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.