In the survey of 2270 teachers done by Teacher Tapp for publisher Pearson, Asked which changes to the English syllabus they felt would most help their students, 80% of secondary school teachers, and 69% of primary school teachers, said they wanted more diverse and representative set texts. Another research report tells us that while around 35% of school-age children in UK identity themselves from BAME group, only 0.7% of GCSE students in England study a book written by a person of colour. These are staggering numbers for a country where sizeable majority think that we are past racism or any type of xenophobia.

Despite the enormity of this problem, there is barely any focus on this by Westminster. Problems like this can never be solved overnight but it needs consistent effort, planning and focus. However, we have a sorry state of affairs in which government sanctioned reports tell us that we live in a post-racist Britain. In the absence of any meaningful by Tory governments, what steps can we do to solve these issues.

First step is to work with not for profits like ourselves to shine as much light on this issue. We are not the only ones who are trying to highlight these major issues in our school curriculum. There are other charities like Runnymede Trust who are also doing a wonderful job in this area and putting pressure on government and Tories to address this.

Second step is for parents to put direct pressure on schools. In times like this where a whopping 99.3% of GCSE students are studying books by White authors and most of them male, we cannot afford to wait passively. Parents need to send emails to schools, raise this issue in parent teachers meeting and/or during the board meetings. If there are enough people interested in this issue, we can force a positive change.

Finally, we would like to mention a very important point here. Lot of the times, when issues like White Privilege, Black Lives Matter, Islamophobia are brought up there is a tendency from the majority group to not take interest in these issues because after all we are all humans and we take part in what benefits us the most. But lack of diversity in our curriculum is more nuanced than most of these issues. Even if your child is white, this issue affects them as the less they learn about Black, Asians and other minority groups, more they will find it difficult to understand and appreciate other cultures, values and traditions when they meet people of different backgrounds at work. After all, lot of education is about preparing our younger generation to be able to find work, self sustain and be productive members of the society eventually.