No Outsiders: Everyone Different, Everyone Welcome

Preparing Children for Life in Modern Britain

Andrew Moffat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000040944
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The No Outsiders programme promotes an ethos of inclusion and tolerance, and aims to prepare children for life in modern Britain. Expanding the scheme published in the 2015 book, No Outsiders in Our Schools, this book is designed to further support educators as they make the No Outsiders ethos part of their school culture at a time when messages of fear and division are rife. Written by a practising teacher whose work to promote equality has been globally celebrated, this book provides lesson plans for use in classes from EYFS to Year 6.

Key features of the resource include:

• plans for delivering the No Outsiders message through assemblies and classes, allowing for a flexible approach

• recommendations for picture books that can be used to support messages of diversity and inclusion

• a scheme of work designed to meet the requirements of the Equalities Act (2010) and support teachers as they prepare to implement the new Relationships Education curriculum (2020).

It is the responsibility of primary schools to promote equality and diversity. This is a vital resource for all teachers and trainee teachers as they prepare children for a life where diversity is embraced and there is no fear of difference.

Chapter 1

No Outsiders in 2020

No Outsiders in 2020

In the May half-term holiday of 2019, two news articles caught my attention; one is from Cornwalllive, ‘Brave 11-year-old speaks of racist abuse by Cornwall primary children’ (Wilkinson, 2019), where a young boy speaks of the isolation he feels since his family moved from Liverpool to the south of England. During the interview the boy says,

It makes me feel kind of sad because I’m just trying to make friends. I’ve had loads of comments from people who don’t want me there … When I wake up in the morning it’s like a burden. But it shouldn’t be a chore really, it should just be going to school but every morning before going to school I feel nervous about what’s going to happen there.

Three days later the BBC reported ‘Children whitening skin to avoid racial hate crime, NSPCC finds’ (BBC, 2019) which states figures of racial abuse and bullying of children have risen by one-fifth since 2016, with on average 29 children suffering race hate crime every day. In the article, a 10-year-old girl says,

My friends won’t hang out with me anymore because people started asking why they were friends with someone who had dirty skin. I was born in the UK, but bullies tell me to go back to my own country. I don’t understand because I’m from the UK … I tried to make my face whiter before using make up so that I can fit in. I just want to enjoy going to school.

The world in 2020 presents schools with huge challenges as communities react to the disharmony around them and people retreat into ‘ingroups’ fearful of ‘outsiders’. Educators across the UK would have been horrified to hear of the attack in a school playground in Huddersfield in 2018 on a 15-year-old refugee from Syria, filmed on the phone of a fellow pupil and later posted on social media. Following an investigation, footage emerged of the boy’s sister being pulled to the ground in a separate incident as it appears pupils try to pull off her hijab (Cockburn, 2018).

These are not isolated incidents; I’ve taught in schools for 24 years and I have never known a climate like this for teachers and schools. Our children are not wrapped up in cotton wool; they are not immune to the messages of fear and division filtering down from voices of influence. In October 2018 the BBC reported on a rise of 40% in religious hate crimes recorded by police in the year 2017–2018 compared to the previous year. Data from the Home Office showed a record 94,098 hate incidents recorded between April 2017 and March 2018, up 17% from the previous year. Three-quarters of the incidents were classified as race related (BBC, 2018a).

We are witnessing a rise in far-right activity across Europe and America that I have not seen in my life time. Speaking to The Observer in October 2018, Sara Khan, Britain’s first counter-extremism commissioner, described her visits to 13 cities in the UK:

I was really shocked that in every place I visited I heard deep concerns about the activity and impact of the far right.

Councils across the country raised the impact the far right demonstrations have on whole towns, exploiting tensions and stoking division. I repeatedly heard about a climate of intolerance and polarisation.

(Townsend, 2018)

Writing in The Guardian in June 2018, Jonathan Freedland highlighted the dehumanising language used by Donald Trump when talking about migrants, which he argues echoes Nazi propaganda used 90 years previously:

You don’t have to go back to 1930s Germany to know that the first step towards catastrophe is the dehumanisation of a reviled group. It happened that way in Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s, and it’s happening in today’s United States. ‘These aren’t people, they are animals,’ the president said last month. They want to ‘pour in to and infest our country’, he tweeted this week. ‘Infest’ is a word reserved for rats and insects. This is language of those seeking to choke off human sympathy, by suggesting those suffering are not even human.

(Freedland, 2018)

What is the impact of using such language on a global scale? When people hear figures of authority using discriminatory and divisive language, is there a trickle-down effect? Professor Mary Anne Franks argues there is a real danger that others are emboldened by the behaviour: ‘You have children seeing the president of the US talking like this then they will think that is the way to talk. I don’t think we will see the full effect of this for decades’ (Buncombe, 2018).

In my own school this year I have experienced extremely challenging reactions to the inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, plus (LGBT+) equality in the No Outsiders resource. This has been well documented in the media and, at the time of writing, continues. This book is not a response to the current challenges at my school, nor is it an exploration of cause and effect; that book may come in time, once the dust has settled and I can reflect, learning lessons for the future. This resource came about simply because it is four years since I wrote No Outsiders in Our School: Teaching the Equality Act in Primary Schools (Moffat, 2016) and there are many newer picture books available that can be used in schools to promote the message of equality.

In the four years since the first volume of plans, No Outsiders has taken off and the response has been phenomenal. I am still working full time as Assistant Head at Parkfield school and until January 2019 the No Outsiders scheme was just one example of equality teaching in primary education. It still is in hundreds of primary settings around the UK and I spend on average one or two days out of school every week in schools delivering lessons and training staff. In the summer of 2019, No Outsiders became a registered charity. The challenges in my own school only serve to confirm how vital this work is in primary settings. After all, we know how this is going to end; it is going to end in years to come with all primary schools confidently delivering this work. We just have to get through this difficult bit.

For let us not forget the horrific consequences of not teaching about equality in primary schools: from children scared of racist bullying trying to whiten their faces in the UK to examples of children taking their own lives after homophobic bullying; 9-year-old Leia Pierce from Denver (BBC, 2018); 17-year-old Dom Sowa who endured bullying from the age of 14 when he came out on Facebook (Griffiths, 2019); Madissen Foxx Paulsen and best friend Sophia Leaf-Abrahamson, both aged 11 from North Dakota – Madissen’s father believes the girls were bullied for their close relationship (Braidwood, 2019). The Guardian led with the headline ‘Homophobic and transphobic hate crimes surge in England and Wales’ (Marsh et al., 2019) on 14 June 2019 and in the same month there was widespread condemnation of the attack on a lesbian couple on a London bus resulting in charges against four teenagers, the youngest of whom was 15 years old (Osbourne, 2019).

In April 2019 Nigel Shelby, a 15-year-old student from Alabama, tragically took his own life after being bullied for his sexuality. At a school board meeting following Nigel’s death, the Huntsville City Schools Superintendent was reported as saying:

It’s time as society to value, respect and uplift one another … It is time for us to come together. Now is the time to teach our students and children the values of acceptance, kindness, generosity, helpfulness and just basically just being a human being.

(Marr, 2019)

The school principal released a statement on its Facebook page: ‘We were saddened this morning to learn of the death of Nigel Shelby, one of our 9th grade students. Our thoughts and prayers are with the family during this difficult time’ (Marr, 2019).

Consider the response from the school and superintendent for a moment: is it enough? There is no mention of the reasons for Nigel’s death and no reference to the school’s response to homophobia. Indeed, the school was criticised for the lack of direct response to the homophobia that was the catalyst for this terrible event.

In 2020 we cannot sit on the fence when it comes to the teaching of equality, nor can we pick and choose which aspects of equality we feel comfortable with. All people, regardless of race, religion, sex, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, age must feel welcome in schools with a clear ethos that spells out acceptance. Every difference needs to be included and this teaching must begin in primary schools. Children do not switch on an identity dial on their first day at secondary school; children’s identities are being formed, evaluated and re-evaluated all the way through their formative years. We are all intersectional; one identity does not suffice to make up who we are. Children must be encouraged, and indeed taught, to explore identity and develop confidence in who they are as they navigate childhood and adolescence. Children must also be taught to accept the identities of others to avoid tragedies like those of Nigel, Leia, Dom, Madissen and Sophia.

In my own navigation of the challenges at my school, which I shall write about in detail elsewhere, I have had moments of doubt around the No Outsiders ethos: is it the right thing to carry on in the face of such opposition? But after months of reflection and dialogue with teachers from across the country I have reached the conclusion that there is no better time for a No Outsiders ethos. In the absence of an ethos where we teach children to identify, respect and accept their differences, what is there? What is the opposite to a No Outsiders ethos? Should we teach children that there are Outsiders and some people don’t belong?

I am confident that the lesson plans in this volume develop the original scheme and improve the outcomes. About half of the original texts have remained. Red Rockets and Rainbow Jelly (Sharratt and Heap, 2003), This Is Our House (Rosen, 1996) and Elmer (Mckee, 1989) are evergreens I cannot imagine replacing; however, all lesson plans have been tweaked and updated. The lesson plan for And Tango Makes Three (Richardson and Parnell, 2007) is completely rewritten to reflect the responses to the book in some places around the world and consider why some books might be considered inappropriate. I have added lesson plans for 26 new texts in this resource and there is now a total of 42 books in the scheme, seven more than in the original. I highly recommend schools use Letterbox Library (www.letterboxlibrary.com) to purchase the book packs as if any books go out of print, we work together to identify a replacement and a new plan is provided in the book pack; in this way schools are never missing a book.

My advice to schools who are already using the original No Outsiders scheme is to continue with that scheme but add the new texts here in to the planning for the year. One of the aims in selecting the texts was to improve the breadth of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) characters and genders. There is no doubt in the four years since my first resource there have been huge strides forward in representation in picture books and the selection of titles here reflects that.

I am often asked where are the specific books about, for example, faith or about disability and, in answer, there are none that meet that criteria, in the same way there are no titles specifically about LGBT+ awareness. For me, the most important consideration when using a book to teach about No Outsiders is the story; I do not use issue-based books. I use books with interesting characters and stories that can then be related to issues, but the story always comes first.

There is also an aim to include references to well-being and mental health in the le...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Chapter 1. No Outsiders in 2020
• Chapter 2. Tolerate, celebrate, accept
• Chapter 3. So much good in the world: No Outsiders assemblies
• Chapter 4. No Outsiders masterclass
• Chapter 5. Other voices
• Chapter 6. A festival of books
• Chapter 7. The resource
• Appendix