Expelling Lessons: Two-Tier Racial Justice in British Schools

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There have been plenty of serious crimes for the UK police force to busy themselves with of late, from mass machete-fights in the streets, to…well, more mass machete-fights in the streets. And more. And more. To judge by footage, a disproportionate number (though not all) of the amateur sword-fighters involved appear to be both black and schoolboys. Import the descendants of the Mau-Mau, end up with a society ruled by the laws of the Mau-Mau.

Yet facing down gangs of largely black youths armed with pangas is difficult for UK coppers for two main reasons: one, they might get stabbed, and two, they might get accused of racism. Therefore, British bobbies now far prefer wasting their own time doing things like sending out no fewer than six uniformed officers to the home of a pair of concerned parents in the small Hertfordshire town of Borehamwood who had committed the monstrous crime of sending some e-mails.

The couple targeted, Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine, stood accused of contacting their disabled and severely epileptic nine-year-old daughter’s elementary school with wholly non-threatening electronic complaints a little too many times. Allen and Levine had then extended their gross delinquency by adding to their criticism of Cowley Hill Primary on a private WhatsApp group. Here, Levine had jokingly asked what the school was going to do about it? Have them arrested? The answer turned out to be “yes.”

Another highly disturbing aspect of the case is that, prior to arresting the pair, the cops, presumably acting upon instruction from the school itself, had made a previous visit and told them to remove their daughter Sascha from Cowley Hill as a student entirely – something the police have no legal right to demand.

It used to be fairly difficult to get yourself kicked out from a British school, but these days there are certain crimes against humanity which can get you expelled from a British place of education immediately. Having parents who know how to use Gmail is one, obviously. But another is the even worse sin of undermining racial justice.

Class Actions

Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine had previously been parent governors on the Cowley Hill schoolboard, something which prompted another former parent governor named Andrew Watts to tell his own story to the newspapers about how easy it was to fall foul of oversensitive UK headteachers (i.e., principals) in the post-BLM era. Watts served on a particular committee in the south-west county of Cornwall with responsibility for deciding whether students from local high schools should be expelled or not. The rather bleeding-heart board did not like recommending that many kids should be kicked out, thinking such measures may severely ruin their future life-chances.

To this end, schools in Watts’ area operated a disciplinary points procedure, whereby childhood offenders were handed out points on a sliding scale for severity of offenses – five points for forgetting your homework, ten points for talking in class, fifty points for beheading your teacher in the name of Allah, that kind of thing. Normally, a child had to accumulate at least 100 points to be so much as considered for expulsion. Even children with 200 or 300 points were sometimes let off, or at least the subject of fevered debate about whether they should be.

One particular eleven-year-old boy who came up before Watts’ schoolboard, however, was different. He only had 19 prior misbehavior points against his name, so was hardly a hardened hooligan. Normally, the only way a child with that minor a previous record could be expelled was if he turned up one day and suddenly did something incredibly serious. And, lo and behold, this was so … for the boy had called another boy a nigger!

The child had uttered this word more than once, across a three-week period, thereby allowing the school to claim this was a pattern of “persistent” misbehavior which thus supposedly warranted permanent expulsion. Andrew Watts disagreed, but at the relevant meeting of headteachers and governors, most of whom will undoubtedly have been white (rural, remote and underpopulated Cornwall still being a 96.8 percent white county), he was the only one to do so. Here’s how Watts described the resultant kangaroo court:

Once they found out they threw the book at him … the head looked positively smug when she appeared before the panel; she thought she was a Good Person doing a Good Thing … And this was why the other governors – who are [supposedly] there to prevent groupthink – went along with it.

So, in order to publicly demonstrate they were not racist, the stupid white liberals committed what may look to some critics like an act of racism themselves, against a child of their own kind, and expelled him for nothing more than the use of a few petty insults; for trivia like that, students normally get a simple detention or telling-off.

Annoyed by the palpable overreaction, Watts “took matters in hand” and wrote to the expelled boy’s mother, telling her he thought the decision completely wrong and laying out precisely why. The school board’s response was immediate: Watts was sacked. He’s lucky he didn’t get arrested.

SEND Them All Back

According to Watts, the expelled boy now sits at home alone all day whilst his parents are out working, waiting for a place at an alternative school to become available, once “he can prove that he is safe enough to be in a room with other children.” You know, just in case he ever happens to call one of them a nigger ever again. If this doesn’t prove possible, I’m sure any offended non-white classmates could always defend themselves against his hurty white words by whipping out their pangas and slicing off his tongue with them.

It’s an interesting case, this, as it seems to go against the general (though highly contestable) narrative that suffering an unjust, racially motivated expulsion from school is a problem which only ever affects black children in the UK. According to the Education Data Lab, the disparities can be summed up in the simple statistic that “black Caribbean pupils were approximately 3.2 times more likely to be permanently excluded” than those of other races.

I’m not going to dispute it, but the traditional common-sense explanation of why this might be so would be “because of their behavior”, e.g., frequently bringing large knives into schools and stabbing one another with them. Yet the only acceptable explanation for these figures in our post-George Floyd world is now “because of racism”, something which campaigners say puts unjustly targeted black stabbers straight on the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

What is the solution to this supposed injustice? One possible measure is to simply relabel black juvenile misbehavior as a form of “Special Educational Needs and Disabilities”, or SEND. This is an increasing scam, in which a once-noble means of diverting extra resources to the genuinely physically or mentally disabled – poor epileptic young Sascha, before she was thrown out of Cowley Hill Primary, for example – has become abused to give little hoodlums of all races an excellent excuse for misbehaving in class “because the doctor says I’ve got a condition.”

An astonishing 1.7 million students (that’s 18 percent) in UK schools are now classified as supposedly having SEND. Black Caribbean students are twice as likely as white British ones to have a particular subset of SEND called SEMH – Social, Emotional and Mental Health problems, conditions collectively and colloquially known to teachers in my day as ‘Little Shit Syndrome’ (LSS).

Emotional Incontinence

A typical media piece bemoaning the tragic plight of such neo-Dickensian mites appeared in left-wing British broadsheet The Guardian last October, concerning Sam, “who lives on a [London] council estate with his Cameroonian mother and has been diagnosed with ADHD and autism.” Despite being eleven years old, Sam is also incontinent, and suffers from a wholly new form of medical condition called “being disregulated”, helpfully defined by the newspaper as “having trouble managing his emotions.” Guess what kind of thing that involves.

Many would say such a child should not be in an ordinary school, as he will prove a severe distraction – and potentially danger – to his fellow classmates. As such, after the boy became “completely disregulated” once again and fell down to the floor screaming in a classroom, teachers tried to persuade his mother to stick Sam in a special pupil referral unit. But she wouldn’t have it, so the school expelled him. Eventually, Sam found a new mainstream school to get kicked out of. Here, a female classmate began bullying him (a rare fate indeed for incontinent students), and, after she pushed him, he pushed her back. Once a teacher intervened to restrain him, Sam then attacked the teacher, leading to a second inevitable expulsion.

“When I got there, he was in floods of tears,” Sam’s mother complained to The Guardian. “He had lashed out but not in anger. He was scared.” So were the girl and his teacher, I’d imagine.

According to the newspaper, this completely typical Cameroonian immigrant was then tragically forced “to give up a ­senior job in publishing and go on to universal credit [welfare benefits] while she fights for her son.” Does the wholly willing generosity of the British taxpayer know no ends?

Even better, liberal human rights lawyers are now teaming up to volunteer to represent similar delinquents for free whenever their cases come up before schoolboards, as part of something called the School Inclusion Project. In the naïve view of white London barrister Ollie Persey, who helped set the whole thing up, delinquency from blacks is generally the fault of the schools, not the blacks themselves: “Behavior that arises from unmet additional [SEND] needs is often profiled by schools as black boys being more violent.”

The Guardian’s article ends with these stirring words:

Persey says his ambition is to end up with no more exclusion hearings to go to. “At the moment, exclusion can be used with impunity,” he said. “We want schools to know that if you permanently exclude, you will be scrutinized.”

Great, glad to hear it, Ollie. Can I assume you’ll be taking up the case of that poor white kid in Cornwall who’s just had his life ruined purely for calling someone a nigger at the age of eleven, then? Or is that not the kind of client you wish to represent for some reason? Tell him to piss himself and attack a teacher, though, and I’m sure you’ll be right by his side, fully pro bono.

School can teach a child many lessons, both academic and social. We often end up forgetting the academic ones, from subjects like Math, Physics and Algebra. The social ones, however, can end up lasting a lifetime. And, for all those boys and girls like little epileptic Sascha and the unnamed lad in Cornwall, the chief social lesson to be learned is this: you are now second-class citizens in your own homeland.