Survivor who became head

The education system was hard for the Windrush generation but they organised to get ahead.

By Sinai Fleary

MANY OF those who arrived on the Empire Windrush, including children, had to quickly adapt to a completely new country and their education system.

Yvonne J Davis, inset, was born in Wolverhampton in the 1950s to Windrush generation Jamaican parents.

Her parents settled in Wolverhampton and that is where she attended primary school.

But looking back, Mrs Davis says she doesn’t have good memories and believes many other Black children who went to the school in the 1950s and 1960s will have had similar experiences.

Speaking to The Voice, she said: “I can’t remember anything good about my schooling, apart from having one good headteacher who listened to me, when I was being bullied out of primary school.”

Mrs Davis said she is “grateful” because the headteacher made the child and her parents go to her home to apologise or they would not be allowed to return to school.

She said: “On reflection of this action, it shows not only the power of school leaders to address issues at a time when you felt all alone.”

She added: “In those days we were in the room, and it was adapt and fit in. The education system didn’t cater for us in any way and that’s why we ended up having the Educationally Subnormal groups that developed in the 1960s.”

Mrs Davis said structurally the system was “not fit for purpose” and failed to cater to the needs of Black students.

She recalls a combination of racism, “low expectations” from teachers, a lack of understanding of Caribbean culture and the pressure to assimilate to British society — as reasons why life was so hard for Black children at the time. She was also subjected to racist name-calling all the time and the “teachers would just dismiss it”.

She said the Black children all “congregated together” and “looked after each other” as a survival technique.

Hundreds of Black children with Caribbean parents — attending British schools in the 1960s and 70s — were labelled as “educationally subnormal” (ESN). They were wrongly sent to ESN schools for children who were believed to have low levels of intelligence.

Black students were sent to these schools at a disproportionate rate, which would have a devastating and long-lasting impact on their education and futures.

Many Black parents, fed up with the racism and poor exam results their children experienced, decided to take action and this birthed the UK Black supplementary school movement. It began during the 1960s and was a collective effort from parents, community activists,

Black teachers and some church leaders.

The groups would run mainly on Saturday mornings and would provide extra lessons in English and maths, but in addition, offered black history lessons as a core focus to counteract the poor media representation of black communities at the time.

Problems

The problems Black children were facing was documented in Bernard Coard’s book How the West Indian Child is made Educationally Subnormal, which was published in May 1971 by New Beacon Books.

The low expectations white teachers had of Black pupils was common and something the Davis family also unfortunately experienced.

A few years into her secondary years, Mrs Davis’ sister arrived in Britain from Jamaica, to join the family once they settled in Wolverhampton — which was also quite common for many Caribbean families.

Her sister passed the British grammar school test in Jamaica and was very “bright”, but according to Mrs Davis she was still put in the bottom set.

Mrs Davis describes her parents as a “formidable force” who went to see the headteacher straight away and the situation was quickly resolved.

She believes one of the legacies the Windrush generation have left on the education system is the “presence” Caribbean communities had within schools up and down the country.

She also stressed that “getting a good education” was always of the utmost importance to Caribbean families and these values were passed on to their children.

In 2000, Mrs Davis made history by becoming the first Black headteacher in Hertfordshire, at a school in Watford.

Looking back on her remarkable career she describes it as challenging, but filled with moments of “enjoyment, satisfaction, and enormous achievement.”

Through “sheer determination and perseverance”, Mrs Davis

STRUGGLE: Black children were subjected to racist name-calling and the ‘teachers would just dismiss it’, according to Yvonne Davis was able to make a difference. Mrs Davis is now retired and runs a charity, Icane Foundation, supporting parents and young people in their confidence to navigate the educational landscape through personal advice, workshops, coaching, and mentoring.

Like her parents, she believes we cannot leave our children’s education in the hands of the system alone.

She says everything she went through “was for the children, for all children and our children.”

Mrs Davis was awarded an MBE for services to education by King Charles III and is a Fellow of the Chartered College of Teaching.

First Black headteachers influenced major change

THE WINDRUSH generation has influenced significant changes to Britain’s school workforce.

In 1967, Tony O’Connor became the UK’s first-ever Black headteacher when he was appointed head at Bearwood Primary School in Smethwick, in the West Midlands. He received years of daily attacks and harassment, but remained headteacher for 16 years.

Two years later, Yvonne Conolly CBE, who was born in Jamaica, became the UK’s first Black female headteacher at just 29 years old. Sadly, the level of racist abuse she received was so brutal, she needed a bodyguard to walk with her to work.

In the same year, Beryl Gilroy, who was born in Guyana, became the first Black female headteacher in London.

Betty Campbell was born in Butetown in Wales in 1934 and raised in Tiger Bay. Her mother was Welsh Barbadian and her Jamaican father came to the UK when he was just 15. She had a tough upbringing and was raised by her mother after her father was killed in the

Second World War. As a child, she was an avid reader and was able to win a high school scholarship.

As a newly qualified Black teacher, she experienced a lot of hostility and got a job at Mount Stuart Primary School, where she taught for 28 years.

In the 1970s, she made history and became the first Black headteacher in Wales.

In October 2017, Mrs Campbell died at the age of 82.

In 2021, a sculpture was unveiled in Cardiff of the pioneering headteacher.