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drew out the significance of events associated with Black Power or Terrorism, for example.
They had worked with the Religious Education and English departments to develop an antiracist
policy, although their approach to diversity was influenced by the intake of the school:
… we actually spend time on it, although having a low proportion of ethnic minority
pupils here we do spend less time on it than if I was say perhaps in an inner city
school.
On the evidence available it is unlikely that this interviewee considered anti-racism or
multiculturalism as particularly significant at Key Stage 3. Until recently more able pupils
had undertaken a Modern World GCSE and the less able the School History Project.
However, they had recently decided to enter all of their pupils for the School History Project
course because they felt that it was easier to achieve higher examination grades in the latter
course. This decision was made in response to senior management pressure to increase
examination results. They selected Ireland as the Modern World Study because they were
interested in it and also because the Irish community were part of Birmingham’s history. They
used the anniversary of the Birmingham pub bombings as a basis for the examination
assignment. This replaced earlier assignments related to the Good Friday Agreement, which
the interview considered to have become dated and dry. The interviewee argued that the topic
was related to local memories and provided opportunities to consider anti-racist issues:
I know where I was at that time; I know what the local Longbridge reaction was at the
time, where you couldn’t walk down if you were Irish. So it is this sort of thing that I
am trying to get over to them about stereotyping as well.
Interviewer: Do you think there are wider issues?
Yes it has got a lot of wider issues – and by wider issues we come up to prejudices, we
come onto wider stereotyping as I have said of certain people, that everybody that is
Irish is a terrorist at that time. It also leads to the formation of Irish political parties,
terror groups, it leads to peace movements, and it can lead to a number of areas that
we can discuss.