Blog

The Department for Education has produced a guidance document for schools when they re-open in September after the Covid-19 closures.  ROTA has some thoughts.  

The period of lockdown has proved particularly challenging for some pupils, particularly those from disadvantaged communities. Refugees, asylum seekers, children from some BAME communities and from Gipsy, Roma and Traveller families have had difficulty accessing support and education resources.  

Meghan’s Blackness has lost its sparkle even quicker than I originally envisioned when I wrote an initial comment piece shortly after the royal wedding. As I alluded to at the time and reiterate here, the sparkle of Meghan’s Blackness could not last because at its core Britain is an institutionally racist country.

NHS England is consulting community members and community-led organisations on their Long Term Plan. The Local Healthwatch in Hounslow has been commissioned to undertake consultations to hear from "disadvantaged groups" about their experiences with the NHS.

You may well have missed it under the Brexit deluge but Theresa May announced a major reform of the Mental Health Act this month – the first for 30 years.

She had commissioned Sir Simon Wessely, Regius Professor of Psychiatry at King’s College London and president of the Royal Society of Medicine to examine the legal state of Britain’s mental health system.

His report came out earlier this month. Frankly it is full of warm words but proposes scant action and dumps the problem of better treatment for mental health patients on the NHS.

A number of people have approached me with regards to Trevor Phillips recent article in the Mail newspaper calling for the police to be made exempt of race equality laws to allow them to carry out more stop and search operations on predominantly young black boys in areas with high levels of violent crime.

The report by Simon Wessely, former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, is headed ‘Modernising the Mental Health Act’ and subtitled ‘increasing choice, reducing compulsion’. There is nothing we can object to in this report except that it fails to recommend any legislative changes at all that would reduce institutional racism. And this is in spite of assurances given by Simon Wessely earlier this year that race was on his agenda for the Review; and that - together with the Race Equality Foundation (REF) - ROTA submitted specific suggestions for such legal changes.

Since 2012 ROTA has been gathering evidence on informal school exclusions - and its various guises such ‘off rolling’ and ‘home schooling’ -  to the detriment of pupils and their families who have experienced this. We also have evidence that young BAME pupils may be disproportionately affected.  It comes as no surprise to ROTA that not only is this practice continuing in 2018 but may be increasing.