Resources for Teachers and School Leaders
Below you’ll find a range of resources that correspond to the key areas examined in the study. We encourage you to judge which resources may be best suited for your context based on the findings we share with you. Click the tabs below to find out more.
The Picture Yourself KS3 and KS4 resource supports teachers and young people to use heritage to develop oracy and public speaking skills (Royal Museums Greenwich), while Education Scotland have produced the You Decide resource for supporting political literacy.
This free online course on Democratic Education guides teachers on educating about democracy and educating through democracy.
The internet/social media is a key source for young people to learn about social and political issues. The Be Internet Citizens Programme supports school and young people with their media literacy, critical thinking and being digital citizens. However, as David Buckingham argues, individualistic solutions to problems of fake news are not enough and media reform is critical to the health of democracy.
Read about Hart’s (1992) Ladder of Participation the Lundy Model of Participation and this UCL report on forms of participation, to reflect on how your school engages young people, especially around decision-making in the school.
Kirshner and Jefferson (2015) outline five principles for engaging youth participation in decision-making in the context of ‘turning around’ a school.
You can check out guidance on setting up a student School Council from the Dept of Education in Northern Ireland and from the Irish Second-Level Students’ Union (ISSU).
Taking a whole school approach
The National Education Union have created a comprehensive framework for taking an anti-racist approach across the whole school.
Addressing nuanced or sensitive social/political issues
Engagement with social and political issues, including those related to race and faith, requires nuance and sensitivity. There are a range of resources which support teachers to address issues relating to race and faith equality, including the Facing History & Ourselves series, the Learning for Justice ‘Let’s Talk!’ guide, guidance on teaching controversial issues from Oxfam, the Northern Ireland Curriculum Council (CEA) and Professor Judith Pace’s Framework. The US-based Visions of Education Podcast also has a range of interviews including topics such as teacher political disclosure, unplanned controversial issues and contained risk-taking.
Addressing local/national histories
A great way to engage meaningfully with protected characteristics of race and faith is to address the histories and specific issues experienced by minoritised communities. It is important that historic and current experiences are addressed as real-world issues that affect the everyday lives of minoritised young people and their families. Lots of organisations have created resources that address the histories of minoritised communities in different parts of England. Check out for example:
Birmingham: We Came to Live in Birmingham by Birmingham Race Impact Group; Teachers’ pack for interpreting the Ikon Gallery/Migrant Voice/University of Birmingham Exhibition ‘Vanley Burke: A Gift to Birmingham’; Birmingham Museums Windrush Generation Oral Histories;
Bristol: Bristol Museums Migration Teacher Resource; and Black History resource
Liverpool: The Sankofa Project ‘Exploring Liverpool’s Black Experience’
London: Lewisham Council Black History 365 events; Museum of Croydon Black History resources; Museum of London’s Black Londoners through Time;
Across Britain: Check out the #TeachRaceMigrationEmpire crowdsourced range of resources; The Colonial Countryside Project (for Years 5-8); The Black Curriculum project free resources on aspects of Black British history; Made with Many resource list on Black History and Culture; Jewish Museum classroom resources; BBC Teach South Asian Heritage Month Resources; British Library South Asian History resource; Windrush Foundation KS2 & KS3 lessons; Reflecting on statues and the UK’s colonial past; Our Migration Story.
Zinn Education Project is a US-based example of teaching ‘the people’s history’ in response to efforts to erase realities of racism and other forms of violence from history education.
Booklists
There are a variety of booklists available that offer great entry points to discussing issues of race, faith and community through the curriculum: BookTrust (for Black History Month); TeachFirst ‘Missing Pages’ Booklist; Penguin (Incomplete) Lit in Colour Booklist;
The Association for Citizenship Teaching has a KS4 scheme on Being a Changemaker in My Local Community.
This free online course from YouthinFront provides a starting point for understanding and supporting student activism. It is US-based, so the social and legal context is different, but most of the content will be highly relevant to exploring anti-racism.
Scratch is a free online coding community from Massachusetts Institute of Technology that supports young people to programme stories, games and animations. You can see how young people have used Scratch to respond to Juneteenth, the day when the last enslaved Americans were old they were free.
Art is a key medium through which people, young and not so young, express their social and political views. Strike a Light have shared some guidance on co-creating campaigns with young people using art, and have created a performance on climate change. The Center for Artistic Activism has a range of guides on developing artistic activism, and the Youth Activist Art Archive also demonstrates a variety of ways young people have used art to address a variety of important social issues.
What Kids Can Do is a US-based archived website full of resources to share the message of what children and young people can do with the right support.
You can support young people to learn about anti-racism and other forms of work for equity in This Book is Anti-Racist by Tiffany Jewell.
This free online course from the Global Campus of Human Rights provides an in-depth look into questions of children’s (under 18s) rights and how they relate to rapidly emerging forms of digital technology.
An ecology of warm, caring, reciprocal relationships amongst staff and students is crucial to supporting youth participation and self-expression. When relationships are damaged, there is a need to restore them for the whole ecology/community’s sake, rather than for the sake of a few individuals. The Restorative Resources Educator Toolkit foregrounds relationships based on equity and accountability rather than on the threat of punishment and the enforcement of hierarchy.
Maslaha have produced a Radical Safeguarding Guide that is based on principles of transformative justice.
Nishant Shah argues a pedagogy of care is crucial to respond to the glorification of hatred and violence in speech and in practice, taking group assessment as an example of care in practice.
Hope Not Hate have developed resources designed to address the signs of hate and extremist propaganda with young people. This includes material on addressing racism and misogyny.
AGENDA is a resource for education practitioners to help children and young people to make positive relationships matter in their school and community. It focuses primarily on issues of gender and sexual equality and rights but the approaches have broader relevance.
The PSHE Association have developed resources on addressing misogyny, toxic masculinity and social media influence.