The election period leading up to the 6 May national poll officially started yesterday and, in at least one way, it was like the end of every other term of the Scottish Parliament since 1999: there had been no women of colour among its 129 MSPs over the five-year term. A cursory look at the candidates for the election suggests that is likely to change - and not before time.

“If I can’t see myself there, I can’t imagine myself there,” Professor Rowena Arshad wrote in Tes Scotland in 2018. That applies to any walk of life - if you cannot see any MSPs like you in Parliament then it’s hard to envisage sitting there yourself - but Arshad was specifically talking about teaching. If few people like you are teachers (and if those who are report insidious racism and a dearth of opportunities for career progression) then you are less inclined to go into teaching, and a vicious cycle loops endlessly on.

That is why the final report by the Diversity in the Teaching Profession Working Group, chaired by Arshad, is hugely important. It is the culmination of years of work and it should act as a catalyst for landmark change in the teaching profession.

The numbers are stark: some 1.6 per cent of the teaching population recorded in 2019 figures was from a minority ethnic background, against 4 per cent of the general population in Scotland.

Improving diversity in teaching

To get those figures to match by 2030 - the current target - would mean increasing the number of minority ethnic teachers recruited into the profession by around 200 per year, across all initial teacher education providers from August 2022 to August 2030 inclusive.

It’s worth noting, too, that before very long there will be figures from a new national census, and if the teaching population is to reflect the general population, then the 4 per cent target may have to be revised upwards.

But this is far more than a numbers game. The report underlines that “racism continues to be experienced…across all aspects of society, including education”. It has, however, “mutated” in recent times: “some overt and deliberate racism” remains, but “microaggressions and unconscious bias are now more common”.

And schools are not exempt from this. Racism, as we have previously reported, can manifest in all sorts of subtle and insidious ways: from not bothering to get someone’s name right, to assuming that a Muslim teacher will have an expert view on terrorism, to teachers who see no route to promotion.

Even where hearts are in the right place, complacency is a big problem: the idea that racism largely amounts to the egregious actions of a bigoted minority gets the rest of us off the hook, implicitly absolving us of any guilt and making us less likely to see and object to more covert and institutional racism.

It is essential that those with power and influence call out racism and, to be fair, we have seen that happen more in recent times. In 2018, for example, Ken Muir, then chief executive of the General Teaching Council for Scotland, told Tes Scotland he was “sickened” by the racism he still saw in education and the little progress that had been made in addressing it over the previous three decades.

There is, it should be said, a lot of great work going on in Scottish schools to tackle racism. Nonetheless, complacency and under-representation remain formidable barriers to progress.

This new report should, then, mark a turning point, with its calls not only for recruitment of far more minority ethnic teachers but also for everyone in Scottish education to play a proactive role in countering racism. “Being anti-racist means acknowledging that racism exists, even when we do not immediately see it or understand it in our individual contexts,” the report says. That is an essential message for all of us.

@Henry_Hepburn

This article originally appeared in the 26 March 2021 issue under the headline “Let’s make this a turning point for diversity in teaching”