VIEWS & OPINION Big hair? Big issue Comment by SAL McKEOWN, journalist and editor
Many schools have hair policies. In recent years it has become apparent that these can be discriminatory. Black and mixed race children have been penalised and excluded for having hair that is too short, too long, too big, too untidy, ‘too extreme’.
Hair for people of African descent has always been a human rights issue. The right to wear their hair in a way that they had chosen was first removed in slavery. This is not
taught in most school’s history lessons, not even in Black History Month, so senior leaders may not be aware of the sensitivities. However, recent court cases and adverse publicity have shown there are penalties for schools that promote heavy-handed, ill conceived policies.
worked with Peter Thomas from the National Association for the Teaching of English so there are now free downloadable lesson plans, for KS2 and KS3 students across STEM, English, art and humanities.
Workshops to stimulate creative responses
The #PowerOfHair project has organised workshops with Black artists and arts organisations. Performance poet Adisa The Verbalizer has been popular. Originally seen as a stimulus for work in the English curriculum, schools have started to use his poetry workshop in history because the content covers the untold history of Afro hair and the link with enslaved Africans.’ October is Black History Month and this could be a good starting point for raising awareness and stimulating different creative responses.
Schools in Cumbria, Leeds, Manchester, South Wales, Whitby, Scarborough, Worcestershire, Hertfordshire and London have benefited from the resources so far. Laura Gaston from Whitehaven Academy in Cumbria said: ‘The programme has given us a chance to explore identity with our feeder primary schools in a fun and creative way. We also ran the workshops with year 8 students but have now run them too with our year 7s because we didn’t want students to miss out.’
Future plans include a dance workshop with the Northern Ballet and collaborations with The Hepworth Wakefield Gallery whose forthcoming exhibition focuses on the topic of African barber shops. Pantene is also exploring an art option with Nike to look at the subject of hair in sport.
The workshops have proved a massive stimulus for schools in predominantly white areas such as Whitby in Yorkshire. Ian Bloor is Lead Teacher for Enrichment at Eskdale School: ‘as a small school in a relatively isolated part of the country, the opportunity to have an engaging and creative team arrive in the school and inspire our students has been an essential part of the school’s mission to broaden horizons.’
Becoming more inclusive
Emma Dabiri, author of the book Don’t Touch My Hair says Afro hair should be seen as a protected characteristic under the Equality Act: ‘It would not be permissible to insist that children lighten their skin to attend school, yet policies that forbid black hair in its natural state or ban the use of the protective hairstyles are in effect demanding the same type of assimilation.’
A survey in 2020 of 510 Black men and women with Afro Hair in the UK, by Censuswide showed that 93% of Black people in the UK have faced microaggressions related to their hair. World Afro Day worked with researchers at De Montfort University to produce The Hair Equality Report. Their survey of 1000 respondents found that one in six children across the UK with Afro-textured hair have experienced hair discrimination in school.
Thursday 15th September is the fifth World Afro Day and there will be a free online Big Hair Assembly at 1:30pm on that day to celebrate equality and diversity. It is part of a global movement to turn negative attitudes towards Afro hair into a positive force for inclusion. Their influence is spreading. Now Pantene and the Ideas Foundation have teamed up to create #PowerOfHair workshops to raise awareness of Afro hair discrimination and develop creative responses to the issue. In the first half of 2022 they have worked with 24 schools, primary and secondary, in urban and more rural areas. They have trialled materials with over 600 students covering digital storytelling, poetry, photography, and marketing that could be used in Business Studies and i-Media. They have developed materials for science, art, and
September 2022
www.education-today.co.uk 23
There are also signs that the government too is beginning to wake up to the issues of Afro hair. Inclusive Britain, a policy paper in response to Black Lives Matter protests in the UK, was presented to Parliament on 17 March 2022. Action 60 in their recommendations is an inclusive school hair and uniform policy that says: ‘The DfE will, in collaboration with the Equality Hub, work with leading schools to help them create a resource on pupil hairstyles and uniform policy. This will showcase best practice in uniform policy specific to the diversity of acceptable hairstyles in school to avoid unfair treatment of ethnic minority children whose hair type may not be like the majority.’ It seems that Afro hair is now too contentious an issue to be left in the hands of schools.
To find out more about #PowerOfHair workshops, see
https://www.ideasfoundation.org.uk/.
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