Sowing Seeds of Success

“Growing up as a Black child in Britain during the 70s and 80s was very disempowering” related one of the women we interviewed. Given the systemic failings and racism within the education system, this is unsurprising. In 1965, the Department of Education and Skills (DES) defined the task of educating the children of the Windrush Generation as ‘the successful assimilation of immigrant children’. The focus on assimilation rather than on learning was further characterized by a series of ad hoc responses to the educational needs of immigrant pupils which included strategies designed to compensate for their assumed deficiencies while causing minimum disruption to the educational needs of White British children. One such strategy was to classify children with educational difficulties as ‘Educationally Sub-normal,’ a label that was disproportionately applied to Black children resulting in them being sent to special schools and receiving a substandard education, with consequences lasting into adulthood. This chapter explores how Abasindi dismantled the ‘cultural deficit’ assumptions about Black people and adopted a vision of education as taking place not only in the classroom but wherever people are. The children we came into contact with were exposed to a spectrum of positive black influences building up their proficiency not only in maths, the sciences and English, but also developing skills for self-care and raising self-esteem.