Nursery World - Anti-Racist Leadership: Part 4

Is there a culture of anti-racism in your nursery setting? Liz Pemberton considers how managers can encourage a sense of belonging.

We may not always realise it, but whenever we venture into a new environment there are subtle indicators that we use to make decisions about whether or not we feel that place is for us.

All behaviours transfer messages about the value that we hold in certain places, and these things are both implicit and explicit. As a nursery leader, your aim is to ensure that all families and practitioners feel welcome.

The 4 Es of anti-racist practice

To create a culture of anti-racism in your setting, there must be some explicit guidance which can support you. A culture encapsulates everything, but it must be adopted as a whole-nursery approach. To support this, I have devised ‘The 4 Es of anti-racist practice’:

Embrace all children’s racial, cultural and religious backgrounds, especially when they differ from your own.
Embed a culture of belonging and value among practitioners and children.
Ensure that your practice is culturally sensitive and places the child as the expert of their cultural, racial and religious identity.
Extend learning opportunities for the child by showing interest, expanding conversations and using diverse resources.

These four points can be used as an instructive and accessible tool to support practitioners. I want to go through each point and give some tangible, practical guidance on ways in which we can use them:

Embrace

Use family tree displays at child height in their base rooms as a way to encourage children to see their own families reflected. Encourage parents to bring in photos that display extended family as well as close family friends too.
If children’s racial, cultural or religious backgrounds differ from your own or they are in the minority in the setting, be what Sandra Smidt refers to as ‘an attentive watcher and a sensitive intruder’. Smidt (see References) explores the concept of children displaying unwanted behaviours towards other children who have different coloured skin. She states that ignoring this behaviour is not the way to address this but that you must consider an age-, stage- and ability-appropriate method, which may include taking a child to a quiet place to talk gently to them about how important it is to be nice to people who look different from us.

Embed

When you play music or sing songs, make sure they are representative of the range of cultures that exist in Britain as well as the world. Do not just do this on nominated ‘days’ – for example, St Patrick’s Day or Africa Day – but embed it into your everyday practice.
Be aware of how the concept of ‘cuteness’ influences the ways in which you interact with the children in your setting. Observe which children may get more attention over others and listen closely to how practitioners talk about the hair textures, skin or other physical features of children who are racially minoritised. For example, is the mixed Black child with the loose curly hair and green eyes constantly cooed over, while the darker skinned baby with thicker, more tightly coiled hair is overlooked? Do not hesitate to address this and call it out.

Ensure

Do not make assumptions about the heritage of children. As exemplified in the group exercise (see Box), mentioning you have been to Thailand to a family who are racialised as East or Southeast Asian and whose heritage is Vietnamese is problematic. Children and families will tell you who they are. Position yourself as the learner and not the teacher.
Find out about cultural practices by reading more and exposing yourself to various media and information so you are more culturally sensitive and aware. For example, it is not appropriate for you to ever take off a Sikh child’s Patka.

Extend

Your resources are only as powerful as the practitioners who use them. If you are diversifying the resources that you use make sure that you are leading explicit conversations with your team about why this is important.
Do not just think about dolls but also what is displayed on the walls, what jigsaw puzzles you have, what colour the skin is on the body parts on the flashcards that you use. If you have books with racially minoritised characters in them, are they the protagonists or do they lean into racist stereotypes?

Recruitment and retention

In an ideal world we would all like to see a racially diverse mix of people reflected in the early years workforce (which would also be important for white children too).

In the first feature in this series (Nursery World, January 2022), I referenced Shaddai Tembo’s paper ‘Black educators in (white) settings’, which speaks extensively about the experiences that some of Black early years educators have had.

There are a myriad of reasons that certain ethnic groups are underrepresented, but we cannot ignore that racism is one such factor. There are a range of early years settings up and down the country, even in areas of the UK that would be regarded as ‘multicultural’, where all-white teams exist. I am certainly aware of the pushback that my work has received from parts of the sector who simply do not wish to engage with anti-racist practice and view my talking about race as divisive and racist.

The presence of structural and systemic racism means that this skews our own view of what an early years educator looks like and we all become subject to internalising these stereotypes.

If somebody says ‘nursery practitioner’ to us, we may conjure an image of a white woman, aged 17-25, who didn’t get on to the beauty course at college. Similarly, if somebody says ‘nursery manager’, you may imagine a more mature white woman who has worked in childcare since the 1980s, has an NNEB qualification and started off as that nursery practitioner described above.

It is important to recognise the biases we hold because they feed directly into the recruitment choices that we make, whether we are racialised as white or not. Unconscious bias is a concept that we must understand, but we must not conflate it with racism. That is to say that we must not say one when we mean the other because we are fearful of the word ‘racism’ and what it means. This is why language matters.

Dr Stella Louis and Hannah Betteridge describe unconscious bias as ‘when we intuitively draw on our stereotypes to make value judgements without enough knowledge, evidence, understanding or reflection. Unconscious bias can show itself in a range of ways, including affinity, attribution and confirmation bias, and it may not even chime with our consciously held beliefs.’ We must pay attention to this in our recruitment and selection procedures. Leaders should consider:

your marketing material – are you only showing images of white women?
where you advertise – is there a conscious effort to advertise in pockets of communities that have higher percentages of racially minoritised communities? Are you connecting with colleges and sixth forms that are more racially diverse?

Writing this series has been a good exercise in frank communication, but I feel it has come with a risk of exclusion from a sector that prides itself on being inclusive and accepting. As I observe all the areas we have much work to do in, I have not given up hope and belief that this can be achieved sooner rather than later.

Liz Pemberton is director of The Black Nursery Manager, a training and consultancy firm that focuses on anti-racist practice in the early years. She is a trained teacher and former nursery manager and is speaking at theNursery World Show 2022 in London on 29 and 30 April: www.nurseryworldshow.com.

Group exercise

Consider the scenario of a prospective family arriving at a nursery with their child to look around. They are racialised as East or Southeast Asian. A nursery practitioner greets the family at the door and immediately tells the family that they have just come back from a beautiful holiday in Thailand; one of the parents smiles.

Through conversation, the practitioner finds out that the family are British-born with Vietnamese heritage. The practitioner is also British-born but is racialised as white with Scottish heritage. The practitioner asks if English is the child’s first language and the parents say it is.

The practitioner proceeds to show the family around the nursery and makes explicit reference to the many ways in which they celebrate different cultures at their setting and says that they treat all children the same irrespective of where they come from. The parent states again that they are British.

Reflection questions