As parents of children with additional needs, we experience many difficult situations and feelings that give us a great deal of shared understanding. It’s what makes us a community. But within the SEND community, there are people from many cultures, colours, countries, and walks of life. And that means we can never assume all our experiences are the same.
With this in mind, today’s SNJ in Conversation tackles the often overlooked (or ignored) issues around race, racism, intersectionality and disproportionality within the SEND world. Joining me to discuss these difficult but vital issues are SNJ’s associate editor, Marguerite Haye, who is a former headteacher, and now head of SEND at Sunshine Support, and Venessa Bobb, founder of A2ndvoice, a small voluntary group run by parents and carers of autistic children and adults, and branch officer of the National Autistic Society (NAS) Lambeth Autism Group.
Intersectionality: Coined in 1989 by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how race, class, gender, and other individual characteristics “intersect” with one another and overlap.
Disproportionality: When a minority group’s numbers in special education are statistically higher than they should be, they are considered disproportionate.
Why we need to talk about Race and SEND
Links referred to in the episode
Here are links to all the references mentioned during this conversation:
- Foluke Adebisi (2019): The Only Accurate Part of ‘BAME’ is the ‘and’…
- Bernard Coard (1971): Making Black Children Subnormal in Britain
- Oxford University (2018): The unequal representation of ethnic minorities in special educational in England: Extent, causes and consequences
- Sir William Macpherson (1999): Report of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry
- Dr Remi Joseph-Salisbury(2020): Racism in Secondary Schools
- YouTube video (2017): Privilege/ Class/ Social Inequalities Explained in a $100 Race
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Further articles
- Where is the research into Black autism and ADHD?
- Teacher Trainees Are More Likely To Misread Black Children As Angry Than White Children
- Marguerite Haye’s articles on Special Needs Jungle
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Previously Renata has been at the forefront of successfully changing government policy so interventions are needs-led and no longer diagnosis-led, and creating the world’s first specialist nurse for undiagnosed children at Great Ormond Street Hospital.
She also helped establish and grow the first online support community for families of undiagnosed children and spearheaded the very first undiagnosed children’s awareness day, including producing information videos that were shown in parliament.
She is a regular speaker on TV and at events, is an RSA Fellow and the mother of three children with disabilities, two of whom have complex needs and one of whom also has complex medical needs.
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