Black History Month

Wes Streeting Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Abena Oppong-Asare) on securing this important debate. I count myself privileged having grown up in the east end of London and then, like many communities, having moved further out towards the constituency that I now live in and represent.

My upbringing was shaped by diversity. I was lucky to go to school with pupils from a wide range of backgrounds, but predominantly white working-class or Bangladeshi communities. I was lucky to go to an inner-city state school here in London, just up the road, where children were drawn from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds, but particularly black African and Caribbean communities. That made me not only entirely comfortable with the diversity of our country, but actively welcome it. I really feel that I benefited from an education that exposed me to people from a wide range of backgrounds, faiths and cultures. We cannot understand what it is to be human unless we understand the diversity of humanity and different human experiences; that is the whole purpose of education.

If I may say so, some of the debate around black history, whether in this Chamber or out in the country, only serves to underline the shortcomings of our history curriculum. From some contributions, it might be thought that people had never read English or British history, that black history is something else, or that, even more bizarrely, talking about Britain’s imperial, colonial past is somehow rewriting history.

Having been educated in some great state schools in this city and in diverse communities, I do not recall even being told about that history, yet it is a central part of our island story, of explaining the diversity of the country that we are today, and of understanding the strength of our international, bilateral and multilateral relationships. We should be more confident about the country that we are today so that we can confront some of the darknesses of our own past.

Why are we as a country so insecure about ourselves and our identity that we feel we lose something by telling an accurate story about our country’s island past? We do not lose anything from that. I do not feel that I lose anything, as a white working-class British kid, English kid, Londoner, from hearing the stories of other people’s journeys to this country. When we look at the story of disadvantage in our country today, particularly educational disadvantage, and at the over-representation of minority communities, particularly black communities, in our criminal justice system or in low pay or underemployment, we find that these are entirely entrenched with existing baked-in inequalities in our country, which we understand from a deeper understanding of our past. We cannot correct these injustices and put our country on a path to a better future unless we fully understand how we got to where we are today.

There are plenty of inspirational stories to tell, but if we are serious about educating out prejudice and about raising ambitions and aspirations, it is important that we tell the whole story. It is important that people see role models from backgrounds such as theirs. That is one reason I was proud to be working, before being elected to this House, for one of the country’s leading LGBT rights organisations, Stonewall, on exactly this issue, so that children growing up can understand the diversity of the country and world they are living in and might see role models of the kind of people they want to grow up to be, whether business leaders, politicians—God forbid—creatives or entrepreneurs. This is also true for black, Asian and other ethnic minority communities, who too often go through our education system without seeing themselves and their own family stories reflected in the curriculum they are taught. How can that be right?

[Kemi Badenoch]

The hon. Gentleman refers to what he was taught when he was young, but is he aware of what is taught in the curriculum today? It seems as though he is talking about a completely different curriculum from that which children today are being taught. Does he not know of any of the modules that cover these issues?

[Wes Streeting]

I am so grateful to the Minister for that question, because, after my slight rant, it brings me back to the issue I wanted to talk about, which is schools. In 2008, the last Labour Government said that black history should be made compulsory within the curriculum, but let us look at what we see today. Of the 59 GCSE history modules available from the three biggest exam boards, Edexcel, AQA and OCR, just 12 explicitly mention black history—only five mention the history of black people in Britain, and the rest are about black people in the US, other countries or the transatlantic slave trade. Only up to 11% of GCSE students in 2019 were studying modules that made any reference to the contribution of black people in British history. No modules in the GCSE syllabus for the most popular exam board, Edexcel, mentioned black people in Britain. A survey of more than 55,000 people conducted by Impact of Omission found that 86.2% learned about the Tudors, 72.1% learned about the battle of Hastings and 72.6% learned about the great fire of London, whereas barely a third, 36.6%, learned about the transatlantic slave trade, 9.9% learned about the role of slavery in the British industrial revolution and 7.6% learned about the British colonisation of Africa. I just do not think that that is an accurate reflection or a proper telling of our history.

Of course history is contested and education is a battle of ideas, but why are we so afraid of just telling the story, letting history be what it is and giving young people the critical capacity to draw their own conclusions? That is where we have to get to, and it is a matter of great regret that in 2020 the Department for Education said that teachers

“can include black voices and history as a natural part of lessons in all subjects”.

It was not “must” but “can”—“should” would be nice. Just saying that they should do so would be an improvement, but I would prefer it to be “must”.

Finally, I wish to single out one of my heroes, as I do not think she has been mentioned. I refer to Baroness Valerie Amos, who was the first black woman in government; the first black woman in the Cabinet; the first black woman to be the Leader of either of the Houses of Parliament; the first black Lord President of the Council; the first black woman vice-chancellor—of SOAS, the School of African and Oriental Studies—in 2015; and the first black person to be master of an Oxford college, in 2020. What I find so remarkable about Valerie’s experiences is not that she is the first or that she is a trailblazer, because that should come as no surprise to any of us; what does surprise me is that it took a black woman in this country so long to get to where so many other black woman doubtless should have been. That is the story of the country we are today. Let us be proud of our history, but let us tell it properly, educate future generations and learn from the worst of our history to shape the best British future.