School scraps ‘racist’ hair rules as they’re influenced by ‘white supremacy’

[editor]

More headteachers like this, please:

A headteacher has given pupils free reign to wear their hair however they like after abandoning ‘racist’ appearance rules.

Desmond Deehan might look like your typical headmaster, but he has introduced radical changes to both the curriculum and uniform policies at Townley Grammar School in Bexleyheath, southeast London.

Speaking from his office, Mr Deehan, 52, said more than half of his ‘bright and hardworking’ students are from black African families, and they were being singled out because their afro-textured hair did not follow Eurocentric expectations around appearance. He said his team talked with students and it became clear low-level sanctions around hair ‘mattered a lot’ to them.

He told Metro.co.uk: ‘By listening and talking to students we realised this was a racist behaviour. This should be a protected characteristic for black African heritage pupils. In the same way language and the colour of your skin is.

‘They have no choice around their hair. It is part of their genetic makeup that their hair grows in a particular way and requires certain management around it. To ignore that is a result of an institutionally racist perspective.’

But it’s not just the appearance rules that have changed at the school. The entire curriculum has been decolonised, with sweeping changes made to English literature, history and the sciences.

An Inspector Calls by JB Priestley has been replaced with Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman, while A level students are getting to grips with The Color Purple by Alice Walker, rather than Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

The Science department has been tasked with showing how European theories were influenced by the wider world context.

History students learn about immigration to Britain and the Black Lives Matter campaign, and less about English Kings and Queens.

The school has introduced a unit on slavery with a focus on British black history.

Mr Deehan said: ‘Most students in UK schools learn an awful lot about the black civil rights movement in the US and nothing about the black civil rights movement in the UK.

‘There’s a real gap in the understanding of black history in the UK. Although black history month has been really helpful it doesn’t go that far. There is a fundamental need to look at the curriculum and what we teach.


‘What we teach and what is in our curriculum is as much a product of empire and colonialism as our rules around behaviour and uniform are.’

Mr Deehan added it is only a matter of time before schools recognise they are ‘influenced by a history of white supremacy’.

School scraps ‘racist’ hair rules as they’re influenced by ‘white supremacy’

The grammar school has introduced radical changes to both the curriculum and uniform policies to face up to ‘colonialism and white supremacy’.

metro.co.uk

 

[existentialist]

I predict a "Political Correctness Gawn Maaaaaad" reaction to this

Also, I like his shoes. That navy suit/tan brogues combo has something going for it...

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Cool.

Fucking absurd that any school even has 'hair rules'.

 

[The39thStep]

The entire curriculum has been decolonised,

 

[Mr Moose]

Won’t someone think of the local newspapers and the pics they always have of parents looking cross next to kids with ‘offending’ hairstyles? It’s a national pastime.

 

[8ball]

The entire curriculum has been decolonised.

 

[Proper Tidy]

I predict a "Political Correctness Gawn Maaaaaad" reaction to this

Also, I like his shoes. That navy suit/tan brogues combo has something going for it...

Are they brogues? Maybe my eyes are shit but I can't see any holes, look like derbys or oxfords to me. More of a chestnut than a tan too #shoechat

 

[8ball]

Fucking absurd that any school even has 'hair rules'.

Was it a Bond film or something where the evil assassin lady had a knife plaited into the end of her ponytail?

 

[8ball]

Are they brogues? Maybe my eyes are shit but I can't see any holes, look like derbys or oxfords to me. More of a chestnut than a tan too #shoechat

I also approve of the shoes, but disagree with the article saying he looks like a "typical headmaster".
He looks like an iconoclastic bowel surgeon.

 

[Proper Tidy]

Anyway not having hair rules and teaching about slavery and civil rights etc in UK context instead of learning fat henry the bastard's wives by rote sounds like good things. Have never heard of alice walker but what's the problem with the handmaid's tale?

 

[8ball]

Anyway not having hair rules and teaching about slavery and civil rights etc in UK context instead of learning fat henry the bastard's wives by rote sounds like good things. Have never heard of alice walker but what's the problem with the handmaid's tale?

I think The Color Purple is a good choice.

 

[Proper Tidy]

I think The Color Purple is a good choice.

Ah wait there, I have heard of it I watched the film

 

[JimW]

his team talked with students

Madness, sheer madness.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I think The Color Purple is a good choice.

Handmaid's tale is a good choice as well, tbf. It's replacing one good book with another in this instance.

 

[8ball]

Handmaid's tale is a good choice as well, tbf. It's replacing one good book with another in this instance.

Fair enough - I don't really know anything about Handmaid's Tale.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Fair enough - I don't really know anything about Handmaid's Tale.

I don't know anything about An Inspector Calls, but that looks good as well. I don't think it's so much about individual works being bad so needing changing, more a broadening of representation. Questioning 'the canon' (although The Color Purple is probably in that canon nowadays).

 

[existentialist]

Are they brogues? Maybe my eyes are shit but I can't see any holes, look like derbys or oxfords to me. More of a chestnut than a tan too #shoechat

Fair comment - I didn't look that closely. I tend to categorise brown shoes into two types - "light tan" and "dark tan". I shall add "chestnut" to the palette

 

[8ball]

I don't know anything about An Inspector Calls, but that looks good as well. I don't think it's so much about individual works being bad so needing changing, more a broadening of representation.

Yeah, he's integrating some relevance for his students into the curriculum generally, and ditching a rule which was only ever about control. Right-wing press will do their usual thing with it hoping to whip up some ire, I expect.

Although the hedmaster DOES mention genetics in the context of race so an eye should be kept on him in case of any other Nazi-type ideas...

 

[Marty1]

Is this headmaster a woke supremacist then?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Is this headmaster a woke supremacist then?

You not fucked off yet?

 

[ElizabethofYork]

Do you consider this headmaster as a lefty academic, Marty1 ?

 

[8ball]

Is this headmaster a woke supremacist then?

This is the first use of the term I've seen. So... dunno.

 

[8ball]

You not fucked off yet?

Tbf the Metro has deliberately worded the headline in a manner it knows is likely to annoy some people.

 

[killer b]

Handmaid's tale is a good choice as well, tbf. It's replacing one good book with another in this instance.

There was an interesting article in the LRB the other week that touched on the racial politics of Handmaids Tale: I love her to bits · LRB 07 November 2019

Atwood has said that she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale as a ‘warning’: ‘I have never believed it can’t happen here. I’ve never believed that. And more and more people are joining me in that lack of belief.’ But the most terrible things that happen to Offred in the novel have already happened to women in America, just not to white ones. There are no black people in The Handmaid’s Tale, even though, as the critic Priya Nair has argued, the story ‘takes from the oppression of black women and applies it indiscriminately to white women’. Once you see this, you can’t unsee it. The narrator is kidnapped and separated from her husband and child; her name is changed and she’s forbidden to read or write; she’s raped in order to have a chance of bearing children, who will be taken away from her. But what’s exciting about The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t that we’re made to sympathise with women who were slaves, or who are now in America’s prisons, or who live in Afghanistan or Yemen, but that even the most powerful white women are invited (or ‘warned’) to imagine themselves as victims.

 

[The39thStep]

I also approve of the shoes, but disagree with the article saying he looks like a "typical headmaster".
He looks like an iconoclastic bowel surgeon.

He's not the Headmaster , he is the chief executive of the Odyssey Trust for Education a private company that runs this selective all girls decolonised grammar school,. This school was in a programme I watched last year or so about who gets into Grammar Schools.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

There was an interesting article in the LRB the other week that touched on the racial politics of Handmaids Tale: I love her to bits · LRB 07 November 2019

Atwood has said that she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale as a ‘warning’: ‘I have never believed it can’t happen here. I’ve never believed that. And more and more people are joining me in that lack of belief.’ But the most terrible things that happen to Offred in the novel have already happened to women in America, just not to white ones. There are no black people in The Handmaid’s Tale, even though, as the critic Priya Nair has argued, the story ‘takes from the oppression of black women and applies it indiscriminately to white women’. Once you see this, you can’t unsee it. The narrator is kidnapped and separated from her husband and child; her name is changed and she’s forbidden to read or write; she’s raped in order to have a chance of bearing children, who will be taken away from her. But what’s exciting about The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t that we’re made to sympathise with women who were slaves, or who are now in America’s prisons, or who live in Afghanistan or Yemen, but that even the most powerful white women are invited (or ‘warned’) to imagine themselves as victims.

Ah ok. Interesting take.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

He's not the Headmaster , he is the chief executive of the Odyssey Trust for Education a private company that runs this selective all girls decolonised grammar school,. This school was in a programme I watched last year or so about who gets into Grammar Schools.

ugh.

 

[emanymton]

Cool.

Fucking absurd that any school even has 'hair rules'.

Yeah I think I'd have preferred it if he said we are scrapping hair rules as it is fuck all to do with us.

 

[8ball]

He's not the Headmaster , he is the chief executive of the Odyssey Trust for Education a private company that runs this selective all girls decolonised grammar school,. This school was in a programme I watched last year or so about who gets into Grammar Schools.

Hmmm. Article says both 'headmaster' and 'headteacher' (though it's the Metro, so pinch of salt obviously).
Companies House lists his occupation as 'Headteacher'.

I don't know how all this 'academy' stuff works though, tbf.

 

[The39thStep]

Hmmm. Article says both 'headmaster' and 'headteacher' (though it's the Metro, so pinch of salt obviously).
Companies House lists his occupation as 'Headteacher'.

I don't know how all this 'academy' stuff works though, tbf.

He was the Headteacher but things have moved on and indeed upwards StackPath