Schools: Racist Incidents

Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon Excerpts

Monday 18th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon (Lab)]

My Lords, as you are aware, my interest in this subject is around the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, where schools are given a definition of a racist incident and what they are expected to do in the circumstances, which is to record, report and publish. In researching online, I found it difficult to find any results on this. All I could find was material about filling in forms. An academy in Swindon said that:

“Schools should be aware that there is no … requirement to collect data relating to racial incident reporting as academy schools are not obliged to share this information with the LA”.


The Parent Zone website states that:

“Schools are required to record and respond to racist incidents”.


What steps have the Government taken to make sure that schools take racist incidents seriously and report and publish them on an annual basis?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

The noble Baroness raises an important point. As I said earlier, schools should develop their own approaches to monitor bullying, including racist bullying, and exercise their own judgment on what will work best for their pupils. We have not gone down the route of mandating figures to be published because, for some schools, it will mean recording incidents so that they can monitor incident numbers and identify where bullying is recurring between the same pupils, but other schools may prefer to survey their pupils anonymously to identify bullying trends and gauge how safe pupils feel at school. As I have said, it is work on the ground that counts.