Chapter Five: Prevailing Against the Odds: The Challenges and Resilience of Teachers of Colour

This chapter focusses on the regional experiences of the BAME teacher workforce, their accounts of their initial training, their early and mid-careers, and their profound frustrations with a lack of advancement and promotion for themselves but also for many of their BAME colleagues. Experiences of initial training were very mixed, but there were plenty of instances of discrimination and prejudice, particularly in very white schools setting, a particular feature if the region. They especially criticise the remarkably low levels of BAME colleagues at Senior Leadership level and they see this as endemic in the wider problem of inadequate representation. Even in certain schools where there is a reasonable relationship between the number of BAME students and the number of BAME staff, there is then a very significant lack of BAME colleagues above middle management. Participants discuss the complexities of being a role model with most embracing the position as valuable and necessary. They feel their workloads are more demanding than white colleagues partly because they feel they have extra to prove and because they take on more, including the role model’s demands. There is an argument for special support and mentoring for BAME teachers to move them on to senior leadership roles to address the representation problem. The chapter includes one participant from a Traveller background whose story adds a powerful additional dimension to the notion of being from an ethnic minority.