BBC Young Reporter: ‘Why don’t more teachers look like me?’

Statistics show that the teaching profession is predominantly white and female. After winning the BBC Young Reporter competition, I worked with BBC News to find out why there is so little diversity in the classroom and what this means for students like me.

I’m 14 and have moved a bit – I was born in London but now live in Manchester, two very different cities. That means I’ve been to a few different schools.

Despite this, I went through all of elementary school without ever having a non-white teacher.

I’m black – both my parents are originally from Ghana – but I don’t really see myself represented in the people who teach me.

I know only too well the impact this has on students. When you’re my age you start thinking about what you want to do after school. You look at different jobs and careers and try to imagine yourself doing them.

If you don’t see people in these jobs who look like you, who have a similar background and experience to yours, then it’s really hard to imagine yourself doing this job.

I have friends from ethnic minorities who would like to become teachers – but the lack of representation puts them off.

It’s not just about getting young people excited about the teaching profession. As students, it is very important for us to have someone to talk to, someone who understands our experiences, someone we can confide in.

The consequences of not having diversity in the classroom can be even more serious. During the Covid pandemic, when students’ GCSE and A-level results were based on teachers’ assessments, I was concerned to read that the grades of ethnic minority students might have been influenced by prejudice.

I was also disturbed to hear about what happened to Child Q – a young black pupil who was strip-searched at an east London school earlier this year – and later to find out that this appears not to be an isolated case.

All of this just goes to show how important it is, especially for black kids, to have that representation.

We know that teaching is predominantly white – according to a UCL study published in 2020, almost half of schools in England and Wales have no ethnic minority teachers at all, even in different areas with large black and Asian pupils. But what I wanted to find out is why and what can be done to change this.

We spoke to two teachers – Johnoi Josephs and Albert Adeyemi. They agree that the lack of diversity in teaching is a big problem – they tell us that’s why they co-founded their campaign group, Black Men Teach.

In addition to providing a support network for Black male teachers, they mentor young people who may be considering a teaching career and speak at schools and conferences on the importance of diversity and equality.

Mr Josephs said he saw his role as “creating a positive experience with black men” for students.

Mr Adeyemi agreed: “Staff need to be culturally intelligent so that students don’t just have an image of black people based on what they are portrayed in the media. That’s the problem we have, even in the most diverse areas.”

The problem, they said, is that diversity often doesn’t reach the level of senior management.

Although he works at a school in south London where “white students are consistently a minority,” Mr Josephs said, black teachers are not represented at senior levels.

“Teachers and assistants are very diverse. Middle managers are very diverse. But the school leadership team is not diverse at all.”

He said that he and Mr Adeyemi know schools in London that have black principals and are very different at all levels.

The 2020 UCL study found the same thing – even in various areas, the senior leadership teams in schools were not representative.

Prof Alice Bradbury, co-author of the study, told us that there is “a major problem with teacher retention in general…but teachers from minority backgrounds tend to have even lower retention rates than white British teachers”.

The teachers told her that they felt like there was a glass ceiling.

“There was a sense that there was some kind of point where the barriers started to go up,” she said. “What’s noticeable is that the seniors’ leadership teams weren’t as diverse as the rest of the school.”

Minority teachers, she said, described feeling pushed into more pastoral roles even as they wanted to do more academic work.

“They weren’t considered academic enough to advance to higher positions of leadership because they had performed far more pastoral roles,” she said. “I think it has to do with stereotyping.”

I was concerned that this was all bad news. But according to Mr Josephs and Mr Adeyemi, progress is being made behind the scenes – albeit slowly. And Prof. Bradbury told us that she brings her research to schools to bring about positive change.

My hope is that by the time my generation enters the labor market, education will be a more attractive option for us so that ethnic minority students will have more teachers to look up to.

Additional reporting by Ashitha Nagesh

You can find stories from other young people at the BBC Young Reporter website.