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Thoughts and ideas on education, culture, psychology and social science to create lasting and evolving change from our academics, students, alumni and other brave thinkers. Podcasts brought to you by UCL Institute of Education (IOE), the world's leading centre for education and social science research, courses and teaching, and a faculty of University College London (UCL).
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Hi and welcome
to part of our series on anti-Black racism
being curated by the equality,
Inclusion and Diversity Group.
For CPA.
So my name is Alison Wiggins.
My pronouns are she and her,
and I am the subject
lead for the PGCE Social Sciences at IOE.
I am also an anti-racist educator.
I'm a secondary school teacher.
And I'm in the middle of my doctorate
in education,
and I'm really pleased
to have my two guests with me here.
So I'd like to welcome Kate Williams.
Please introduce yourself.
Kate. Hi, I'm Kate Williams.
I'm a teacher also.
I'm here today because I'm Ruby's mum,
but I'm also doing
the same course as Alison,
so I'm doing my doctorate as well.
The topic is Afro hair discrimination.
Thank you so much,
Kate, and welcome. Ruby.
Would you like to introduce yourself?
I'm here
because I got told my hair was too big.
I've just graduated
from Manchester
and I've just started my graduate job.
Amazing.
Thank you so much for joining us.
We really, really appreciate your time.
So we're going to spend some time together
kind of talking about the specific form
of anti-Black racism that you have
experienced specifically and as a family.
That's kind of part of the work that I do.
It's part of my role as a teacher educator
to make sure that the student teachers,
who are going into the profession,
fully understand the responsibilities
that they have around
anti racism and addressing all issues
of discrimination in a way
that is confident and well informed.
But it's also Black History Month.
So happy Black History Month to everybody
who's listening and to both of you.
So what have you done or
what might you do for Black History Month?
Bearing in mind we recognise
black history is 365 days a year.
But in this month,
we usually get more of an opportunity
to celebrate and learn about it.
So. Okay, can I start with you?
So I was fortunate to teach a lesson
about Benjamin Zephaniah
and Bob Marley together.
So I got to use the word over
stand in a lesson, which was great.
Okay, that sounds amazing.
Thank you so much.
What about you, Ruby?
I've been trying to be kind of selective
with the things I do
just because it's difficult to sometimes
tell my story, bring up old thoughts.
But I'm doing this interview,
and I've just been
helping to amplify other voices
and working with the Halo collective.
Amazing. Thanks so much for sharing that.
And something that I've done
is, as you have,
Ruby has been quite selective
about the things that I engage with.
But I've also handed the responsibility
for the Black History Month over to people
who are not racialized as black
because it's everybody's history.
So what I'm trying to do is empower people
who don't usually get the chance
to organise things like this.
To actually be part of the organisation.
And that's actually been really,
really successful.
So we're going to go to the Black
Cultural Archives in Brixton,
on a trip with my group.
And they've also found
some, black art exhibitions
that we're going to engage
with, which is brilliant.
So kind of leading from that question
to my next question to both of you is,
why do you think it's important,
that we celebrate black History Month?
And what do you think schools should be
doing to celebrate this year's theme,
which is, reclaiming Narratives?
Like you said earlier, black
history is all of our history,
and it's something
that should be all year round.
So it should be spread
across the curriculum in different ways.
But unfortunately,
the way the national curriculum is,
the pressure that we're under as teachers,
it becomes very heavy
about literacy and numeracy,
and we're focussed on the, caught up.
So Black History Month for me
gives us sort of explicit
time frame in the academic year
where a lot of schools
do something at least.
And so I think that's why it's important
until it is embedded for me,
we need to keep it there and hopefully
one day we won't need to there.
I think it's important that schools
focus on the positive of the narratives.
Amazing.
Thanks so much, Ruby. What do you think?
Yeah, I think that a lot of the time
it can be quite virtue signalling.
Look what we're doing,
look what we're doing.
But I think, as my mum said at the moment,
there isn't enough throughout the year.
So it is important
that we do have the time dedicated to,
even if it's not necessarily
something big being done.
At least there is something being done
within the schools because children
deserve to feel celebrated.
They deserve to have that time to know
that they can be proud
and reclaim their own stories,
narratives, reclaim
their parents,
their grandparents narratives.
I think it's really important. Yeah.
So I think it's very important
that schools try
and have positive narratives
around black history.
So, as you said earlier,
it should be embedded
throughout the curriculum
throughout the academic year.
But we all know that doesn't happen
in schools.
You know, it's busy.
There's lots of demands on teachers time.
And unfortunately,
sometimes the subjects which aren't
core subjects
can slip into the background.
So I think Black History Month
is, an explicit time where teachers
can celebrate if they have black
or mixed race pupils in their class.
Even if they don't,
they can learn about people
such as Benjamin Zephaniah,
who died last year.
They can use his poetry
with the children in the class.
And I think, until we can honestly say
that black history, which is all of our
history, is across the year
and across the curriculum, we need to keep
Black History Month in place.
Thank you so much.
And I completely agree with you.
Until we don't need it
any more, we need it.
And it's the same for All Awareness month.
So if we think about Women's History Month
and LGBTQIa Awareness Month
and Pride Month, like until we don't need
those awareness days, we have to use them
and harness the power that they have
to kind of uncover and enable people
to recognise the interconnectedness
of all of our histories,
which is unfortunately obscured in
lots of the national curriculum.
So, yeah, thank you so much for that.
So, Ruby, I'm going to come to you now.
And can you talk to us a little bit
about your experiences
of racialized discrimination
while you were in school?
Yeah.
I mean, if I tell the whole story
will be here all day.
But, when I was 14,
I went to school with my afro,
about as I did many times
throughout my school.
My time at school,
I went in with my afro out
and was approached and told that my hair
was getting a bit too big and I
would need to do something about it
because it wasn't complying
with the uniform policy.
I went home, told my parents
they were like, well,
obviously
it must be like a weird little joke.
Also doesn't realise that it's offensive.
Went in the next day with my afro out
as I usually did, and was told no,
you're breaking the uniform policy.
If you do this again,
you will be sent home.
And that was like the start of a two year
being at the school battle.
But then onwards, up until I was 18,
it was going on
legally behind the scenes in the school.
I would, if I would go in sometimes
with my hair and like a big bond,
I'd be told maybe a bit too big to day,
maybe breaking the rules.
I would have a teacher
pull me out of a classroom
to take me and tell me
I think it's going a bit too big.
Let's do something about it.
I once had a teacher
that took me into a changing room
and actually, like, physically
tried to wrap my bun to make it smaller,
in the guise
of helping
me to make sure I didn't get in trouble.
Which I was 14, and this was the teacher
I'd known since I was like 11 years old.
So I very much trusted her.
And she was a black woman.
And I thought, oh, she just doesn't
want me to get in trouble.
But as soon as she told my mum,
my mum was like,
how many white kids
have you had your hands in today?
Like, this is out of order.
And it just went on for a long time
at school where
and my confidence in myself
ruined my opinion on school.
I didn't want to go in anymore.
I had really bad anxiety.
I'd have panic attacks because I would be.
I would walk into school
and have a teacher waiting most,
most of the time, one specific teacher
waiting at the door for me
to walk in to basically judge
whether I was allowed to learn that day.
And it would be a public thing.
Everybody would be aware,
oh, Ruby's has a bit big today.
She's going to get in trouble.
And it shattered my confidence in myself
and I just didn't want to go in anymore.
I really appreciate you sharing that
with us.
And, Kate, I know how hard it must be.
And, Kate, I would now want you to tell us
how you felt and reacted,
when all of this was going on with Ruby.
Even after however many years, it's
still really hard to hear
you say the story.
I think first shock.
As I said earlier,
I'm a, I'm a teacher myself.
I trained to be a teacher here at the Ioy
and I did a module called Wider
Context in Primary Education.
I don't know if that's still going on.
The PGCE.
And I was trained that
you need to look at a child
as a whole person,
and you need to look at your class
as a collection of individuals.
I've raised
my children in Hackney,
from the north of England myself,
where it wasn't a very diverse area,
but Hackney,
you know, is a very diverse area.
And I suppose I was very naive
that I, I knew I'd have to prepare,
Ruby and her brother for, for racism.
Like when we went back up to visit people
where I'm from.
But I didn't think I would have
to prepare them
for it in a school in Hackney.
And maybe I didn't enough, I don't know,
it was a bit of a shock, wasn't it?
I think we weren't expecting it.
How did I feel?
Angry.
Angry?
I think the thing
that sort of really stuck out for me,
which still burns when I think about it,
was when we talked about the fact
that there were white girl.
There's a white girl sitting next to her
with her hair down to her hips,
which when she was leaning down,
her hair was flopping,
going on to Ruby as, had moves around.
That Ruby's hair was literally no bigger
than yours is right now.
I mean, this is a really good visual
representation.
We don't need to use that picture of you.
We've got, you know,
Ruby's hair was literally at yours,
maybe with less movement.
And it felt that they
they wanted her
to put her hair away for me.
It felt very dehumanising.
So one of the words used
a lot was distracting.
It could make contact with other children.
It can block their view of the whiteboard
and like five foot four,
I'd be sitting behind boys.
I just have their growth spots
and just hit six foot and like
we just had to work around it.
But for some reason, my hair
that grew out of my head the way it was,
like they just
couldn't seem to get their head
around the fact that that's how it looked.
And I was once told
I wouldn't care if your hair was blue
as long as you made it a bit smaller.
And it's like, how can it be okay
for me to chemically alter my hair,
but not wear it
the way it naturally goes out of my head?
And I think that's the thing.
I think the school itself,
it wasn't, a strict school.
It wasn't a school that we'd had to fight
to get into it wasn't a school
with a waiting list or, you know, a
run of the mill normal Hackney school.
And the fact that they would let
blue hair,
I mean, like any other style,
their only other policy was about,
children with fringes making sure
that a fringe didn't go in your eye.
That was the only other policy.
So the children could wear their hair
however they liked.
But it was just this
with weird thing about
Afro hair, and they actually put that
in the policy as well.
They actually specified for home
the policy, which is first all hair,
including bands,
must be of reasonable size and length.
And that's why
it was such a strong legal case.
And that's why
the Equality and Human Rights Commission,
wanted to push
this case forward once the school stopped,
it didn't cooperate.
Because it's
that it's such a clear cut case
that having it in the public
eye will educate other schools
and hopefully these trainee teachers
that are going to see this video, that
to make a child feel less than other
children, to make a child feel that
she no longer belongs somewhere,
that she's been for three years.
You know, I wanted her to move schools
when when it when it was made clear
to me in the beginning,
I'm going to say the head teacher
is not going to change his mind.
When that was made clear to me,
I was like, you know, let's just move
schools.
This is, you know,
this is not going to end pretty.
But Ruby was adamant
that she didn't want to move schools
because she had all her friends.
I mean, most of the it was a feeder school
from her primary school where local.
We've lived there
literally her entire life.
So it was a feeder school.
So she had people in her year group
who she had been in primary school
with, who she'd been in nursery school
with, actually.
Why should she have to change school?
And you know what it's like
when once you're in secondary school,
it's like you're this school.
You're that school to go from being a, 14
year old, from this school to suddenly
being a 14 year old in a neighbouring
school would be very difficult.
And you didn't want to do it.
Did you know?
But she also didn't want to go to school.
Yeah, I know she.
And it's actually really,
really hard for me to hear.
Ruby, I've followed your story
since it happened.
Not because we share ethnicity
and hair texture, but also because I.
I was absolutely astonished
that the same thing was happening to you
as had to me,
happened to me.
And a lot of the kind of generation
of black mixed women
who I went to school with.
And because kind of
because of your case,
I've done some research in uniform policy,
and about the ways that uniform policy
literally contravenes the law,
and how it works really against the people
it's supposed to serve.
Schools are there
for the purpose of educating children.
And there is zero correlation.
There's no evidence whatsoever
that uniform
and the way that you have or don't have
your hair has any correlation
with learning or outcomes whatsoever.
So when these decisions are made,
it feels like they're being made
because of something else. Right.
And the research that I've done
has shown that
when a child doesn't feel like they belong
to the school community,
that has more of an impact
on their wellbeing, on their attainment,
on their achievement, and on their ability
to be able to navigate,
you know, the rest of their lives.
At that point,
Ruby was a child, and her safety
and wellbeing should have been the thing
that was focussed on.
And it wasn't.
I think that's what was really hard
because we even had,
As Ruby described, her mental health
declined
very rapidly and very suddenly, actually.
And the GP was actually
writing to the school and saying,
please stop.
You know, this child is depressed.
They have anxiety
because of your school policy.
Please stop.
And to me, the fact that that's not enough
to make a school stop is just incredible.
I don't think I'll ever get over it,
get over the actual arrogance of,
an organisation
that can keep a policy in place
even though they have psychologists,
GP's, MPs, local politicians, the DfE,
the dioceses, the parent,
the young person,
children, charity, just for kids law,
even though they have the Ofsted
who social services
like literally when I think about
how many people got involved
in Ruby's case before it got to court
just to walk alongside us as a family,
but were writing to the school,
were communicating with
the school, was explaining exactly
what you just said, that this is a legal
but they,
as Lenny would say, you know,
that they were wrong and strong.
They took their heels in very, very hard.
That is what we're going
to kind of talk about next. So,
as I say, I've followed your case
the whole time.
Tried my best to support you, and
I've used this as a catalyst for change.
So, your ruby, you're actually named
in my proposal for my doctorate.
Because the purpose of my doctorate
is to make sure no one ever experiences
what you did.
And my doctorate is focussed
specifically on black girls in school
and their experiences.
Because those intersectional experiences
are absent from a lot of literature
and invisible eyes, by school cultures
and school policy specifically.
So it's really important to me
that and I know it's really important
to you as well, that what happened to you,
first of all, is never repeated.
But secondly is a point at which, for me,
this is a turning point
in in British schools.
This case
and your experience has to change things
profoundly moving forward.
And it's my job as a teacher educator
to make sure that everybody I work with
has a level of awareness that will mean
that is unthinkable in the future.
And that is absolutely
what I'm working for.
That's the rage that kind of propels
me forward in the work that I do.
Which is why I'm so happy that you're here
to talk about it, and that all student
teachers will have the opportunity
to hear it, actually, from you.
So basically, now we kind of want to know
what happened next.
So we know that you stayed in the school.
So maybe if I come to you, what happened
after all of these people got involved?
And, your case was, I guess, started?
Okay.
So I think what happened
next was probably what had more
of an impact on me emotionally as well,
because one of the big parts of
my case was not only the policy
and how it damaged me, but it was actually
the victimisation and harassment
that I then faced in school
as a result of legally challenging
the discrimination that I was facing.
So something as simple as I was saying,
this policy is wrong.
We're going to challenge it then led to me
being treated completely differently.
I had my yearbook picture.
I still remember the day like vividly.
I was in parents evening as normal.
We'd seen a teacher who who was
really outraged about what was happening
because she was my maths teacher,
and she'd literally said
the amount of school you're missing
is making you fall behind in your like,
one of the top of the class.
You shouldn't be behind.
So it was already a difficult parents
evening from hearing this, from hearing
teachers saying that my absences
had been impacting my learning
when I'd normally never really
had anything that negative said about me
at a parent's evening.
And then one of my friends comes to me
because this is in year 11,
we're getting our yearbooks
and says, oh, Ruby, have you seen
your picture in the yearbook?
And I said, no, I haven't.
And we went and looked.
And so when the last picture
that they had of me in school,
so I had my year seven picture,
which is when I was 11 years old,
first in the school, like first day,
I had my hair straightened
like literally was a baby.
And then the next picture
that I had had was my.
Then it was my year nine
nine photo when I had my afro out,
and that was the picture that had always
been used on the digital registers.
And like if they ever printed out
pictures of us in the classroom,
that was always the picture that was used.
And I opened up the yearbook
and out of these two pictures
that they had,
because I had missed the year
11 for a day,
instead of using the most recent picture
they had of me taking a new picture,
which they had proven, letting me know
that they could take a new picture,
that which they had.
They put that picture of me
at 11 years old in the yearbook.
So all my friends in that year,
but photos are 16 years old.
They all get to look back and remember
how they looked in that final year.
But when I look in that yearbook,
I see myself at 11 with straightened hair,
and literally it's just because
they didn't want to put the picture of me
with my afro and and that was just one
that was just like one example.
Like I asked the teacher
about the teacher to ask me,
are you going to be trying
to become a prefect?
I said, well, why was there a picture
of me in year seven?
And the yearbook said, oh, well,
that wasn't my decision.
You know, that wasn't my decision.
Like, it's very it was
it became really difficult
because I would kind of have teachers
whispering in my head like,
I don't agree
with what's happening to you.
I don't think this is right.
This isn't good.
I it wasn't my decision,
but none of them were doing anything.
None of them would say out loud,
they would say it to me
or they would say it to my mum.
But none of them are doing anything.
And I know that they didn't
necessarily have too much power to.
But what would have been nice
for me to see was them
defending them, trying to protect me and
one of the
worst things that happened
in during the case was,
I think was in the days
after the papers had been so.
So that first incident was after the first
initial legal letters from the proper
solicitors, from the legal solicitors,
then and then that one was in May.
So the first sort of pre court letter
it's called went to the school.
And then that was
when the yearbook thing happened.
And then the school literally ignored
every letter for months.
So this leads to a sending
it recorded delivery you know.
And they just never responded ever.
And the only option for VB in the end
was to actually take legal
to take it to court.
There was nothing else to do.
They were served with court papers
and two days later, so my history teacher
used to put pictures of us up on the wall,
like for good homework.
It was a thing that she'd done, like since
we were in year nine or something. And
within the week.
So it would go up on a Monday and then
it would stay up until the next week
when the next homework could be given in
and my picture was up there.
And then the next day
I had my like French GCSE.
So I was like kind of practising
in the back of the classroom.
So I hadn't been paying attention.
And at lunchtime
one of my friends came to me and said,
Ruby, did you notice that your picture
wasn't there anymore?
That your picture wasn't on the thing?
And I said, oh no, I didn't notice.
The next day I went and looked at the end.
I wait until the end of the lesson,
and I went up to the front and I said,
miss, was my picture not there?
And she said, oh, I was told to take it
down because, you know, I'd like signals.
It's the side of her head for an afro.
And that was literally
like the moment that everything was just
it all snapped for me.
It held it together till then. Yeah.
Like I followed the rule.
I'd gone home with my hair tied up.
I'd been like, biting my tongue
with all these little things happening.
And even when I was doing that,
I was still being punished
just because I was legally challenging it.
I wasn't even doing anything
in the school.
Like I wouldn't
even talk about it to anyone.
No one knew that
the legal thing had happened.
We weren't allowed to like
we weren't allowed to discuss it.
But just because I had taken this action,
even though they gave me no choice
because they ignored
everything, I'd taken this action
and the retaliation of the head
teacher was to walk into my classroom
and order my teacher
to take a picture of me off the wall.
And so I took my hair out of the ponytail
that day and refused tie it back up.
And basically
that was right at the start of my GCSEs.
So then I was refused entry to the school
other than for my exams,
because I was refusing to tie my hair up.
They wouldn't
let me in to any of the revision sessions.
During one of my GCSE exams,
there were two senior leadership
team members standing outside the doors
like the end 20 minutes of my exam.
So I'm there, do my GCSE
and in the corner of my eye
I can see two teachers in the window,
standing there waiting for me
to tell me that I would have to either
tie my hair up or leave.
And I still did decently well at my GCSE,
but I was predicted to like
I think I was like all nines.
Yeah, she I mean, I think that's
sort of one of the interesting aspects,
I think, of Ruby story and why it has
to change things as well, is
they didn't know who she was,
you know, they didn't know who she was
walking down the corridor.
They didn't know that
she was one of their star pupils
who was in the gifted
and talented in this, that and the other.
And the point is,
it shouldn't matter who she who she was
and you know, when.
But what it did, was it
her intelligence safeguarded her failure?
But my concern is that an average child
who, you know,
who's kind of just doing or writing,
just going to make their GCSEs,
which is the middle children,
because the way I education
system is set up,
we're always going to have children
who are missing the mark.
We're always going to have the middle
children.
I'm always going to have
the children who get the nines.
This damage could
happen to Ruby,
and she survived it academically,
purely because of her intelligence.
But other children don't survive it.
Other children end up at school,
other children end up with no GCSEs
or go into A and getting three GCSEs
simply because of their hair.
We know a young person that happened to
who ended up in a Pru because of her hair
and her, and it happened to our school.
I was just
the first person we didn't know about it
did told that by the head teacher.
You're not the first person
I've told about this role.
You're just a person
who refuses to follow it.
There's so much here, and I really hope
that the teachers experience teachers
and the new teachers in the audience
are listening to this and recognising
because I feel like what's coming out of
this is an identification bias for you.
You are a child and you are being brought
into adult matters like a court case
when you were a child.
And rather than protect you and support
you, your teachers were actively
like working against what it is
that they are, what is their core purpose?
And their core purpose is the safeguarding
and education of you as a child.
And you are not being treated as a child.
And you are forced to
navigate all of this while you are trying
to prepare for your GCSEs.
And to me, it doesn't matter how often
I read it or how now I've heard it
like from your mouth, it doesn't
in any way cease to shock me because it
literally goes against everything that I
and I'm sure UK went into teaching for.
So I really just want people
to pay attention to this and to recognise
this is not a one off case.
And that is what it needs to take
is for adults and educators
to stand with the children
who are being treated like this
for things to change,
everybody just knowing that it's wrong
and saying nothing changes.
Nothing like it's not good enough
for you to
ignore the harm that's being done.
For me, it's violence
that's being done, to a child
in your remit, in your sphere of influence
in your school.
And no one should be okay with that.
It felt like violence.
And I think really,
as, she's told me off for now,
she's an adult.
It had a very sheltered life.
So she wasn't a young person
that had lots of sleepovers or,
you know, she wasn't out on the streets
or anything like that.
I was quite,
I am quite a overprotective parent,
so she'd had quite a sheltered life.
And all of a sudden one of the days
when she was sent home,
the second day she was sent home,
they actually
mobile phones were banned in the school,
so she didn't have her phone on her.
She's gone to school this was
actually the day that that picture
that all the papers use was taken.
She was sent home from school,
but they actually refused
to let her
to let the receptionist call me.
Yeah, I, I walked in to the school
through the main entrance
and was told by the head teacher
that I needed to leave.
So I went into the reception
just as my mum had told me to do,
because we knew it would happen.
Because this was the second day in a row
and I went into the reception and said,
oh, I've been sent home,
can you please call my mum or my dad?
Like whichever one you can get through to?
And I was sat in the reception
area waiting
and as everybody
had gone into their classrooms,
the headteacher was then
kind of making his way back to his office
and saw me sat in the reception
and came into the reception
to basically ask me like,
what are you still doing here?
I've told you to leave.
And I said, I'm
waiting for them to call my mum.
And he said, no.
Then your mum knows
that you're going to be sent home.
She doesn't need to be called.
She knew when she sent you like this.
And he stood there.
He stood there with an open the door.
Yeah.
For Ruby to walk out into the street in E9
at 9:10 in the morning or whatever it was,
without
us knowing
that she wasn't safely in school.
And I just like as a parent
and as a teacher, I just think that's
astonishing.
And I reported it
to, Hackney Ta as a safeguarding issue.
It's like,
yeah, you obviously she can come home
at 330 or when we're expecting her,
but you do not expect your child
to walk out at 9:10.
You know, they knew nothing about her.
She came home, you know, upset her
dad was there to greet her.
What if we were both out?
What if you didn't have keys?
What if she had no where to go?
No money, no food, no phone.
And I just find it
astonishing that that could happen.
Not that I'm not the only child
who did that to the actually did it
to a little boy who ended up going missing
for like a couple of days.
Yeah, I'm not the only one that he sent
home without contacting the parents.
He's I mean, Ofsted actually raised,
Ruby situation,
not that particular situation,
but just her declining mental health
as a, safeguarding concern.
And they went to Hackney Social Services
and highlighted Ruby's a child at risk.
This was after just for kids.
The Lord contacted Ofsted
to tell them what was going on.
And social services rang the school
to see if she's okay.
So the people who actually abusing her,
as far as I'm concerned, it was abuse.
Abuse of power.
The people who abusing her
were the people reassuring social services
that she was okay.
No one actually rang me
or asked to speak to Ruby.
What's happening to you?
You know, and, Yeah,
I mean, like I said, she was saved
by her own,
resilience. But I don't like that word.
But that's what she was saved by.
She was saved
by having a supportive family.
But she should never have been put
in that position in the first place,
and neither should any other child.
Which is why I will keep going until I'm
with you as well and with everybody else.
You know,
we cannot be that an innocent child.
A minor goes somewhere
that they have no choice about.
It's not like a job, you know.
We have a choice about where we work.
And if something happens at work,
you can quit and go somewhere else.
Education is compulsory, you know.
Look, they're fining parents
left, right and centre, aren't they?
It can't
be that they go through the school gates
and face this kind of abuse
that the responsibility of teachers
is to be their parent
while they're in their care.
No co-parent.
There's no way that those teachers acted
in that way.
And anything could have happened.
This is what my mum used to say to me
all the time.
Anything can happen to you
and you're on that road.
Anything and literally anything
could have happened to you as a child.
At nine in the morning, wherever you were
at the school
would have been responsible for that.
And thank God nothing did happen to you.
But that should have never
even been a possibility.
Like I find it. Yeah, it I mean,
with rage, actually, I really does
after after about 20 minutes,
a member of staff from the school,
I won't say who actually rang me in secret
from her own mobile.
I was like,
okay, I'm not allowed to ring you,
but I just need you to know
that we've been sent home
and put her her job,
her livelihood on the line
because she was concerned
about Ruby's welfare.
By then, she'd actually already got home
and and nobody knew that.
But nobody knew that.
Nobody knew that.
And, you know, we don't live,
you know, I mean, nowhere safe.
But we definitely don't live
in a particularly safe area, you know,
that sort of a big, massive estate
on either side, really, isn't it?
Yeah.
I still get cross when I think about.
I mean, I'm writing right now.
I can see my I can feel my face going red.
So now we know what happened.
Now I really want to focus on Ruby,
thinking about
what do you hope these experience is?
Well, they have changed things in schools.
We know that.
But what do you hope for the future?
In terms of the ways in which your case
and what happened to you
and what you've done subsequently,
is going to change in schools.
I very much like what you said earlier.
I just don't want any other child
to have to experience this,
and I that's been my main goal
ever since we decided to share the story,
because it was always known
that there were going
to be people who said, well,
why wouldn't you just follow the policy?
Schools have rules.
In my day,
we would have all had to do this.
And you just wanted money,
attention, things like that.
And I never did.
I hated the attention that I got at school
for the whole experience.
Like, I hated all the oohs and aahs
I would get when a teacher would come in
and say, Ruby, like,
can I be sweet to you?
I hated it, I didn't, I didn't want
to have to speak out about the story.
I didn't want to have to have my name out
there known for this.
I frankly have not had a great time
having it out there
because I was called unemployable
and told that I'd never find a job
because of challenging this rule
and but the only thing that makes it worth
it is knowing that I can save
other children from experiencing it.
We're really interested to know
what has happened since and what changes.
Have occurred in the school
and in the school context
as a result of Ruby's case.
So once it had gone to court, court,
as everyone knows, it takes a long time.
So there was a very
it was a very drawn out process in court.
Eventually Ruby
was again, people don't know this part.
Ruby was actually given a default
judgement in default or something like
that.
It's called, which is if you ignore
court proceedings then then it will just
automatically go in the other person's
favour after a certain number of months.
So because the school unbelievably
ignored court proceedings for nine months,
I think it was, the judge
eventually found in Ruby's favour.
But then the school had the opportunity
to appeal that.
So then they answered.
After all those years,
they answered to appeal the judgement
that had gone in his favour.
So it was due to go to court to
for the judge
to decide whether or not
the judgement would hold or not hold.
And two days before it was to go to court,
the, the
school, the governing body of the school,
offered a settlement
to maybe a financial settlement,
which they wouldn't
be admitting legal liability.
But the way it was explained to us
by the legal team
is that because there was money
involved in terms of the public sphere,
which was what we were interested
in, we weren't interested in making
legal precedents
in terms of the public sphere.
People will see it that Ruby's won
because she's won the compensation.
She didn't win. It was settled.
But the fact they gave her money,
you know, people
draw their own conclusions from that.
Never had an apology or any.
Well, and so then we will. No apology.
We were waiting
then to, to do the media coverage
with Equalities
and Human Rights Commission,
but the school were actually blocking it
somehow.
I'm not sure how because
we were kept out of those communications,
but it was delayed.
So I think the settlement was in October,
October, November, December.
We was getting more and more frustrated
because she was still being silenced.
And then in January
she said to me, if we don't do it
now, I'm not going to do it.
I don't want this
to follow me to university.
I don't want to be at university
and the story is going to come out. So.
So I, asked permission from the Equalities
and Human Rights Commission
to do the press ourselves,
so they couldn't do it
because of legal reasons.
So, we did it ourselves.
We found our own journalist.
And contacted
them, gave them the exclusive and
and then at no point did we expect it
to blow up the way it did.
Did we?
Really wanted to.
No, no, I think and at that point,
once the story started coming out,
that was when the school, opened up
and were forced to change a hair policy.
So up until that point, they were still
keeping the same hair policy, but
once point they changed it to
that must not be of excessive volume.
Yes, yes, they changed the word.
They took the word Afro out
because it was direct discrimination.
They just made it indirect and scared.
They actually won an equalities
Ward award in 2017.
My son came home innocently saying, oh,
we had an assembly today
because we want our equalities award
and this is the thing, it's
even impacted him
because I literally just started
crying in rage.
So what do you mean?
The front equalities and his face.
He looked like, what have I said wrong?
Why is mum crying?
I was so furious because this is
when they still have the original wording.
So on my way to work the next day,
I found out who this equality award was
and I rang them up and I said,
did you actually read this school's
hair policy
before you gave them this Equality Award?
And they put me in touch
with the director of the award,
and we had an email back and forth,
and I sent her a screenshot of the hair
policy on the website and said,
you know, your award is meaningless
if you can give it to a school
that actually is doing this
to a child, it's meaningless.
And that
same day, the
whole uniform policy came off the website,
and then when it went back up,
it had slightly different wording,
but they the core of
it was still the same.
Yeah.
The core of it that was that was 2017
and I left the school in 2018
and they were still doing it. All right.
And the point is, is that
there's not another group of people
that this applies to.
Yeah.
It's only people who look like us
only of us who are melanated,
only us who have an afro texture.
I was six, that was one of his arguments,
is that he once sent home an Irish child
that had an afro,
and he that was one of his arguments
is, oh, like, we didn't send him home.
We just asked
him to cut it. Oh yeah. Yeah.
But, that was one of his arguments.
So, you know,
like all the white footballers in the 70s
that had afros because they had poems.
And that was one of his arguments was, oh,
no, it's not just because you're black.
It's it's that you have off her hair like,
you know, make it smaller.
Have you ever heard of chemical relaxers?
I've been looking on black hair.com.
Yeah.
It was very just something about that
that makes everything worse.
The idea that you can't even differentiate
between somebody who has a perm,
which is a choice,
and somebody who has afro textured hair,
which is exactly the way
that it grows out of the head.
And the idea that you're so out of touch
with reality
and biology
and biology and genetics and awareness
and I mean, the first the first meeting
we had myself and Ruby's dad,
because at
that time I was so angry,
we invited our pastor
along to kind of just sort of
keep me calm and keep Lenny calm.
But we didn't know Lenny needed to be calm
until we were in the room.
And he's a mixed race guy.
And he came along,
and when the head teacher was saying about
white people having an afro and
he was speaking back to him, and he said,
can I just ask you what you mean by that?
And, you know, and then that was when
he said about Kevin Keegan having an afro.
And then my pastor
explained to me,
he said, I, I'm mixed race.
He is the pastor and I have two daughters.
One has the same hair texture as Ruby
and one has like
soft, curly, wrinkly hair.
This daughter
would be able to come to your school
as she is.
This daughter would have to alter herself
to just try and get him to understand
the how ludicrous
it really is, but he
he didn't want to understand.
Some people don't want to understand
is the truth.
So that so they forced the school
to change the policy.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission
helped write it, the new one
that's still there, although I haven't
checked recently, I have to check,
it was a legally binding agreement.
So if they did it to another child,
the family wouldn't
need to take it to court.
They would just
automatically be breaking the law.
But then the whole point of the case
was for it
to spill out into other schools.
We did the press ourselves,
not the quasi human Rights Commission.
But since then Ruby's been involved
in their press releases.
And we've been we were involved
in the writing of that guidance.
We involved in writing
Hackney Guidance first, weren't we?
And the
new we were involved in their racial,
what's it called to their,
the anti-racist.
Yes, the anti-racist thing.
We were involved in the launch of that.
Think that was the first thing you did,
wasn't it?
But yeah, a lot of things.
The guidance now exists.
So the guidance was written by
the equality, the Human Rights Commission,
with the help of lots
of different organisations, World
Afro Day, we're involved with a Halo
Collective involved in that.
Not that. No,
but and that were weren't they.
So lots of different people involved,
including us.
It's there but it's not it's not statutory
educational law.
So it's there as guidance.
But schools can and do
never pick it up. Never read. Yeah.
Well this is what we're hoping to change,
right?
We've got to raise awareness.
We've got to make sure
the next generation of educators
have an understanding of how, essential
this is to the responsibility as an adult
and somebody who is responsible
for the learning
and education of young people
and the wellbeing
and safety of those young people.
So we we can
you tell me a little bit about,
what you hope moving forward,
what you've experienced
and all of the work that you've done
with different organisations
is going to do to change things.
Main goal is just to protect
future generations
from even ever
having to think about this happening.
Like, I look at my niece
and I want her to be able to work
however she wants and not even think
that it would be an issue.
She always says, I want to wear my hair
like my Auntie Ruby, and I love that.
She sees it as a positive and that's how
I want children to be able to see it.
And I want that to be changes
for children, but also for adults.
Because as much as education
was compulsory and work isn't necessarily,
we also shouldn't have to work
and walk into a workplace and think,
I need to alter myself just to get by.
There's obviously different.
This is one of the arguments
we had in the school is that I understand
the science, and I understand if there's
a reason why I need to do it for safety,
but there's no reason why any other time
I should be having to do this.
And so with the Halo Collective,
we focus on,
adopting the code, which is the Halo code,
which schools and workplaces can adopt
and basically put into their policy,
which is them
pledging to not have discrimination,
to not do this to any children.
So we have adopt the code.
We have slave stigma, which is focusing
on the stigma of Afro hair in society,
looking at destigmatizing it
and normalising it for everyone.
And then we also have fixed the law,
which is to look at things
like the educational, not being statutory.
We want to be able to make sure
that if any school or any workplace
or any institution is doing this,
that it's automatically legal.
It's not just a suggestion
that it could be illegal.
We want it to be known that this is wrong
and you will face consequences for it.
And so that's what I'm doing
within the Halo Collective.
Outside of it just very much just
I like to work alongside
anyone who's pushing to try and
save anyone from experiencing this,
and that's my main focus.
I help dove with the Crown Toolkit,
which is a workshop that schools can use
actually, like they've basically done
all the work for them.
It's like a lesson that you can do
for your children
with different exercises
and activities to talk about
how discrimination in a nice light-hearted
way for young children.
It was a part of the
what was it called?
I remember it was a few years ago.
I'm a part of that, helping children
with, self-esteem.
Self self-esteem. Yeah.
It's a part of their self-esteem project.
Was that because it was behind something?
The filter on the filters
behind the filter.
So a part of their.
Because they've got the crown
acts in the US,
they were looking at
what they can do here.
So the Crown toolkit was a nice idea
to basically give schools
something they can work with.
And Halo's also very active in schools
with, doing different workshops.
Sometimes it's just difficult
because most of us are volunteers and,
you'll work with World Africa as well.
The judge thing you did.
Yeah, that was a long time ago now.
But yeah, well, that Friday
we did, a competition
for children to do modelling.
So we had ten, we picked ten winners
and they got to do a photoshoot
with Black Beauty magazine.
And it was just a really lovely day,
like having them all so excited
and all the different clothes
they were wearing, having their hair
and all these different hairstyles.
And I was doing the makeup
and they were all just so
happy to be there
and really excited at the celebration,
which goes back to what we were saying
before, that they should be able
to celebrate themselves.
They shouldn't have to be justifying
their own existence, and world after day
is something that schools can do as well.
On the 15th of September,
you know, just to sort of have that day
that, you know, do something,
do something different
with your hair, let's, you know,
let's celebrate all the different ways
that afro hair can be worn.
Amazing.
So, okay,
we're just going to come to you now.
What do you hope?
Well, can you tell us a little bit
about your research
and what do you hope
that is going to change?
So as you can tell, it's still a very
upsetting experience for both of us.
I could
have gone into debt and gone into therapy,
but I decided to go into debt
and do a doctorate instead. So.
So here I am.
I want to make sure that parents
and pupils
have a voice about this
topic in educational research.
So there's bits of work
that's been done in sociology,
history, law,
but there isn't really research
about hair policies in the education
discipline.
And it's not really something
that people talk about.
So so I decided to research it.
So I'm doing the Eddie like yourself.
So it's sort of you
move, you progress along a few years.
So I'm sort of at the halfway mark now.
So I've interviewed parents firstly,
and now I've interviewed
pupils as well, just about their
experiences really, just to,
give them a voice which will then
hopefully do
what you're trying to do with this,
which is to educate the educators.
So if they realise what my hope is, is
when educators realise
I had one little boy
when I asked him, how did you feel?
So his first day of year seven,
his first day of year seven,
he was put in isolation for having plus,
and I went back kind of asked him as to
how do you remember how you felt in
when you were in the isolation room?
How did you feel in the isolation booth?
So we're talking about an 11 year
old baby,
his first day of school, excited.
You know, I think how excited my kids
were, their first day of secondary school.
Excited for pictures
in my yearbook. If you remember
going in.
And, and then he was put in isolation
and put in an isolation booth
staring at a brick wall.
And I said, and I asked him how I felt,
and his words will haunt me
for the rest of my life.
He said he felt heartbroken
because he knew that any teacher
walking past the isolation
room would look at him and think, what
has he done on the first day of school
to deserve this?
He must be a really naughty boy.
We have to watch this one
and just listening to that conversation
was enough to
for me to know that all the hard work
or the late nights or the frustration
when I'm like, got a deadline is worth it
because we can't have babies.
11 year olds go into secondary school
and having their souls destroyed
and being told
that they're not good enough
to be educated any more,
that he had, paperwork for his Spanish
from his Spanish teacher.
It was his first ever Spanish lesson,
so he'd never spoken Spanish in his life.
And he was faced with this paper
of Spanish work to do
with no help at all.
And you just think, you know,
whoever thought that was a good idea?
So, yeah,
I think there were three, three children
I spoke to.
Where that where it was a year
seven situation.
Well, one was actually year six.
It was on his transition day.
He'd gone to his transition day,
and then his mum got a phone call.
Oh. Before September,
you need to cut his hair.
And they spent the whole summer
fighting that.
And they didn't know until the day before
he was due to start school
whether they would let him
in the school or not.
And did that.
They did, but it was an exception.
They had to they had to kind of get,
reports involved.
They had to kind of sort of
not mental health,
but almost like proof that he proved why.
Yeah, why it would be so detrimental
to him specifically to have his hair cut.
But all the other boys
had have that haircut.
So now he's the only one
who looks like him.
He's the only one that looks like that.
And all the other boys
have had their haircuts.
So he still doesn't belong, does he?
He still doesn't belong.
And our hair is so much
a part of our identity,
and it's something that I think
maybe some people just don't realise that
there is a history, there is a culture,
there is a process,
there are practices and rituals and things
that are so implicit in the culture
and in our identity.
That has to do with our hair.
So when you ask us to change it, it's
not just you asking us to change our hair,
you're asking us to change
exactly who we are,
to conform to a set of standards
that have got.
We've got no hope of meeting.
So even if you were to straighten
your hair,
you're still never going
to feel like you entirely belong.
Same as me.
And I've had to see you. Look.
You look like a different person. I. Yeah.
In this country, it's going to rain.
So I think the stories that you tell
and the humanisation of those stories
is so, so powerful.
And educators need to know,
they need to understand,
and they need to be
the ones that speak up about this.
It can't be left to parents
and children themselves
to help adults to understand
why this is fundamentally wrong, and goes
against everything
we should be doing as educators in school.
Schools should work for the benefit
of the children that are in the school.
And that's that's the bottom line.
There's nothing else.
I don't want I don't want to hear
any more arguments about that.
Like,
if you're there, you're there to serve.
If you're a teacher
and you're an educator,
you're there to serve the children
who the parents have put in your care.
And there should be
no questions around that.
And if you're doing something
that is harming that child,
whatever you're doing
absolutely needs to stop.
So that's one of my,
messages to educators.
I want to hear your message to educators.
What do you think that they need to know?
What would you tell them?
I think the main thing is just to,
like you said, to protect the children.
And if something seems wrong, it
probably is.
And it shouldn't have to be like,
I wish that it wasn't
a situation that that person that called
you was putting their job on the line.
I wish it wasn't that.
But when you when children are involved,
I feel like you have to like you shouldn't
just be staying quiet or whispering
in the child's air that something's wrong.
If you know that a child is being harmed,
you should be stepping up.
Whether that's in secret,
whether that's actually standing up
and fighting against something.
You should be protecting the children
because it's not fair that, like,
I shouldn't have had to fight
my own battle in the school.
I shouldn't have been getting bullied
by a grown man walking around the halls.
I should have been able
to walk into school and not be worried
that I would literally be pointed out
and screamed at for having my hair out.
That shouldn't have happened.
And so teachers should have been able
to say to him, what are you doing?
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, well, he should have listened.
Yeah, he should have.
What would your message to our future
educator is?
And, I came across a phrase,
a phrase recently, which you probably
know, cultural humility.
And I think, I think for me
that that really sits well with this topic
because even me
as a white parent of mixed race children,
every day is a learning day
in terms of the fact that my children
are racialized differently to me.
And I think that the arrogance that some
white people have that I've read one book.
So now I understand Afro hair or I've read
one books and now I understand slavery.
No, it doesn't work like that.
You know, if every single child
is a unique individual.
So you might have met
because that's what people say.
But black parents want their kids to
to have their hair in this way.
Well, that family might,
but that family doesn't.
So you need to take each family
as they are,
and you need to not sort of group
a whole section of society together
just because they happen to share
certain DNA or whatever, you know,
I think humility, cultural humility
to sort of accept the fact,
I accept the fact that I will never
oh, sorry, I will never understand or over
stand
what it is to walk down the street
as a mixed race
black woman in this country,
or as my husband,
as a black Rastaman in this country,
or my son
as a mixed race young man in this country.
I will never overstay what that is.
And that's okay,
because I'm here to support them in
that, you know, and it's you.
I think it's the arrogance that gets me.
It's the arrogance of white educators
who think, will our policies fair
because it applies to everybody,
but everybody's hair's not the same.
So, okay, you don't want white kids to
come to school with a complete skinhead.
Okay.
I don't really see why that's a problem,
but fine.
But actually, a black boy having a low,
low haircut is exactly
the way his dad is got his hair
and the way Barack Obama had his hair.
You know,
and so many of the men that they maybe,
aspire to, you know, that boy that was
put in isolation in year seven?
Look at Lewis Hamilton's hair.
Look how he's celebrating his culture.
And he's got his hair in lovely Cambridge
a lot of the time.
Yet this 11 year old was put in, you know,
almost like a shell for having the same
height as Lewis Hamilton, who I'm sure
he's been knighted now, hasn't he?
So things like that.
I think as educators we are forced.
And I remember this from my PGCE days.
You're forced to kind of fake it
til you make it.
You're forced to become a bit arrogant.
You're forced to pretend
you understand things
that you don't
necessarily understand. Phonics.
I do understand it now, but,
you know, you're forced to kind of run
before you can walk.
You know, that's the nature of our job,
and it almost feels like
survival of the fittest.
So the ones who fall over,
the ones that don't make it as teachers,
so the ones who make as teachers are often
the ones that can blag it a bit and kind
of, you know, like, multitask.
But actually that's really dangerous
because what that means
is you miss massive chunks of knowledge,
and you're pretending
to understand things that you don't.
So once you've established yourself
as a teacher, find your humility again,
find your humility again, and let the
children teach you, because they will.
You know, if you see a hair
where your hair is and you think, oh,
that's not appropriate for school,
just ask yourself, why do I think that?
Why do I think it's not appropriate?
Yeah.
And I think this will kind of ties into,
like culturally responsive pedagogies.
And the idea that,
as I say, I'm going to keep saying it,
that we're there to serve the children.
They're not there to serve us.
And it's our responsibility
to know and understand them.
And if we don't know and understand them,
we need to model good learning
and go and do that work
and find out about it.
Kind of regardless of your own race
or experience,
you don't have to have experienced
something to make
the effort to understand them
and have a level of awareness about that.
And that all does come down to humility.
So I really appreciate your time,
your energy, you sharing your stories,
and we have to hope that, it's
collectively the work that we're doing.
And I do have hope, like,
I do believe that
if you don't have hope,
you can't be a teacher.
If you can't believe that things
can be different and things can be better.
You've got no place in this job.
And I am forever
hopeful that we are going to move forward
more positively, and that all of this
will not have been for nothing.
Things are change.
It have changed, things will change
and hopefully this will be part of that.
So we really appreciate your time today.
And my last question to both of you is
what have what is the best thing
that you have seen, read or listen
to recently that you can recommend to me
and to the rest of our audience?
And I'll start with UK, UK.
Okay.
I'm going to be very quiet at the moment.
I'm rewatching Schitt's Creek.
Okay. It's hilarious.
Okay, so we've come to decide
you've already seen it.
But yeah, something.
I think everything feels very serious
in my life a lot of the time,
so I think I just want something frivolous
to watch.
Of an evening
that I don't have to concentrate on.
And that's just a bit funny. Yeah.
I said, I'm on my YouTube.
I've been really enjoying
all the interviews
from the people that were in Love
Island, USA this season.
That was like a group of three women
that became really close
friends in there that have, like,
become a really big thing.
And everybody's
talking about their friendship and talking
about the centring of female friendships
and how important that was in the season.
And especially like the winning
couple were black couple, the winning
couple of Love Island
UK, the zero black couple.
So there's been a lot of conversations
and one of my favourite interviews
was of Serena,
who won this season's Love Island USA
in, the Sacred Salon,
which is Beyonce's hair salon,
and she was talking about her reasoning
for choosing braids
when she went into Love Island.
And I think it was just nice to be able
to hear all of this because
like when I was younger
watching Love Island, I wouldn't have had
really any representation on that.
So it's nice
hearing someone talk about the reason
why she chose to do bow braids
is because she knew that being in that
for all those weeks,
she'd be able to maintain it
and keep it looking nice and know
that she would feel comfortable with it
and like seeing her
do the other black people on this hair
throughout the show.
I think it was really nice to see.
Yeah, amazing.
Thank you so much for your time.
We really appreciate it.
It was great to talk to you.