The group is committed to exploring the issue of racism in schools and creating safer and more inclusive school environments for Black children in Lambeth and Southwark. The work of the group is rooted in the strength of collective experience working within these communities and extensive networks that enable meaningful engagement with key stakeholders.

The group chose to take a community-led approach from the outset of this project, focusing on amplifying the voices of students, parents, educators, and community leaders to develop practical, locally relevant solutions with a goal to produce outputs that complement and enhance existing frameworks, offering hyper-local insights and fostering cross-sector collaboration.

In December 2024 I was honoured to be invited to join this dynamic project team as a Strategic Lead, bringing into what was a highly experienced, highly astute project team, seasoned expertise in project management, to provide structure, timely planning and enablement for the team to execute against a host of deliverables within a very short window of time, whilst also contributing to the quality metrics of the project, through professional scrutiny and the intersection of my own lived experiences as a father of Black teenage boys navigating the UK education system and also my internal insights with the Education system, as a former governor and chair of the finances and general purposes committee for a London Secondary Academy.

The strength of The Race Equity in Education Group is in the explorative nature of the project, anchored by an unwavering commitment to cross-sector collaboration, local expertise, co-production and intersectional insights. The agile mindset that the group have fully embraced, together with a strong commitment to community engagement and genuine co-production throughout the project, has facilitated continuous improvement and in particular meaningful stakeholder engagement, a crucial ingredient to achieving project objectives. This has already achieved significant buy-in from young people, educators, community leaders and parents wanting to contribute and ensure their voice is centred.

This approach has enabled listening, rapid learning, adaptation, management of expectations and a balance of the pragmatic and optimistic, which has ultimately cleared a pathway for a truly organic community-led, community centric set of outputs and outcomes, that will help promote safer, more inclusive school environments for Black children in Lambeth and Southwark.

This project is funded by Impact on Urban Health through The Ubele Initiative.