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Survey highlights that racism continues to be ‘a real issue’ in schools

New research from Show Racism the Red Card has found that 83% of teachers have witnessed jokes, name-calling and stereotyping in schools.

The survey of 900 teachers has been conducted by Show Racism the Red Card over the past 18 months. The findings suggest that a minority of pupils and even teachers display strongly racist attitudes, and that there is a much wider prevalence of misinformation and unintentional use of racist terminology in ‘nearly every school’ visited by the charity.

The research report finds that there is a real gap in training for teachers in this area. The TES coverage of the story reports that: More than a third of the surveyed teachers said they had never received training in tackling racism or promoting equality. Only 12 per cent had been provided with strategies for supporting asylum-seeking and refugee pupils.”

At a time when Ofsted is moving away from inspecting schools’ contributions to community cohesion, it is clear that teachers continue to need high quality support to broaden young people’s horizons and help them to recognise and celebrate different cultures and ethnicities, as well as the commonalities between us.

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