Multi-cultural Education

1981-06-21
25m

Skin analyses the impact and legacy of Multicultural Education.

Multicultural education was long considered a solution to the perceived attainment gap between West Indian students and other demographics. Originally conceived as a problem similar to the attainment gap faced by white working-class children, the expectation and consensus among the government and education authorities was that integration would gradually improve attainment levels in education for West Indian children.

In this edition of the LWT series Skin, leading West Indian educationalists (keen observers who would themselves come to be authors of educational policy) offer incisive perspectives on the effectiveness of multicultural education. They point out that it was not necessarily the fault of an ineffective curriculum but of prejudice within the teaching establishment and teachers who set low expectations for West Indian children. This was extensively documented in Bernard Coard's 1971 book, How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System.

The programme allows educators to reveal how schools have not sought to provide West Indian children with a robust learning environment - one of the critical findings of the influential 1981 Rampton report. Multicultural education began to take off. It purported to incorporate the diversity of the children's experiences to improve accessibility to learning material. Looking at Catford County Girls School as a test case, the programme investigates the efficacy of this change to the curriculum.

The legacy of discrimination in British schools had an enduring effect on the outcomes of Black children in education. This systemic discrimination was in recent times explored in the documentary Subnormal: A British Scandal by director Lyttanya Shannon and in the last episode of the historical drama Small Axe by Black British director Steve McQueen.

Multicultural TV

This collection covers programming that emerged from specialist multicultural and Black broadcasting units.

A multicultural Britain was forebodingly cast as an oncoming social issue. Only at the behest of campaigning by the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (established in 1965) did the programming introduced begin to frame Asian and later Black Britons as part of British society and cater directly to their needs. The earliest examples were programmes broadcast by the BBC Apna Hi Ghar Samajhiye (1965) and Nai Zindagi Naya Jeevan (New Life), which helped improve the English skills of recent Asian migrants. Targeted programming initially emerged regionally, and franchise holders in the midlands who feared the impending reallocation of franchises reacted quickly, leading to multicultural programming such as Here Today, Here Tomorrow (ATV, 1978), Here and Now (Central TV, 1978). In London, London Weekend Television produced Babylon (LWT, 1979), and the London Minorities Unit produced Skin (1980), an extensive focus of our collection. During the emergence of Channel 4, Black programming was in-built into the new channel. Black commissioners, researchers, and presenters emerged, leading to Black and Asian-led series like Black on Black (1982), Eastern Eye (1982), Bandung File (1985), and Black Bag (1985). These programmes catered not only with increasing specificity to their respective audiences but also took on an increasingly globally connective approach centred around acknowledging the intricacy of diasporic relations.

25 videos in this collection

Bob Marley

1981-05-31

Black Actors

1981-04-05

Attacks on Asians and West Indians

1980-10-19

Immigration Laws Part 1

1980-10-26

Bengalis and the Rag Trade

1980-04-27

Here and Now

1985-05-12

After the Deptford Fire: A Watershed in British Relations

Deptford
1981-06-07

Here and Now

Birmingham
1984-02-19