BLACK LIVES MATTER – ACTION, NOT WORDS, WILL MAKE THE DIFFERENCE

I feel privileged, I am privileged. I feel privileged, I am privileged because:

·      I live in a close-knit family bubble founded on inclusion, love and acceptance

·      I grew up on a council estate in inner London where people of all colours lived side by side each other, largely in harmony

·      My own child is growing up in a diverse extended family with black in-laws, nieces and nephews

·      My best friends have been with me since we met at University almost 30 years ago, and in this group, I am in the minority

·      I have the pleasure of working with, and supporting, a number of BAME leaders in the FE sector.

But of course, the real reason I am privileged is because I am a white man - and at no point in my life has someone told me I couldn’t do what I wanted to do or I couldn’t achieve what I wanted to achieve.

The Black Lives Matter movement has caused me to reflect on my own behaviours, views and practices, and recently I was sent an open letter from the Black Further Education Leadership Group which makes a powerful and necessary case for urgent change in the FE sector. What I have come to realise is that for people like me it a not enough to simply not be racist, we need to be anti-racist and do everything in our power to support and advance the BLM agenda. As the AOC’s David Hughes said: “It should not just be on black leaders to fix the issues of societal racism. It is on us all.”

So how? Well right now I’m not completely sure and I am thinking it through. But what I know is that I have the influence, connections and commitment to do something and maybe make a valuable contribution. In my role as a recruiter of senior staff to the FE sector, as well as the person who leads the national leadership development programme for middle leaders in the FE sector (through our contract with the Education and Training Foundation) there are, of course, a number of things I can do and commitments I can make.

1. I can challenge my clients to positively and proactively tackle a lack of diversity in their leadership teams. Great leadership is about having diverse thinkers and connecting diversity to the collective vision.
2. I can pull on my resources and contacts to support the career development of BAME leaders.
3. I can review the way we do search and recruitment and ensure that our approaches in the future not only place an emphasis on diversity and inclusion but become ‘best in class’ in this regard.
4. I can stop making the assumption that my knowledge of diversity, inclusion and the experiences of BAME people and others who have been discriminated against are fully formed, and I can begin learning and listening  
5. I can instruct my team to rethink the content of our middle leaders training programme and in doing so, fully engage with diverse groups to ensure their experiences are understood by everyone who undertakes this training programme
6. I can push the organisations I work with on the delivery of contracts and programmes to do more to support the career development of BAME people in FE.
7. I can provide my time freely to anyone who wants to be supported, and positively challenged, on their career development journey.  

So whilst this piece is largely a way of capturing my own thinking and sharing it with my connections, I also intend for it to be used as a basis for respectful discussion and debate. Happy to hear the views of others and to get a feel for the commitments others are making.