experience: culture, hair, beauty, well-being encompassing and highlighting the more positive attributes of the black family. These are exciting times: times to take a sharp look at ourselves as human beings, as social beings and as parents. I will be urging parents to take particular interest in how we can best equip our children for an education system that despite firm efforts, still contains systemic bias against significant groups of pupils: those with special educational needs, and those of Caribbean heritage. These are not merely opinions, statistics from the Department for Education evidence that these biases do exist. (2017/18).
In 2007, a pamphlet called ‘Challenging Exclusions, Handbook for Parents’, was published by Birmingham’s Partnership for Achievement, set up to ensure that Birmingham’s Caribbean community was achieving their full potential socially, economically through educational attainment. One of the findings from this study conducted by the then DfES (Department for Education & Skills) was that a disproportionate number of Black Caribbean and or Black of mixed heritage pupils, were excluded from school.
I have a copy of this pamphlet, in my extensive library of SEN and child development literature. Part of the reason I have a copy is that it was co-authored by my late mother, Cas Walker, a huge champion of education equality and diversity. The apple, as they say, rarely falls too far from the tree!
© Suzy Rowland