 Good evening, everyone. I'm Valerie, I'm the director of SOAS, and it's a particular pleasure to welcome you all here this evening for what's going to be a really important discussion. We've seen really stubborn attainment gaps in higher education for far too long. Inequalities persist in our universities which should not be there. So what this evening is about is talking through some of those issues and really thinking through exactly what we should be doing to make a difference. I'd like to welcome Comfort, who has worked so hard to put this evening together. Comfort is a student at SOAS and has spent a great deal of time drawing management's attention to some of the challenges that students face that we need to address. And she has also, for the last year, been working with our WP team looking at precisely what we could be doing to make a difference. So Comfort, thank you for the huge amount of work that you've put into making this happen. Why don't you come up here? It's over to you. Okay, thank you so much for everyone for coming. I know it's exam season. Firstly, I'd like to thank Valerie for agreeing to be here today. I think it's really important that we have university leaders in this conversation, students alike and professional staff members. So this is the programme for the evening even though we're running a tad bit late. So I'm just going to do a short presentation which will then be followed by questions that I'll be asking the panel. We want to keep it quite interactive. Also, it would be great if you have any feedback to write down your suggestions. And there's a suggestions box just outside and also if you haven't already signed up to the mailing list so we can keep in contact and continue to have the conversation going. So I'll just begin. My presentation is quite meaty. So tonight, first of all, we have Baroness Valerie Amos, who is the director of SOAS, somebody very important in this conversation and you'll hear from her tonight as well. We have Dr Nelika Nicoloroluk, who is an award-winning academic, doing lots of work on equality and diversity. I'll put the links on if you sign up for the mailing list. We'll send these things over. He's been looking at the experience of the 25 black female professors in the UK. We've got Paulette Williams. Paulette, do you want to wave actually? Paulette works at UCL in WP and she's done so for over a decade. She's also the leader of Leading Roots, which is a programme which exists to bring black academics and students together. It's the hashtag Black in academia. Robert is from Kingston. Robert also works in widening participation. He loves working with young people and he also works with boys in the PRU unit in Hackney. He's done lots of great work and Kingston is one of the universities who are really hammering down and closing their BME attainment gap. Finally, we have Calacay. Calacay is a former postgraduate student of SOAS and you'll hear a lot from her today. It's very passionate about decolonising, but also African studies and development in a global perspective. That's it. I'm comfort. I'm going to be the chair for the evening. Firstly, as we all know or maybe not know, there exists an attainment gap in higher education, but for the purposes of the evening and in the future I would like to start calling it the award gap because attainment suggests a private failure on the students part. It's a systemic problem that exists not just for black students, but for students of colour and for also white students from working class backgrounds, namely Roma gypsies and Irish travellers. However, we are focusing tonight on the participation of black students in higher education, so the stats. The attainment gap starts long before university and though this is a main area of focus, we must acknowledge the context from which black students face multiple instances of discrimination and barriers to access and therefore success. Black Caribbean boys are far more likely to be excluded from school than any other group, but hidden within this is also the fact that black Caribbean girls are very much at risk. If we look here, we can see the incidences of exclusion in primary and secondary state schools, so if we just contrast them, bearing in mind that black people make up 3% of the total UK population. Data shows us that on average black African students outperform the average white student at massive English GCSE grade 5 and above, but it's important when reading data and using labels that we look at things as more than just average percentages as this often conceals large disparities. Without the breaking down into subgroups we would assume that black African students are doing very well, when in fact they do less well than white Irish students who obtain such grades at a rate of 55%, compared with just 43.5% of black African students or just 28.7% of black Caribbean students. Different groups may face different barriers to education and in order to mitigate these we need to know where the concerns are and how to tackle them. As we can see here, after Irish travellers, black students, both Caribbean and African, are least likely to get three A's at A level. Of course this doesn't necessarily determine one's life outcome, but it's part of the negative cycle where black students are left behind and therefore less likely to be enter into said higher tariff or prestigious universities. 48% of black people in the UK enter into low tariff universities, higher than any other group included in the statistics. Asian and mixed groups are at just 29%. One reason for this may be that Indian and Chinese people are more likely to be middle class than any other ethnic minorities and thus perhaps have more information about navigating the system. Aside from that, once again, we see black students in a position where we are already 10 steps behind the race. If we understand education to be an apparatus which one can use to become socially mobile, then where we go, what we study and what we get are all part of the equation. To put things into perspective, there are 24 Russell Group universities in the UK, but there are more black students in London Metropolitan University than all of the Russell Groups put together. This in turn will inevitably impact employment outcomes and thus continue a negative cycle. This has gone on for far too long and equipping ourselves with every possible tool is one way forward. So here, this data shows us statistics from 2010 up until 2018 of 18-year-olds gaining a place in higher education. Black participation has risen greatly from 28.4% just eight years ago to 41.2% in 2018. Chinese and other Asian students, which includes Indian, have a much higher rate of participation in higher education, but black participation is still among the lowest of the BME category. However, contextually, working class black African students are five times more likely to enter entire education than working class white students, so it's not an issue of aspiration. It's actually about access and encouraging people to apply to universities what they study if they are able to continue without dropping out and what they are able to be awarded. There are some commonly used statistics about the attainment gap, and I'm carefully using the word again award to replace attainment as it suggests a private self-inflicted failure rather than a process of which there are many factors of causality, such as material deprivation, racism in schools, and an ethnocentric curriculum. It goes without saying that these factors in turn can create an environment where mental health issues are created and or exacerbated, both for black staff and students. These are some statistics about degree holders in the UK. Having a degree is supposed to increase earning potential and career prospects, and on average, across the black category, the number of people with degrees has increased exponentially in the UK over the years. However, this hasn't translated into the job market. Black people experience lower employment rates and lower rates of pay than their white counterparts, so this is the amount of people who are degree holders, so actually it's quite high if you look at it contextually as the black and white binary that we always see, which I will go into later today. As we can see here, black African degree holders still have among the lowest rates of pay, with women being worse off across the board, with one exception which is Bangladeshi. As the disparities run across, it is crucial that we do not always focus on the white counterpart. If we can see here, the Indian males' pay average is £19.35. Black African males is £13.71, so we cannot always look at things as a white and black binary because it runs across a case against the BME label. The BME label continues to conceal massive disparities. While much of the conversation about educational inequality is centred around BME statistics compared with white, we mustn't be complicit. The aim of raising awareness is not to be divisive, but black students face real disadvantages and need to be placed as a priority as there is a high demand for education but a lack of progression and pay. It's not always useful to use the term BME in planning and strategy as one net will not catch us all. Here it says, Black students should be reaching for the stars and not be seen as touching them when on par with white averages. Asian students are still more than twice as likely than black students to be awarded a first-class degree, and so it cannot be a question of BME versus why it has to be broken down into subgroups. And also, black is not a flattened identity, though it's easier to understand and combat issues using this term, but there are massive disparities between black Africa and black Caribbean students also. Here at SOAS, we have just over 50% BME students and 40% BME staff, which is much better than the sector average of 21% BME students and 8% BME staff. However, at SOAS, we have a relatively high number of BME staff, but we are generally concentrated in the lower professional services than it will be to be, sorry. Overall, SOAS has a relatively high number of BME staff. However, they are generally concentrated in the lower professional services grades, and I think it's grade six where people are concentrated the most and is the most junior academic grade. The BME staff pay gap at SOAS is 533 pounds or 13.4%, that's compared with white averages. Black staff account for just 3.6% 11 people of academic staff and 5.2% of all fractional staff. There are just two black staff members at the level of Professor. We need more gender and ethnicity reporting, which is organised in explicit categories so we can really see who's where, why, and how much are we being paid. One suggestion that I have is should we lobby university guys and force them to include racialised attainment gaps as a column, this way parents can be more selective about where they send their children and we can be more involved in the conversation. Thank you for listening and I will now go into what should be hopefully a very interesting panel. Again, please feel free to be interactive. We've got two mics that will be going round over the evening. Thank you. The first question for the evening is, is there a lack of awareness in our communities regarding award gaps retention and student outcomes? So I pose the question to the panel. Who would like to start? I would say that there is probably a lack of knowledge around awarding gaps or attainment gaps, not actually as well within the sector. So I think part of the issue is around us always looking at sort of like, is it on? Always looking at sort of like the next step. Rather than forward planning, so that we're kind of caught off guard when it comes to making decisions about university, making decisions about postgraduate study and if we do want to go into postgraduate research, these sort of seeds aren't planted early on enough. And so I think being aware of some of the obstacles would help us to navigate a bit better, but I do think that there is a lack of that. I can just expand on that point because I think it's not just about a lack of knowledge in terms of award gaps. I think it's a lack of knowledge about essentially how the sector operates, league tables, what universities are good at and why, what's being measured. So there's a whole range of data and information that is actually out there, but which I think is not available in a form that we can actually use to help students and parents to make decisions about where might be best for their children. So I have a mix of views on this topic, so I agree with the comments that have been made so far. I think there needs to be a better understanding amongst some Black families about the fact that the landscape is one of competition. It's a marketplace. I think that we should be relying on the schools to provide the best education for our children as unfortunate as that may seem. But I also want to go to the other end of the scale and reference, being an academic, reference of my own work that I did with colleagues when we were at the Institute of Education that was looking at the educational strategies of Black middle class families. What we were interested in is whether they had the same knowledge and resources as their white middle class counterparts in terms of navigating the education system to get the best outcomes for their children. What we found was that they do have that knowledge, they do have the resources, but that the schools weren't treating them as if they were knowledgeable, so they were shocked. So just to give you one very small example, I remember one parent explaining to me that she went to speak to her sons, and it's important that this is male, given what we know about the data on black boys in education, to speak to her sons tutor about university admissions, and she brought out of her bag the Sunday Times list of top 100 universities in order to begin that conversation and solicit his advice about what to do. Now, rather than respond in kind, he actually stopped the conversation in confusion and lent forward and asked of her, what is it you said you did for a living again? So with the implication being that you shouldn't have this knowledge at your disposal, and he was shocked that she did. So I am in agreement with colleagues that yes, there is I think an element of black families where that knowledge is needed and support is needed, that we need to give better information to families about navigating the system. But I also think we have to be honest that at the other end of the scales, even when people have that knowledge, they still experience barriers. So my background into university is very limited in terms of professionally speaking as in I've been working at Kingston University for a couple of two years now. I've had a lot of experiences from every sector working with young people. I did it from primary school all the way up to university, mainly working with some of the most really challenging young people, the ones that most probably will never ever think about dreaming about going to university, letting on finishing their GCSEs. Talking from their standpoint, I think if we're going to their world, I find that there is a lack of awareness, 110%. I think it borders around the community, schools, and also parenting. A lot of the time it's what they don't see. So we spoke about the whole idea of black representation and improvement attainment gaps. That is an alien language to some of the young people that I work with. A lot of the times they don't actually see young people their age or if not older doing great things. So just by a reason of admission that literally in their mind it's nonexistent. For me, I think part of the challenge is trying to find a way to not necessarily create this understanding of what their opportunities are, but almost manifest this presence of education in front of them because it's there but they can't get access to it. I think our challenge at Kingston is to try and find a way to tap into the communities for them to see that there is a reality to the future that they don't see for whatever reason. Can I ask you, given that, what do you do? What do you at Kingston do to actually bridge that gap then? So at this moment in time where part of our agenda is to try and work with a lot more pupil fellow units, currently we are rather than creating random projects. What I'm doing right now is that I'm actually contacting a lot of community organisations that are working hand-on with a lot of these young people rather than expecting, okay, so with universities for my understanding I find that universities position themselves as a beacon of light, a source of power, and oftentimes they think they know it all when it comes to how we actually reach out to young people and I find that's not the case, especially when you're working with certain types of young people. So rather than me positioning myself as maybe a staff member in the university, I try to remove all of that and actually go straight to the community of who communities are actually working with. So I actually work with the Lawrence Diadro Foundation, I work with a programme called Spiral, I work with a programme in Hackney, I'm working with a boxing academy, and I'm working with in-house professionals who see these young people day in and day out and I collaborate with them and find ways in which we can actually create some form of ongoing programme where they then can see themselves through our current students, but also through myself as well. Rather than just saying I want to turn out a programme that's directly from HE, and then give it to them. Oftentimes when we do that, we don't actually give them what they need because we're doing it from our perspective, but if you understand what they're coming from, what they've gone up seeing, also including getting buying from their parents as well, and understanding their world, then it'll be a lot easier for them to be able to understand and be a lot more aware of these attainment gaps and that sort of thing. I was going to say Paula, you run Leading Roots, which you want to talk about that. You look to me like that. Similar to you, I worked in WP for quite a long time, and we'd won events for parents and not seen many black parents come in, and it just confused me because I'd be like, well, I know there are a lot of black parents who would want this information so similarly it's kind of taking yourself out of the institution and setting up something that you feel can directly speak to your community. So we run a parents event. We've had our third one this year and that is it creates a space where parents and children get the same information and they can start having conversations about education. There were some parents looking at their child like, see I told you, but also there's just that space to be like, OK, I don't have to study X, Y, Z to do whatever it is that I want to do. Here's the information that's coming from different institutions and I can make informed decisions. So, yeah. Just to add to that as well, this is a story that happened that I would say at the start of this year we ran a programme which was focusing on celebrating black women in STEM and we had a film screening so we had a hidden figures film that we showed and then we invited some external stakeholders and also some internal staff members at different levels who are all involved in STEM. Fired to that we did a lot of different types of workshops and activities and also I would say around a four or five hour day. Normally at the end of each session I normally position myself at the door and I normally say goodbye to all of the students by shaking their hands just to make sure that they are treated like adults as soon as they walk in so they can have that experience of being in the university. So normally I look them in their eyes doing and so forth one particular young lady as I was walking up I literally put my hands out there and she whacked it away and literally grabbed me and said thank you so much thank you so much and hugged me tight and obviously I'm six foot three and she's like five foot two and I'm looking down at him and obviously safeguarded and I didn't know what to do so I had to just leave her like that but she was speaking her language to me and I didn't even ask her why she hugged me I just assumed that she'd never experienced that level of personalisation where they actually got a chance to get to know us we actually got to know them and it wasn't just more of a recruitment strategy to say come to Kingston which a lot of universities do they really position themselves as slyly use and outreach to really recruit and it shouldn't be about that so when it comes to reducing the attainment gap I think it's not just about day time it's not just about numbers it's actually about people and getting to know people and that's something that I personally try to incorporate a lot into our work moving forward I think that's really true I think that when we're doing outreach we have to think about who we're trying to speak to and rather than seeing students as well, pound signs over our heads because that's what we are ultimately with the marketisation of the sector but to actually get people in the university before they're sixteen actually and get them used to being in the institutions so they feel like they actually belong and so they don't feel like they're outliers in the system and that they never can have a career in academia it all starts from bringing them to open days as you said having parents with them I remember open days I went with my friends and sometimes making the decision to come to university is almost like oh mama I've decided to do this it's important to include parents in the conversation and also make parents aware of where we're going to and it's just not good enough in the sense that we have so many great universities in the UK but black students are just we're just not there and when we are there it's a very marginal experience oftentimes I can speak from my own experiences when I went to the University of Southampton and I was literally the only black person on a course of 150 people and that is a very isolating experience not because I didn't see myself but because it's about the culture it's about being able to partake in freshers and not feel as though you can't do certain things or speak in certain ways we'll be able to get along with people because you're not from the same place and I just think that we really need parents to be on board with where the students are going with the reality that a lot of students do face mental health issues and lots of troubles when they do go off to university it can be a very vulnerable place and I think outreach and more information days specifically for these people will be a way forward rather than it just being come to this master class we actually should be going out into the community as you said which I think is quite a salient point so let's move on so I'll just read from this so the experiences of black students at university have long been far less than perfect exclusion and isolation in classroom dangerous tutorial dynamics bullying overt racism from lecturers and students alike an ethnocentric curriculum that favours and makes mandatory Western European thinkers but marginalises and undervalues the contributions of and scholarship of black people this is a quote from the SOAS degrees report in 2016 by the SOAS Students Union SOAS is an institution makes studying us its specialism it's not a pleasant experience to be dissected in every way analysed and told what we are it would not be so bad if we were studied on our own terms but we are not for the most part we are studied from an inherently European or white lens many of the scholars we study are western or westernised and those who are not are analysed from an inherently white perspective and so just to kind of put it in short, black students are not necessarily comfortable on campus even if there are loads of us here we cannot also discount anti-blackness and I want to I wonder if Calacay will be able to share your experiences of lecturers and things as you've studied at SOAS I think this quote excellently captures the experience of being a black student at SOAS I think SOAS operates under the guise that it is fundamentally a decolonial institution but at large that is a marketing ploy and when we sit in our classes those binaries still occur and they are produced through the knowledge that we produce the literature that we read those who are teaching it and it's an institutional thing and it happens from the top to the bottom and one thing that was very let's say against the status quo at SOAS was I had a PhD lecturer called Sarah and she taught Government and Politics for our tutorials and one thing that she did that was incredibly relevant to our our classes was we wouldn't have the typical structure of the class, we'd put all the tables together sit around the tables, she would sit in the centre and just climb up on the desk and before we addressed topics relating to Government and Politics in Africa she asked us about our positionality and when we sat in relation to the discourse and to the literature that we were reading because we were all coming from different spaces and with different knowledges and different experiences that had historically been silenced in our academic career and so this was a space to finally reconcile what has been dismantled so and do you think that having black lecturers has been a positive experience in role models and feeling like you belong she wasn't black but that's good, that's part if 95% of teachers for example in the UK are white we're not looking to ensure we have nice black teachers we need all teachers to be nice and all teachers to be aware of their positionality and to be able to internalise the fact that all students are coming from different spaces fortunately enough I did have a black lecturer I studied international development and French through my undergrad for those of us in humanities humanities generally carries that colonial rhetoric it doesn't have even when it does study other literature or the subaltern it's still producing those binarised knowledges but I had a black lecturer and we had a course called rethinking aid and development and this class it happened too late to begin with because I had naturally being in an institution that being in the institution I perceived development as being ultimately white like it had to come from here and it had to help those who were others until I did that course obviously I did my own reading but so in that class it became very obvious about not only the disparities between myself and other students about what development should look like but it also became something where I could see okay so this is what a black lecturer looks like and I don't want to undermine representation because representation shows us what access to space looks like it is access to space essentially and if anybody watched the Beyoncé homecoming on Netflix which you should have there was a very relevant quote you can't be what you can't see and that is so relevant for us in these institutions and in professional spaces okay just real quick everyone close your eyes so like comfort was saying when you go to class when you're in any specific space and you're looking for people who is the person that you look for you don't have to answer I open your eyes but typically somebody who looks just like you naturally that is what you search for in the classroom or in whatever space you are because there's that inherent connection between you and the other person that you're not alone and for comfort and I guess we both went through the experience of being totally isolated and so situating a black lecturer in my classroom changed a lot of the dynamics in my classroom so it's quite a bit necessary I think that's what is a positive about so I ask that there are lots of wonderful staff members like Mira and Nadia and all these people who you can go to and who see you as more than just a student they welcome you they make you feel like you belong here and where your suggestions are actually valued and I know Sarah is not perfect but what I will say is that I'm grateful to the fact that it does open opportunities for students to be able to have a voice in a way that I couldn't at another institution so there's that so if we move on to the next question okay so what has been successful in bridging the gap for both students and academics and Robert it would be really great to hear from you because you know Kingston yeah so we've done quite a lot the most popular one is pretty much focusing on ensuring that as an institution we are really trying to find ways to narrow the gap so one of the things that we looked at is using this valued added matrix from what I remember it's basically looking at the university timetable or the university guidelines and looking at it from an entry point of criteria so students who actually enter into university they mark their entry point in terms of qualifications that they've had and also they look at it in terms of what subjects they're actually studying and then from there they actually find a way to create this matrix where they want to try and see whether or not a particular student actually allows themselves to reach that goal breaking it down into three components the three areas that they really want to focus on is student support so student support, student experience throughout their whole time at the university but also staff and student training and it's not just your usual online quality and diversity modules that you click on that has no relevance to anything and thirdly is actually having ongoing assessment processes throughout the whole student cycle from when they start and when they finish what I would more focus on though is because it's more in my area of student achievement is this whole idea of what is actually what is student support and what is student experience what is student achievement and some of the things that Kingston are doing is that they've created these student consultancy roles piling that at the moment so it started last year it's getting a bit of traction and basically what it is is that we employ students to get involved in projects ongoing projects that doesn't necessarily have a start or end time where students can actually work alongside staff members to advise staff members to advise academics advise support staff on how their projects should actually be improved and whether it's reaching students needs from what I understand most universities have an ambassador scheme we do have an ambassador scheme as well but we do try and make sure that we create bespoke opportunities for students who really want to showcase their skills showcase their knowledge as well and give them opportunities to grow on the flip side of that as well we've got a lot of other programmes like Beyond Barriers, our mentoring programme we've got a BME leadership programme which I've been on which is really good because you really get a chance to meet a lot of professionals across the UK going through similar things and trying to find ways in which you can actually improve that there are challenges though still we're moving that and I say that because for example the BME leadership programme the university and this is not unlocking Kingston because I've expressed this to them already as a university they're quite good at saying we want to try and support staff members to go up the ladder and give them more skills and opportunities when they do that staff members go on and then that's it there's no follow up there's no food there's no what extra support is needed after and to me sometimes it feels like they're just ticking a box or maybe just making us feel a bit more quiet maybe they're giving us what they need and then we can just shut up and I can say that on my experience because I went through the BME leadership programme really excited more so about what's going to happen after and like at least a year a year and a bit after nothing happened nobody contacted me nobody offered any extra forms of intervention I had to go by it myself to dig deep and liaison staff members that were willing to talk to me and from doing that I was able to get a mentor Lady Karen Lipsage is an awesome academic who teaches English and she's now mentoring me but that didn't come off of any initiatives that the university put together and so although there's a lot of things that we're doing to bridge the gap when it comes to students and academics there's so much more that we should be doing that often times it's not really met and sometimes I feel like even me sitting here and being in Kingston I sometimes feel like I'm recreating a certain pity party narrative that people will look at me and see like well that's what Robert Roberts is the one that has to speak about black people's issues and really it's frustrating because whenever people look at me now I am now the go-to person for BME and that's not what I want it to become I find no way to progress myself encourage my students and undergraduates but now I'm this beacon equal warrior of trying to like change the world and there are a lot of universities and staff members that don't really want to hear that that don't really want to hear that because today it sounds like they're complaining or we're complaining which is not the case so yeah I can talk a lot about that Nicola I know that you're itching to say something I just wanted to pick up on the last point that Robert was making and I think it is very much the case that while we're here this evening talking about students Robert's touched also on staff and I do think that speaks to a wider issue which is how universities engage with and prioritise issues concerning race and it's mine for you that actually we don't take it very seriously universities have particular priorities and let's be frank it's about bums and seats it's about numbers for reasons which are understandable and on the academic side of things actually it's about the research excellence framework it's about the TEF and these things are legislated for and they're attached to funding so that by and large very crudely speaking those are the things that become important for institutions we've suddenly started talking about the attainment gap or the award gap in recent months in particular even though the data has been around for some time and we have to ask the question why as someone who worked in education policy that kind of critical question is important and it's because of the TEF but some of us have been working on this issue for decades and I think the issues around staff and that you speak to Robert are really really quite crucial and when you had the quote up earlier with regards to students experiences actually what we know is that there are similar experiences for academics as well hence my point that this isn't just about an attainment gap issue this is also about the retention of black students we know that the evidence shows that black students of all ethnic of all ethnic groups black students are most likely to drop out after their first year of study we also know that the gap issue we also know their least likely to be employment six years after graduating and then we could go on and look at the work, the employment sector if we wanted to completely depress ourselves but also in terms of black staff we know that black female academics are least likely to be professors which is the highest level you can be if you want to follow the academic trajectory so there are issues in the sector when it comes to engagement race and you know there are many institutions that don't have exit interviews that don't have the resources to have exit interviews, my institution Goldsmiths being one but there is a difference also where black academics are employed, we're more likely to be employed at non Russell group or non elite institutions mirroring very much the profile and the representation that we see for students so I think it's important that we're looking at the attainment gap I think it's absolutely central but I would hope that institutions were more sophisticated with the engagement of issues and look more broadly at what they're doing as an institution with regard to issues of race So last year, the October I was invited by the student union to do a talk on Black influence within the Victorian period I spoke on an ancestor of mine a lady called Sarah Fawls-Benedda who was the Queen of Toria's Godua So I used that angle to talk about the different influences that black people went for and how they impacted colonialism in different ways it was quite a big big event and it was part and parcel of Kingston University's對對's incentives to try and find ways to bridge scheme hand the gap between students and academics, where we are helping students along side the union representatives That particular event, is what led me here ac dwi'n dod i'ch bod y farchop, ond ond, dy'r holl yn ideae o myriadethe yma i'ch gynnwys. Ac pleinwyd yr ysgol yma ymlaenio yng Nghymru a'r myriadethe PME. Wrth gyd wedi addeder ynddo, i ni'n bwysig yw'r hynny o'r lleol, sy'n ei wneud, a'r hynny i'r lleol Teachings maen nhw i'r holl ymlaenio, a'r hynny'i gobeithio hynny i'r lleol, ond rho'n gallu cymaint ar y farchop, ond mae'r hynny i'r lleol. Mae ymgyrchu, mae'r Ymgyrchu Llywodraeth Geniwyddi, mae'n gorfod oherwydd yna, a'r ystafell o'r cwmfysgau efallai'n ddwylo sy'n pari'r Eritreu a Ymgyrchu, y byddai'n cymdeithio dros y Gymdeithasol yn yr Ymgyrchu Llywodraeth. Mae'r byddai'n ddim yn ymylwyr am Ymgyrchu Llywodraeth yn ymgyrchol i am wahanol ymgeithio am yr Eurach, a'i ddefnyddio i amserau, ond ymgyrchu, ymgyrchu Llywodraeth, Lly 이상r, mae'n gyll Sidr yn can 카메라. Rydyn ni'n gwybod I renamed 200, ddod i. Rydyn ni'n gystangos mewn moneglu. Rydyn ni'n gwybod I renamed 200, ddod i. Rydyn ni'n gwybod I renamed 200, ddod i. Dydyn ni'n gwybod I named 200, dydyn ni'n gwybod I named 300. Rydyn ni'n gwybod I named 100. Rydyn ni'n gwybod I named 100. ac yn gennym. Yn cydwethaf ar Nameil, mae yn cydweithio'r arbenig iaith, ac mae'r cydweithio ar gyfer y cwrs. Mae llwyddechrau, mae'n ffordd todio'r lleolau. Mae'r llwyddechrau a llwyddechrau a'r llwyddechrau wedi wiriaeth trafoddiol a'r llwyddechrau a'n ei ownhau'n cumfyniol, ond mae'n fyfanedd o'r wych, a wnaethau eu cydweithio'r llwyddechrau a'r gallw pethau, Felly, we were able to actually, in fact, we were invited to go into a number of different faculties to present this same workshop. It was quite an interactive workshop, and that went really well, and then off the back of that, Jenny Woods encouraged me to apply for this face conference that's coming up in Sheffield this year, and she was saying that potentially she could actually change this workshop into a compulsory workshop where both staff and students, when they come into the university, they can actually get access to that workshop as soon as they actually become staff or students, where they have to actually partake in that workshop. So, the reason why I mentioned that story is because this started off as a student-led initiative. Nothing to do with staff, students from the Student Union and societies contacted myself because they wanted to work with staff members. We came together, collaborated, and we've created content from getting case studies from students. I can tell you so many stories from the case studies that we've gathered from the students, and so many stories from the case studies that we've gathered from staff members, and it's turned into an initiative where potentially we're going to be trying to plug it at the face conference, but also it could be put into the actual institution when staff and students come in. And so, I only say that because a lot of the times when it comes to staff members, there's a high level of cultural myopia in that staff members, one, they don't care about cultural awareness, and two, they don't know anything, and they're not willing to find out. And oftentimes, students are just knocking on the door trying to get more information, but there's no one there to answer it. And again, as you said, when you close your eyes, who do you turn to? The Student Union reps and the Society of the World Black closed their eyes and turned to me, so that says a lot, that says a lot. So, I think there's so much more work to be done, and I think there's a great opportunity to work a lot more closely with our students, but it's just about trying to find a savvy and cool and innovative way to make that work with our alienating people that don't fully understand what this is all about. So the cynic in me wants to ask, do workshops work A and B? After these workshops, what are the disciplinary processes and what are the procedures that should follow, should things go wrong? Because I know we're great at putting on workshops and great for having staff training, but when we leave the room, what happens and where is the accountability? It's a good question. So whenever I pitch the workshops, I never pitch it as, this is going to take away all of your problems. In fact, this actually might give you more problems because of bringing up so many different issues. Ultimately, I create it as a workshop to discuss and bring out a lot of the issues. One staff member who's white came to me crying saying that, Robert, I can't believe this is what staff and students go through. And I was like, what are you talking about? You know, but that's her experiences. And so moving forward, we try to find a way to open up the discussion to actually make it a lot more action-led. So it's rather than just talking, it can come to that, it can talk and nothing happens. We're trying to find a way to move on from that. We haven't done that yet because we're still working on the workshop for the FACE conference, but it's an important point that you made. Sometimes workshops can be workshops and it serves no purpose, but we're trying our hardest not to make that happen. Just briefly, I think it's a really good question. And I should declare, I was involved in designing and I still deliver with advanced HE, which used to be the Equality Challenge Unit since merge with two other bodies. A programme on advancing race equality in universities, and they've carried out an evaluation of that statistically to show that there's been an improvement in people's understanding, particularly around racial microaggressions, which I think some colleagues in particular struggle to understand and struggle to understand the real impact on students and faculty of colour. But to speak more directly to your question, I would like to see actually appraisals have criteria within them in terms of what specific actions have you taken as a staff member to improve the experiences and or outcomes, not just of students, but also of your faculty of colour. Because what we see, unfortunately, is that for faculty of colour, you have this extra work because students come to you. Black minority at the students come to you, seek in that informal support and mentoring, and to be really crude about it, we don't always have the time. And not just we don't have the time, and this is the boy with some of the technicalities of higher education life. Our days, our time is cut up and measured, not all universities use this, but something called the workload management model. So we have a particular allocation of time for our activities, irrespective of whether it works. We have that model, and most of us work far beyond that model. And certainly the research that I did on black female professors has shown that those women are working extra time in order to prove themselves in the face of skepticism from their counterparts that they are qualified and experienced enough. So I have problems with workload models personally, but I'd like to see in promotion criteria and appraisals clear and specific targets and objectives for colleagues to take actions for initiatives surrounding race, and in terms of outcomes for black and minority ethnic students, and also for colleagues. I wanted to come in, and if I may just say a little bit about some work that I've been doing at the national level with universities UK and US around this topic, because I think part of what the conversation so far has demonstrated is that this has to be tackled through a whole of organisation approach. And one of the challenges we have, not just in a place like SOS, but I think across the sector is that you find that there are bits of things that work, but actually overall in terms of changing an organisation overall, it's a long-term approach that you have to take. So following on from a speech that Amate Doku, who's the deputy, one of the deputies at NUS, had made at a UUK conference specifically on the black and minority ethic, the awards gap, it was agreed that there would be a joint project between UUK and NUS to look at this issue, and I was asked to lead on behalf of UUK at Amate to lead on behalf of NUS, and to cut over a year's work short, the report of our work comes out in a couple of days' time, but we essentially took evidence sessions up and down the country, we asked universities and student unions to send us examples of what they felt worked and hadn't worked in their organisations, and clearly there's a contextual issue which everybody has referred to, which one, a kind of complacency that exists in the higher education sector, a kind of sense that because we're academia, because this is about intellectual endeavour, these issues around race, other forms of discrimination, aren't really serious, and so higher education institutions have come to these issues I think quite late in terms of addressing them, but in the work that we've done, we've essentially come up with five areas, it doesn't mean that there aren't others, but there are essentially five areas that students and people working in HE talked about as being essential to really get to grips with the awards gap. The first obviously is around leadership and the commitment of the leadership of the institution to that whole of organisation approach, the issues that you talked about with respect to accountability, performance indicators, I mean a whole range of things, really setting a tone in terms of what an organisation is trying to achieve, and then there are these crucial issues around culture, and how you create a culture that enables honest conversations about race, because in the majority of organisations, those conversations do not take place, they do not happen, because either you have the fear, you know, I'm going to put a foot wrong, I'm not going to say the right thing or whatever, or this whole onus is put on Black people, minority ethnic people in the organisation to, as it were, explain what is going on, or indeed to give support to others who are facing challenge, so how do you create a safe environment to start those conversations? But also how do you create a more inclusive environment? And that links to the issue of curriculum reform, to the wider decolonisation agenda, to the whole issue of representation, what does my institution look like, you know, who's teaching here, who's available to give me support, just what does it look like, who are the role models? What information evidence data exists, and your point, Comfort, right at the beginning, which is that you have to segment the data as well, it's not just, you know, a binary, you know, white, black and minority ethnic, it's about looking beyond that evidence and data, and we talked about that a lot, getting the evidence and using the evidence, and of course in academic institutions, people grab on to evidence, but we were also very clear that sometimes the push for more evidence was an excuse for doing nothing, so you would have this constant refrain which is where's the evidence to justify what we're doing when actually, you know, Daimwell that there's a problem and you have to address this and just get on with addressing it. And then finally, how do we share, how do we better look at what has worked, and in doing that we also have to think about what's not worked. So when you, we talk a lot about good practice, but it's just about practice, and your failure may be as important as the thing that works, because you learn a lot from the things that you try to put into place that don't work, which help you to get to the things that do work. So the focus in this report is very much around what can we do and we'll be reviewing where we've got to in 2020, but I do think that there is a moment right now that we can use to actually really begin to get some significant change in our institutions across the country. No, I think you put it, you know, in short, in medium, what actually it's been taken seriously on a national level, but again, the cynic in me wants to say that we always do defer to, okay, well, what can we do? I think the answer sometimes are already here and I do feel that first of all being able to identify and have that culture where you can talk about racism and racism and going to workshops and learning about it is great, but we need to also talk about accountability, that is something I really would like to touch on especially in regards to SOAS, where actually there have been loads of incidents that happen, sometimes they're brought to the schools' attention and they're kind of dismissed and also looking at the way in which staff members are treated by other staff members, but also the way in which staff members interact with students and the fact that if they put a foot wrong, it's almost like a peer slap on the wrist. There is no sort of formal process, the complaints procedure process is very long, is very tedious and it oftentimes doesn't give us answers or show us that this person has been dealt with in the right way, if that means be that a suspension or whatever it may be. What can we do at SOAS to ensure that when these incidents occur, there are staff members? I mean, I know that now thanks to Lavinia, who is actually in the audience today, their emotion was passed that there would now be a Black Pastoral officer at SOAS, so that is a massive movement forward. It means that people will have a contact to go to. I mean, it's not to kind of defer all of the issues to this one person, but it's to have a point of contact for Black students to know that they have somewhere they can go to for advice and who can direct them to the right places, but what I also want to ask though is what happens with staff? That is my real concern. Let me say two things in relation to that. One is, I think that the SOAS culture is a really difficult culture and that there is a lot of kind of bullying in the culture at every level, including bullying between students, bullying between staff and students, bullying between academics and professional services staff, bullying up the chain and down the chain. So what we have done is created a group which is looking at the whole issue of culture at SOAS in its broadest sense because you have to have a culture in which there is no point having values and principles if they're not put into effect. There is no point allowing a bullying culture to flourish when what you need to do is actually to go back to your values. Everybody gets treated with respect and as you said, the issues with respect to complaints and disciplinaries and everything else are taken seriously. On the complaints, we've just had a major review of our complaints system by an independent external person, a raft of recommendations which have been made. That report will come to our academic board with a very clear action plan as to how we put it into effect because one of the things that we've been very poor at at SOAS is this whole thing about processes, making sure that we stick to timetables in process, that people understand what the decisions have been made and how things get closed off at the end of it. So the complaints procedure is one area looking at the respect at SOAS policy and what that means and how that again is implemented across the whole of our organisation and not letting people get away with bad behaviour either because they're members of staff or because they're students. Okay, so this is a big one. Has conversation around the award gap taken attention away from immediate issues of access such as finance, mental health support and pastoral care? This is personally something I'm very passionate about because when we talk about the award gap, it's always the focus on, okay, are we awarding students with two ones or first? Do they get good degrees? But what about the immediate problem of being able to have bursaries, for example, being able to afford to go to open days? What kind of initiatives can we put on to encourage people to actually come from not just London? How can we get people from all across the country to be able to access universities and be in those spaces? But mostly mental health support. So I want to touch on this, the fact that SOAS has about 50%, 40% BME staff. That needs to be reflected then in the well-being centre. We want to see black councillors. We want to be able to see people working in professional services not just as cleaners, not just as, you know, well, not no longer casual, but just as staff members who are along the corridors and the security guards. We want to see black people in positions where they can actually impact students' well-being and attainment towards the end and also pastoral care. As Nicola said, it's usually oftentimes women of colour, black women, who are kind of lumped with the burden of student complaints and, you know, students who want someone to speak to about things that have been going on. And it's quite unfair. And I feel like this workload needs to be taken off their backs and actually put to the attention of the school that this is a real issue that needs to be taken seriously. I also wanted to mention that, for example, the Office for Students regulate higher education access and participation plans, but they want to reduce spend on bursaries. Now they say that they want to reduce spend on bursaries because bursaries apparently do not increase attainment, but they're not supposed to. Giving somebody money as a cushion to be able to get to campus and be inside your lecture is not going to get you a first. I think that universities need to understand that bursaries are necessary for us to actually be on campus and the fact that 50% of us, 50% of black people in the UK do go to post-92 or low-tariff universities, meaning that the resources are already scarce being spread amongst the people with a larger need. So there's even less money to be put into people's pockets to be able to allow them to not have to work 21 hours a week whilst trying to obtain their degree. And we talk about award gaps, but what about the fact that we can't even afford to be on campus? Last year, there was a scandal at SOAS. I have to talk about it and it has been redressed, but just to put things in context for people is that the body that regulates bursaries, the university has to sign off on that plan. Normally it's the Widing Participation Department and SOAS only made available 152 bursaries, whereas there were over 300 students who actually were eligible for this money. And so the scandal is that we recruit students to come in without being able to support them when they're actually here. And it's a real shame that universities don't take things like money, but not just actually bursaries, mental health support would also be great whilst at university. And I keep on saying it and people at SOAS is anecdotal knowledge that there are no black counselors, there are no black counselors, but what are we actually going to do about it when we say that we can't advertise a position specifically for this reason? I would like to know what happens at other institutions and the ways in which we can have pastoral care and see this as quite an urgent thing because we're not going to retain students if they can't afford to come to uni or do not feel that they belong in university or they've had a negative experience, which means that they are more likely to drop out, go somewhere else, or just never see academia as a career option. I would say that what you've picked up on is what the sector overall has picked up on. So we spent decades now looking at sort of widening participation and just pushing students into university and now suddenly this area is emerging of student success and we're thinking of what's happening when they're actually getting to university. So I would say that that area of work is definitely developing and it shouldn't take away from, like what you've said, there is the rewarding gap taken away from some of these other issues. It should all be addressed as sort of taking a holistic approach. I think the project that we're running at UCL is attempting to address kind of a broader range of issues and looking at our student success strategy, which we're developing. I think a lot of institutions will begin to look at student success overall and yeah, these things should be a part of that strategy. I'd like to add on that. I think that the whole issue of mental health is an enormous area for universities. It's a big area here at SOAS in terms of how do we get greater investment in that area, how do we support students. There's the issue of retention, which when we started to look at the figures was quite shocking for a lot of us. When we actually saw what was happening to our students in terms of their capacity and ability to actually stay at SOAS, some of it was in relation to academic issues, not getting the support academically, but other issues were in relation to the stuff that you've talked about, comfort, financial sustainability, access to bursaries, the long hours that some of our students had to work. We're very, very aware of that. We've tried to deal with it, but I think we're only dealing with it right now at the margins. We created, for example, the Opportunities Fund, which was an opportunity, which gives an opportunity for students to get bursaries for a whole range of things to support their ability to actually come on campus to study, but we know that we have a great deal more to do. We are nowhere near where we need to be, and these issues particularly around, and it's not just, we talk about it in the context of mental health, but essentially it's about student well-being. Mental health is an aspect of it, but it's about wider student well-being. It's about the student experience. It's about how we can really put a greater degree of energy and capacity into making the student experience at SOAS as inclusive as possible. It's a work in progress. We're nowhere near there yet. Yes, just a very brief comment from me. I think I worry because there is an assumption, I think, in the sector that everyone is running on a level playing field. Actually, what we know is that for white middle class students, they can enter and experience university as a priority. For many black and minority ethnic students, university is part of a wider picture of responsibilities that they have. It might, we've already heard about mental health, we've already heard about for some the need to work, but also having caring responsibilities. All of those things mean that university is important, but it might not have the same priorities as it does for the white middle class counterparts. Just to share with you some research on what my students did when I was at Birmingham, which I thought was really, really fascinating, but also concerning. She was interested in looking at who needed to work while they were taking their degree and what she found, which won't be surprised in the first instance, that middle class students didn't need to work. But when they did, they tended to be in roles or occupations such as internships and law firms that would support their subsequent career choices for black and minority ethnic students. They worked more out of desperate needs and obligation, maybe in bar work, for example, which is not necessarily going to support their long-term career aspirations. So, it's these kinds of issues that I think we're only slowly waking up to as a sector. Just to add to that as well, I read Trevor Noah's book, Born and Crying. Anyone read it before? Yeah? Just to see who's read it. Okay, it's cool. I listened to that as an audio and I read it as a book as well. I was one quote that he mentioned in there that stuck with me up until this point. It's the quote where he says if you give a person a fish, they can eat for a day. If you teach them to fish, they can eat for a lifetime. And then he said only if they have their own fishing rod. And I was like, okay, that's a different one because ultimately that's the misconception is that if we teach someone and then go about our business, we just assume that they're going to be okay. And I think the extension of that is this whole idea of equity and recognising that it's not about just giving education for all, but it's personalising it to meet their needs. And there are some students with the capacity to do well, with the intelligence to do well, that can really do well, that will flourish if you teach them. But the moment you leave them in their own world, they could easily revert backwards because of the things we're talking about. Finances, mental health of all student well-being. And I find that the fishing rod isn't necessarily a representation of money or equipment. It's more of a representation of going the extra mile to make sure that you're actually finding ways to transition this particular student and or person to doing more. So rather than just assuming that what you've given them is enough. And I think when it comes to student well-being, that's what I think we should represent, going the extra mile to ensure that one individual or a group of people can actually go further than what they actually think they can. And oftentimes I find that students can only go as far as their teacher. So if the teacher doesn't really know much, or it's limited in their knowledge, then the student can only go as far as that. Only unless the student is also the teacher and they also teach it themselves too. So I think there should be a balance there. I think your last point is actually quite salient. Educators are also learners and I really would like to push that idea of reverse mentoring, where it's not necessarily a student being mentored by a member of staff or some sort of role model, but also students mentoring teaching staff and professional staff about how they're experiencing university and ways in which we can actually improve our experiences through reverse, the reverse kind of thing. I think that would be a really good bottom-up approach. But also let's talk about the fishing rod. Where might it be possible to always have bursaries? Can we be practical? I really don't want this event to kind of turn into a talk shop. But what can we practically do to support students? I really would like to see a travel scheme or something where we can have oyster cars. So it just takes away the burden. We can't talk about award gaps without recognising that we have so many barriers, as you said, caring responsibilities and work. But if things were made a little bit easier, it might be easier to actually just focus on the academic side of things if we could afford to come to campus or if we had lunch vouchers or we could buy food so we can stay on campus late and study the same way that our other counterparts who might be able to afford to live in halls can do. Like, yeah. No, just to also contextually place it. For black students, especially most of us live in in London, non-decent housing, mental health is a huge taboo within our cultures. And then coming into the university space, immediately we have a distance from well-being care or pastoral care, because the people that are typically in those positions do not look like us again. And that creates that distance because, I mean, how often are you going to talk to somebody who's unlikely to understand your experiences coming from the space that you come from and then within this institution? So, yeah. I kind of just wanted to go off of your point, though, again, as I think, Valerie, at SOAS, I think we are supposed to serve students, ultimately, in the higher education sector. But a lot of the places that students should be able to go to are not student-facing. So, for example, let's say that you need to go to a drop-in, mental health drop-in. I'm speaking from experience of the well-being centre where there are four slots for the hour. And if you don't get to see the time of the drop-in, which is maybe three to four PM, that's it for the day, that's it for the week, three times a week, and they're constantly being cancelled. So, if I can't actually be on campus at time, maybe I have a shift, how can the student access support when it's actually not physically there? It's not, it's never, it's a thing of nine to five, but some students work on social hours because they need to work those hours. And then when they get there, sometimes it's that, oh, you have to sign up online, oh, the slots are already gone for the hour, or you have to pay a deposit. And it just might be that we can't do that at that point in time, so we can't access the help. So, I'm going to come in there, and I think that students have much more power than they realise. I've worked at different universities, and what you're describing is reflective of those spaces as well. And I had a student who, at one university, was actually suicidal, and it so happens at my backgrounds in psychology and therapy, so I was able to make use of those skills, but you shouldn't have to rely on the randomness of someone having that training and that background to support a student. And I remember calling up our student support, our wellbeing support, and they said they closed at five. I thought, well, her issues don't close at five o'clock. So, I think this is the issue for the sector, and I would encourage you as students to be radical and use your voice and get petitions going to Lobby Downing Street to speak to ministers. Use your voice because there's not enough resource in mental health issues. Some of you may be aware of the matter of the student occupation at Goal for Mediallegers, where I'm based, and actually wellbeing is one of the issues around their demands also, and they want training for the councillors who are there, and they also want councillors who look like them. So, I raised that, I raised both my experience as an academic and the demands from the students at Goldsmiths to make the point that this is a wider issue. This isn't just so as, and I would encourage you to get together with other students unions, with others who share your views, and Lobby Parliament. Yes, one of the issues I just wanted to raise was around this sort of, not expectation, but a lot of students that are kind of activists or in those positions where they're quite vocal, and the impact that that then has on the student, and I've seen that personally from a lot of students that we work with at UCL. I do think that there's this, we need to push that responsibility back on the institution, and that the students aren't in that position where they always have to raise things, they always have to be in a position where they're co-creating, and they're, you know, I mean, they're there to study. And I think there is this sort of, although we want to hear the student voice, sometimes I think that line gets crossed into like, and the students now have this additional responsibility as well. And just to touch upon that as well, it's exhausting, like, it's so exhausting, like for any student who's got mild symptoms of mental health, to severe symptoms of mental health, as well as being a community student, as well as having some form of care of responsibilities, or being a parent themselves, or working, just the usual live stuff, as well as having to try and like take responsibility and like push forward the need to kind of like take control back and really try and find ways to get the staff members to, to like listen to their needs, as well as trying to like help the person next to you who's also gone for something to you. Just having like in your, in your mind, without even speaking it, is exhausting. And I think it's difficult. And so I think it's about trying to find a way where a way where both HGI Institute and student can kind of like move together. Sometimes it's almost like, well, you need to move first. Okay. So for example, we got invited to speak to, to put on a focus group with film, media and communication students, second year students because they were quite disgruntled about how the course has been going on. We sat down with them and a lot of their stuff that they were coming out with was really important. Some of it was like, but you can fix that yourselves. You can actually change that yourselves. Some of it, some of it could be small wins that we could create. So for example, as a community university, some of our students are coming from different parts of London. So I live in East London and you've got students living further beyond East London that are coming in to, to university and my community work is like almost two hours a day. So some of the students are commuting like two and a half hours, three hours to get to their chosen course, which is a long distance, let alone the money you're paying for every single zone that you're going through. The smallest thing that they requested was if they get in late, rather than them, rather than them being penalised for it, the staff members should have some type of tea and coffee corner, just right in the corner. So when they come in, they can kind of like just have a cup of tea to just decompress and get themselves back in together. And I thought that's a great idea. And that's something that a lot of teachers at the time wasn't willing to do because they didn't understand how stressful it was because a lot of the staff members live in an area. And so just a little, tiny little thing like that can actually help our student to think, you know what, they're actually thinking of my needs in a small way. But I'm sure some of the students here, my, and even staff members as well, can also, can safely say that it is very exhausting to have all of that information just sitting in your mind and then having to then step out and then deal with it. If you get rejected, if you get turned around, if you get shot down, that's even more, that's even more exhaustion than just disappointment. So it's about trying to find a balance and trying to find ways in which we can kind of like encourage students to be independent and be outspoken, but also support them at the same time. And that's difficult. That's difficult. Yeah, I will say that. And I also just kind of wanted to add some small context to the issue of the fact that we're seeing education as a tool for social mobility. However, things like maintenance grants have been, they don't exist anymore. So the average working class student will have to actually pay back the money that they borrow. So let's say you have a situation that there's an environment where 50% of us already don't go to what we would deem prestigious universities. More debt, lack of a reduction in bursary amounts first of all. And then you leave university maybe not with the award that you should have gotten based on your workhound part and the tariff that you had when you entered the university. You have to pay back more and you get less. You pay back more, but you get less. You borrow more, you get less. And then it's the thing of what can we do to practically again, I keep on turning back to, to practically support students. I mean, I really, really would like to hear ideas and have you in the community, I really like for people to be able to speak about how we can practically support black students, not just in terms of money, but in terms of mentoring. In terms of also having a system where when you can't come to lectures in SOAS, there's an automatic email that comes. If you haven't been to your lectures for three times in a row, an email comes to say, you know, you haven't been to your lectures, whatever. But then what happens after the email? Who's checking in because something could have happened. There's a reason why somebody might not be. And this is what happens with the retention. You don't come in. It continues as a cycle of, well, no one's even noticed. There's no safety net. You continue to not come in. You continue to learn less cramming for exams. It's just absolutely mental. And there's not really kind of anyone checking in again, checking in that, you know, what's happened to the student? Where are they? And it's this thing of also empathy. I don't think that a lot of staff members and even ourselves, we don't have a lot of empathy. You don't understand someone's pain if you don't have any kind of relate, if it's not relatable to you. So that the academic isn't necessarily thinking maybe they couldn't afford to come to uni. Maybe they're mentally ill. Maybe something's happened. It's always, well, you know, I had uni was good for me. So why is it taking so long for this student? Why are they not obtaining these grades? Why are they this? Why are they that? But it's like they're not being compassionate to understand that we are not at a level playing field. We are not coming from the same spaces. And going to university is a really tough thing to do when it necessarily isn't. It's a deferred gratification where actually we have bills to pay. And there are other priorities. And there are other things going on in our minds without all of this work going on in our head. Sorry to kind of take it there once again, but practical solutions. We really like please think about sorry, practical solutions that we can feed into the into the suggestions box. And on that note, we just pick up on that retention point and the whole issue of, you know, when do you recognise that something is not quite right? Because we've been, we've been doing a lot of work looking at that. Because there's quite a lot of data out there that shows you as a university and as academics and as professional services staff what some of the trigger points are. So, and some of it is actually really straightforward. And what we have to do is think about how we can actually monitor that. So if somebody hasn't gone and got a library card, for example, that could be that could tell you something about what is happening to them. And that you need to intervene very early. So that there are some very straightforward things that we can use to monitor what's going on and develop that empathy that you're talking about that will actually begin to make a real difference for a lot of our students. I think that's one way to move forward. Does anyone else want to add something before moving to the next question? Okay. Okay. So this is a big one for so asked. What does decolonising mean to and for Black students and academics? And I would really like for Calacay to kind of speak on this because she, this is, this is, this is for you. Go on. Okay. So I mean, I've partially addressed it. But I think decolonialism for Black students means a totally transformative. I mean, for all students are totally transformative model in the institution. One that is far more integrative and collaborative between students, academics and staff, because it can't be an initiative led from the top down. I think in the classroom, our classes are performative and informative, which means that we were learning and gaining information, but we also need to be included in the process of the way in which we learn and the way in which we're receiving that information and diversify the remit of how we are examined assessments, how we contribute to the class and what we gain out of that class. So I think just another quote. There's a standard way of thinking that is hegemonically white since students from ethnic minorities either have to get with the programme or do us. So just hands up if you agree with that statement. Yeah. And I mean, clearly that's the majority of us. So I think decolonialism is a process in which we dismantle it, but what is it in place exactly as it is and consider the... Sorry, I'm rambling. But if we really consider it, knowledge is supposed to be universal and knowledge is not treated as universal in the institution. It is treated as exclusively and explicitly white. When I have my... One of my modules I did was African philosophy and really the question that we discussed a lot was, is there an African philosophy? Do I have eyelashes? That's essentially what you're asking. And we continue with that rhetoric across scale in my government and politics class. I mean, my lecturer who's Iranian, when it came to like race or ethnicity or even just African policy, she's just like, I think there should be a black person teaching this. And she's absolutely right. When we have those discussions, there needs to be something far more inclusive where it's not just us being othered by the lecturer and the teacher and where knowledge isn't othered and where our contributions aren't othered, but where we are a part of the fundamental process and beyond representation and beyond the curriculum as well. It's about the space. It's about what it looks like when we come into university. What our student union is like. What spaces where we study look like. And those are essentially non-inclusive. So, yeah. So, I just wanted to add that, okay, some great work is being done at SOAS with decolonising and the vision was accepted in late 2017. And whilst great work is being done in terms of the decolonising toolkit and raising awareness, collaborating, speaking, working with students, what does it actually really mean for us? The word reparation, which is directly connected to black diasporic identity is not part of the vision statement. So, I just wanted to kind of talk about that and the fact that the omission of the word is telling of the sentiment towards people of African descent and our transience is linked to our erasure. And whilst we contribute so much to reshaping and dismantling academia and society as a whole, we are not included in this statement. Valerie, I don't know if anybody wants to kind of comment on that because for me, reparation literally does mean access. It means being able to have scholarships. It means being able to have access to money, to care, to be able to go into the classroom space and not have your tutor ask you because you critiqued an idea. Well, do you think white people shouldn't be studying Africa? What sort of dangerous tutorial dynamic is that? And what are we trying to perpetuate? Who are we forcing to emerge as the producers of knowledge? Sometimes it's very invalidating when you come in and you're expected to have a certain standpoint or people are looking at you so the teacher says, you know, x, y, z and they look at you like, you know, black girl answer. It's really, really invalidating and it's really, really, it just contributes to an already marginal experience. And whilst I asked us great in the sense that we actually have BME and black lecturers unlike other institutions, it doesn't necessarily mean that we have an anti-racist curriculum or we have a curriculum that actually reflects Afro people of African descent. And even when it does, it's still looking at its Western criticality, its Western knowledge. It's not inherently diasporic. I do not feel that decolonising necessarily means anything to me sometimes beyond, you know, decolonising the curricula. Okay, but can we even make it to the classroom door? Like it's just the whole kind of it's just a negative cycle getting into uni, getting into a good uni, staying in that good uni, being able to get a good degree from that good uni and then getting into employment. What does decolonising mean? Okay, well for me, I think in terms of access as well, decolonising must start at a lower scale. It has to start in schools essentially. Because I mean, when you're in schools and you're taught that the British Empire, and I was saying this earlier, that the sun never set on the British Empire and that was something that I'd be like, kill us lit. Like, yeah, okay. And when I would question why are there only four countries in World War one and two, I'm just curious. But that's how my curriculum was set up. And even when it came to doing Black History or African History, I studied African American History. And our teachers allowed to assign the amount of time that we're going to give to a certain subject. Given that we did World War One and World War Two for five centuries in class, I only did one hour and it was on African American History. And I think that the fundamental change needs to start there before it moves to higher education. So decolonising for me is a mental process. It's also a very personal process. You have to undergo it yourself before it transpires in the education system. It is part of access fundamentally because it's part of how we see ourselves and our belonging in these institutions. Yeah, I hope that answers your question. I don't really have an answer. I don't have an answer, but I have another question, which is how do you, because you touched on that, it's like a sort of personal process as well. So for example, UCL, there are like 12,000 members of staff. So how do you get through that process or make sure that, you know, it's kind of embedded in the process of an institution while still maintaining that essence of decolonising? I'm not really sure. It's just a question. More questions, more questions. I think just to add to the overall question is I personally don't think universities and or staff within universities believe that there's an issue to be interviewed. I don't think they believe it. Culture of science. People have been teaching for 20 years. They're part of the furniture, and there are no procedures that exist that will actually make them feel like they're accountable to anything. They are part of the furniture. But I think that's why dialogue like this is incredibly important to open the room between. No disrespect to anyone, but you know, it's kind of. And that's the issue. That's the issue, sorry. That's the issue that people don't see it as a problem. They don't see it as a problem. That's the issue. So my question is, and I listen to a BBC radio for debate just today, actually. It was recorded a few weeks back. All these very intelligent people that came onto the programme debating about whether or not it's causing a problem, whether it's defective, whether it's effective. And one of the biggest issues I got from it is that a lot of people don't actually believe that it's a problem. They don't believe it's a problem. So my question is, how do we then raise this challenge, raise this issue in a way where people listen? And I think one of the things, one of the debate is actually mentioned that those that are talking about turning out statues and decolonising, they're actually picking fights. And they're picking fights where they shouldn't be picking fights and they're talking about the fact that they're actually limiting students' views on what education should really be about. And for me, I thought, wow, is this where we're going with it? So I realised that ultimately, even when it comes to really intelligent academics from whatever university they come from, they don't see it as a problem. And I think that's the first issue. How do we actually make it aware that this is a real, a natural physically real thing? It's just as real as your ashes. You know what I mean? It's real. It's really real. But people don't see it as that. So I think before we even have that discussion, I think we need to find a way to raise that awareness to say this is actually real and it's difficult to see that. Just one quick thing in relation to this agenda. So I think that the challenge is that decolonisation is seen as a major challenge. And the reason it's seen as a major challenge is because this is a country that has never faced up to its history in terms of slavery, colonialism, where the wealth has come from, how some families are richer than others. So until we do that as a society, the things that you've talked about in terms of decolonisation being a real issue, not just in terms of higher education institutions, but throughout our society isn't going to happen. One of the things that Britain does really well is shy away from actually facing the reality of that history and what it means and the way that it is totally integrated into every aspect of our society. So here at SOAS there is a valiant attempt to really begin to address these issues against a very serious tide and some of you may have heard over the last couple of months when Mira, who happens to be here, but who leads our decolonisation working group, was on the Today programme and basically John Humphries tried to humiliate her in the way that he spoke about this. I mean she actually ended up humiliating him, but it says something very strong. I mean similarly today, I don't know those of you that heard when they were talking about the Cambridge decision to actually look at their history. Again, the attempts to trivialise, when we talked about what is happening on the philosophy course, does this mean that you're going to drop all of these great Western European philosophers from the curriculum? So I think it's a really important agenda for all of us, but I think that we have to do something that's more transformational than that, which is actually get our society to face up to the reality of the impact of colonialism and slavery. Thanks. My apologies. I should have left. This seems to be my evening for doing these issues, so I'm off to do the third thing now. So my apologies. Thank you so much for your participation Valerie. Thank you. Okay, and so we come to the final question, which is how can we amplify the need for support slash funding for progression to postgraduate study? So evidence shows that if you have a negative undergraduate experience, you're less likely to pursue postgraduate study. This is a systemic problem and one that is not necessarily isolated from the other. How many young black people think of academia as a career option? Marginalisation and access can impede on the aspiration of working in academia, but we need more of us there. We should be taking a wide and participation approach to postgraduate study. This is my suggestion, whilst also providing the pastoral support that is necessary for a psychologically safe and fitting work and study environment. So in the same ways in which people are assessed on household income for, for example, being recipients of bursaries, I would argue that universities should just take the initiative and have sliding scales for master's programs. So if you come from a low income background, let's say the course is 15,000 pounds, you pay a lower amount. This is a practical way that we can get people in the door. It's not good enough to have people crowdfunding. I have one of my friends here today, who is a postgraduate student at Oxford, and we have to crowdfund for black people to be able to take places at these institutions, whereas if we simply have things in place where people from low income backgrounds or from certain backgrounds have access to not just scholarships based on academic excellence, because we know what that means. I wouldn't have been able to get first because I was working through the whole of my degree, so we need to stop looking at it as academic excellence, and you can only get this money if you have three A stars. Well, 45% of black people in the UK live in social housing, so how can we always base it on the most, the most eligible person is not always the person who got the best grades. It needs to be looked at in context. There should be sliding scales for people who want to do postgraduate study. We should not all be paying the same price, first of all. And I would argue that universities should explicitly create funds of money, pots of money, for black postgraduate study, not just, okay, we encourage BME applicants or whatever. We want explicit pockets of money where we can access this and be able to study what we want, not just if we got a first or the most exemplary example, because then you're just perpetuating and kind of reproducing class inequalities, because who is more likely, even amongst BME or black students, who is more likely to be able to get those three A's. It's certainly not working class, black students. So, for example, the HEFC, which doesn't exist anymore by the way, had a postgraduate support scheme. It finished in 2015 and it was now been replaced by PGT loans, which are £10,000 for anyone who is a postgraduate student here or knows. You can have access to £10,000. I would just like to ask, where in the UK can you have a masters for £10,000? We have to do the maths. People would be able to take these places and have to work for the duration of them. It just perpetuates a cycle of non-awards or non-attainment. So, how can we amplify the need for support or funding for progressions postgraduate study and even beyond that, PhD level, or even beyond that, professorship? Well, I think there should also be an initiative that, just like you said, it's not about individual deficiencies. It's not that black people can't attain these grades. It's the barriers that stand in our way. So, it's something, a sort of initiative that moves beyond just grades, but maybe it's an asset-based approach. So, thinking about our skills and our contributions or even things like this, organising this, is it being a contribution towards moving higher up in the education system? I would say maybe as well institutions might be forced to do that at some point, because if you're acknowledging that the BME attainment gap means that BME students or black students are less likely to get a first or two one, and then you have your requirements for masters to be a first or two one, typically a first, and then funding in order to get PhD funding you need to have a first. All these sorts of things, I think it's important that the sector kind of looks, as you said, at terms like academic excellence. The idea that having a first doesn't necessarily mean that you'll do well in your PhD. All these sorts of things that I think are common practice, that in actual fact, A, having a negative impact on black students, but then also aren't really that rigorous anyway. As you know, we've got the black and academia campaign, which is definitely a campaign more around representation, but as well we've been speaking to doctoral training programmes, we've been speaking to institutions, trying to challenge some of the things that are happening within the sector that are disadvantaged in black students. It's difficult. I'll make a very quick point, because I'm mindful of time. I would like to see more initiatives from funders, so part of our worth as academics is to publish and is also to do what we call grant capture, very sexy labels that we use in higher education, but I would like to see embedded in the criteria for funding, and I know that there are some funders that are considering this, such as a Wellcome Trust. I would like to see criteria around supporting underrepresented groups, and particularly black minority ethnic students, as part of the criteria for funding. What support have you given to black minority ethnic grad students? What support have you given to those who are researchers, and also which actions have you put in place around race, and how's that being addressed through your project? At the moment you can just write a statement, but I think there needs to be something very explicit within the funding criteria that is asked of principal investigators. So again, just be mindful of time. I'd like to now start the Q&A section for people to kind of engage with what we've spoken about, and there are two mics that will be going around the room. Thank you. Just to address the issue that was mentioned about how to get the conversation started, especially with academics where they are uncomfortable, don't have the words, feel quite complacent in what they've been doing. I have been doing quite a bit of research on workshops, et cetera, to start that dialogue in high education institution, and I would point out, of course we all know about unconscious bias training, tick box exercise, and there you go, we're sorted, but to really get to the heart of what works for researchers is if they feel that if they don't embrace decolonising what they read, what they put on their reading list, how they deal with their students in their classroom, making sure that the materials resources, the people they cite, have diverse, there's a diverse number of bodies, voices given in that, goes to the heart of their research if it's impacted in some way, and some of you may or may not be aware that there is something called the implicit assessment test that can be undertaken, and it's only recently been sort of rolled out from Harvard, where it's actually speaking to researchers because they're the ones who go on, write those textbooks that we all then use, they're the ones who go for the grants, get the money, get the professorship, et cetera, but it's speaking directly to their self-interest, which is you are the expert in this particular field, what are you reading, which articles are you citing, is it the global north only, so only North America, Western Eurocentric, what's happened to the rest of the world, is nothing happening in the global south, are there no experts there, so that training is actually started and has been rolled out at Imperial, so there is a possibility hopefully very slowly because this is also the colonising the curricula, is also one of the ten identified drivers in the Open University innovating pedagogy, which came out in February, so it's expected that within the next ten years all high education institution will realise that they have to respond to that because that driver is there, it's going to be very slow, but then we've had hundreds of years of things being exactly as they are, and yeah we want changes now, but we have to realise that, we have to take it a step at a time, so it's finding good examples of things that actually work, and trying to get to a place where you're not sort of saying you're the problem sorted out, but sort of saying I recognise there's a problem, we all have to try and work towards it and the burden shouldn't fall on the students or the person who feels marginalised or the person who doesn't appear in anything that's been done, but they're studying the subject, they don't see a role model, but this is something they're interested in, how do they keep on going when there is no support or no reflection that actually this is something I can do and should do? Yeah, so my name is Mark Martin, a secondary school teacher, I've been teaching education for the last 15 years, when I first came to education there was a lot of support for black teachers in the sense of funding, development and so on, but over the years that's been eradicated and now it's down to professionals to kind of seek professional development, what's really interesting for me being able to travel around the country and to see so many different teachers and even in the world I've been privileged to actually do is that there's lots of great stuff happening amongst black teachers, but there's no platform or spotlight on that, so people just think that we just don't exist and for me and then it goes to the wider question around black intellectualism in terms of, especially in the sub that I teach in computer science, there's a neglect of that, we see it push the music, draw on my entertainment, but we're not seeing the intellectualism in STEM and it's there, it's there to be seen, so my kind of thing is where are the platforms and why aren't we creating more platforms to showcase talent and innovation and the futureists coming from ethnic minority groups and then also I think that from some of the conversations tonight, I think we need to have and what I've seen in other countries a teacher group that actively advocates for black teachers around equity, equality, justice and all of these kind of things because in our silo worlds it sounds good, it looks good, but nothing gets done and I think that there needs to be a collective approach amongst all the educators within this sector to really champion and the furtherment of intellectualism and especially coming from being backgrounds. Jerome, there's a gentleman who's had a hand up for a really long time, just I'll put the top there, but in the meantime. I found this whole session really really interesting after saying there'd be lots of things if we had more time and I would comment on the first question that you raised was around how about community awareness and you talked about retention and I think one of the things as my experience as an academic in higher education is that what happens with a lot of black students is they get pushed into certain courses and what I've seen and I'll give you an example so I've come from I've recently started working in London but I worked in another HGI for a number of years on health and social care courses and I speak into a student and she said and she talked to and she said I'm not really enjoying this course I said why is that she said well I'm thinking of leaving why I said she said well I want to do interior design and what happens is we as a community but also in HGI's we push our students into certain types of courses we don't so if you're on a course that you don't really want to do why are you doing why would anybody be doing because they don't think she said I don't think that's where I can I can get to I don't have role models in interior design I don't have these things so of course there's going to be people dropping out of course it's because they're not really interested in black people black students black academics can work in more than just law and healthcare and we must do things as we go out and promote courses and promote higher education for black minority ethnic groups encourage people to study the things that interest them because that's how one of the ways in which you're going to retain students and students are going to achieve should we take the questions and then have a chance to respond because I'm just being cautious of time sorry thanks yeah my my name is Angelo Irving I'm a student master's student at the University of Sheffield and mine the thing that kind of struck me was about the first point about community engagement and but then the second point and but it led into talking about staffing at university it seems to me that we're talking about the university's role without necessarily acknowledging a societal issue decolonisation the reason I feel like there's a struggle and I say this as I authored some research last month about decolonising the University of Sheffield is because moves to equality feel like moves to inequality for those that have benefited from inequality and I think that there has to be this awareness that it's what feels like us moving towards 50% which is a big jump for us is a drop for other people but I'm pessimistic that ideas of decolonisation can happen within one institution within a society and I'm just wondering what sort of joined up approach that can be had and I don't know the chair's name but you said what can be done one of the things that came out of a round table discussion that I hosted during the decolonising the university week we got a whole week which was nice was we have lobbied to have a position on the university's board specifically dealing with issues of specifically BAME and British based BAME because the university response has been to champion its international students and there's so much research that kind of points out that international students are not British based black and minority Asian minority ethnic students and it's about getting into the rooms where it happens and when we have kind of vice chancellors that are at these meetings when we have a vice chancellors that are kind of taking on this kind of mantle piece and not in a box ticking exercise kind of way I think that's when we'll have success. Thanks for your question. My question is really is there any research or evidence to show that if we had more private education focused on say BAME studies or BAME faculties for example like you might see in the United States you know they have traditionally black colleges etc is there any evidence that that would work here pre-university and perhaps as a university model? Okay thank you. Yeah I'm from Hackney too I'm 45 and from my own experience I've had a I've observed the attitude within my own with our community and outside of it and unfortunately it's quite shocking from one member of the panel not to ask about African philosophy I think it's important because it has contributed to our understanding about the world and I've got a list of people that have done this before one of which is a member of SAWAZ, Maggie Adrin Polcock, an aeronautical engineer, Neil Stigrath Tyson, David Odo Sugar and Gus Casey Hayford who happens to work here why is he not on the panel? They've both been on TV they are visibly black who have promoted the passion for their field and I feel that tackling racism is a sideshow is a distraction from what we should be doing and that is to cultivate our own get back our own intellectual tradition the Chinese can do it they don't give a damn about nobody they do what they do and that's why white America hates them because they don't pay nobody no mind and we should have that same attitude so I want to ask the lady at the end or why can't we why would you object to asking about what African philosophy is because we all because we ask what European philosophy is okay thanks for your what's the difference thanks for your question we'll take two more questions so that we can actually yeah yeah I'll answer at the end yeah sorry so we're going to answer questions any questions that you have at the end just because of time I want to try and make sure we get thank you for your question though can we pass the mic to Maxine please sorry can we pass the mic to Maxine who's just over here all right sorry good evening everybody um so I was just saying obviously we can all agree that this issue of attainment gap is very complex um I've worked on as a student engagement officer and one of the things we've done and also it's just talking about how exhausting and this journey won't be easy if we want to actually get down to the roof of the problem and actually find out why people are struggling so we had a scheme where we were looking at at risk students and they tend to be the black students um and when I called them so I would spend hours and hours and hours of today calling the students actually find out why they're not attending and most of the time you know the reasons behind it has been mentioned tonight so it's actually finding out these things so not only sending out those emails about non-attendance but actually following up on it and then signposting the students that are right to support departments so I feel like those are really practical things I currently work as a course administrator I've seen unconscious bias manifest at different levels so for example um with so with um wide academics um rounding down students grades as opposed to up um and obviously this is not I'm it's there's no evidence to suggest that this was done as you know a direct thing to as a student but it's just saying it's showing how unconscious bias operates at different levels so when the work is not present what else is guiding your decisions to round up marks or round down marks because we don't deal with nines for example so these are things to be very aware of so things like anonymous marking was implemented to tackle those things so if you want to so if we're talking about the marks being the case and the students are getting two ones and first who are the people marking what are the conditions that they're marking under so academics have loads of like a lot of work load and they they always complain about not having enough time to mark if they're stressed who are the students that will get the lower marks compared to the higher marks so I think it comes down to being very careful about the actual practical things that go on as opposed to always the big picture so it's important to tackle it on a local level as well as on a bigger scale thank you if we could have Maxine speak and then yeah thanks that will be it thank you um so I had a few questions firstly for those who've worked in other higher education institutions so here at Sawas we have like quite a few off the top of my head I can think of at least five different like groups that students are currently running to work on um raciatainment gap to work on improving student experience but there's we have an issue here of actually unifying for all of these projects to be kind of coming together with the same energy I don't know what the cause of that is um all of the work all of the groups that I think of can do incredible work um but it it's almost like I wonder how that operates in other higher education institutions and if we can take inspiration from other institutions as to how we can make sure that we're also unified in the work that we're doing um secondly a comment was made about education kind of following society and I feel like we have to remember that higher education in particular is meant to be leading society having those difficult conversations and breaking ground education is a particularly empowered space we have the language we have access to information that other people don't have and so going back to conversations that we've had during this panel discussion about earlier stages of education my question becomes leading from that point how can we make information more accessible to people before they get to university before they have access to literally the sign-in logins that you get as part of your enrolment that mean that we have able to that access to to be able to um interpret that information and then come through with the arguments so for example um all of the statistics Comfort gave us at the start you know this is this is privileged information not everybody has access to that off the bat um I definitely can say for myself before getting to university I knew in my heart of hearts what my experience was but I wouldn't have been able to have those kind of statistics so how can we try and make that information more accessible um earlier on and in a digestible form um so that it can be interpreted and instrumentalised so that we can rally um in higher education across different institutions but also beforehand so um my question is because you know I'm involved in the work itself as are other people in this room who do incredible things um what are other institutions doing what do what do you guys think what do you see about how we can try and rally and unify in secondary education in other stages of education in higher education within our institutions between our institutions to make sure that this movement like we're not getting exhausted on our own in isolation all right thanks Maxine and that's all we have time for because we want to respond okay okay is it just a is it just a quick question okay thanks um you you spoke about um sorry the the quote you had when you asked the question about racism and blackness um the one that began experiences of black students at university could easily translate to experiences of black students in any level of education particularly primary and secondary um my my question is how do you address um the the fact that there are students in primary moving to secondary education who are looked at upon as gifted and talented from primary and when they when they transfer to secondary they become an educational problem so that by the end of their educational experience at secondary school they no longer aspire to higher education although they've come from a gifted and talented background how can you address that okay all right if we're going to respond to the question just really quickly thanks if i respond directly to sorry can i catch your name sorry my name is will will will well nice to meet you well um so some of the work that we're doing at Kingston is that um we work with all key stages to begin with and where we've got um a organization called the Kingston hubs where we get students who act as volunteers and they get involved in social enterprise projects and also community projects that they want to add value to so part and part of what we're doing is that we're creating a mental input we've we've we've really created a mental input which i'm creating at the moment where we're trying to get um current first year academics so first year students who've begun in the second year who will be working with and supporting the students from tutoring to mentoring and it's not just it's not just um pp um students um people permission but it's also students that you've mentioned that are doing extremely well but when they transition to the next level they kind of like fall through the net because of whatever reasons so we're trying to find a way to also look at that as well by getting mentoring put into somebody's schools we've got um a school called the kinks and academy which is our partner school um and we're piloting it we're piloting that that that process within that school as well because it's not just from primary to secondary seat it's from secondary to college and or sixth form two so so we're working with um yeah nine students at the moment my first session is actually this Thursday so wish me luck to be interesting um with handpicked 22 um students who are doing really well but for whatever reason they're still struggling so it's not just students who are really doing bad it's students who have got the potential to do even better but we've got to try and take them to the next level um and i'm in a position of trying to recruit as many different um ambassadors and all volunteers who i can match them up with so that we can work with them over the summer and in september all the way to until they finish their year 11 we can help prepare them for um their the next step and to come in line with the lady in the green she mentioned about careers and she mentioned about community work for my understand bringing it together what we're trying to do is have a have a career led approach to our wp work so a lot of the students that i work with or not the young people that i work with they don't see any incentive to go into university they don't see the end product they don't actually care you know some of the students that i work with or some of the young people that work in the community are earning more money than teachers way more money just by doing a uh uh uh you know maybe some type of drug group on the street and they've told me straight i earn my money the new of it i'm like you must really do you must really do but my issue is how can we sustain that income in a very positive and legal way and so we want to try and find a way to work alongside the communities but more so do it from a career led approach so get them to see where you can end up once you finish university rather than rather than I'll say to you rather than I'll say to them you can get a degree and that's it so we try to get a lot of the alumni team as well a lot of um um alumni who actually finished doing the degrees and are doing really well and also that looks like them to come back and work with these school students to say to them this is what you can actually do after you finish school primary school school college and or sixth form going to university and when we flip side to that as well at the start of every single program we make sure that we make the students aware that university isn't for everyone we make sure that we make that aware to them we're not trying to recruit them we we stress to them that as as a university we're not trying to recruit you to come to Kingston we're not even telling you to go to university we're saying to you if you were to go to university which is which to me is the macrocosm of this world represents how this world should be in terms of moving forward innovation creativity business and everything else if you were to go to university this is what you can benefit from if you're not going to go to university then how can we help you get to your next step and it's not just about going through HEs about going through apprenticeships going through other internships whatever the you know what that platform is but we do want to try and make sure that it's it's not just top heavy but it's starting from the basics of getting them to understand what's available to them so I hope to answer your question. Okay Nicola's going to respond. I think it's going to make four points. I don't turn this on. I do think it's quite a hard cell to present to students an academic career and I'm always quite honest as an academic myself about the terrain that lays ahead for them so I am explicit about some of the challenges and that you need some of the tools you need tools and strategies to navigate and manage higher education but I think more positively I do want to point to um there's someone in the audience who asks about black British intellectuals and I'd like to um reference my colleague Paul Warmington who's done a book looking specifically at that issue um there was comment about what previous or what what existing movements there are for black teachers and I think there's a really key question because certainly we saw a lot of those movements not just at black teachers but looking at anti-racism more broadly in the 60s and 70s so we had the campaign against racial discrimination for example and then the movement that was led by Gus John and others comprising of black parents and teachers that was initially set up in Camden in terms of and I can't remember whose point I'm speaking to so apologies in terms of speaking actually to your point Rob around positive representations and looking at that in the workplace I would also like to point colleagues and students to the future leaders publication that's published by powerful media um that's published annually of successful black graduates from across the country and documents their journey and their degree outcome and also published by the same company the power list of successful or black people across a number of industries so not just STEM but a number of industries um someone from the audience a colleague asked about HSBC use historically black colleges and universities we have a different history in the UK and I think it's important to recognize that and also technology the very important point made by Baroness Amos around our failure I would say to engage seriously with issues of race and racism in this country too often the debate seems to steer back to either gender in higher education or to social class and that's not to say that those issues are lacking importance but there is a reluctance fear and denial about the salience of some of the issues that we've been discussing this evening and there is research that shows that students attending HSBC use in the States have higher levels of wellbeing and less stress than their counterparts at more mixed universities and then my final point that I just want to speak to I note the trend and I think this is commented on by a colleague in the audience for unconscious bias training which is all the rage nowadays and institutions are grabbing at it with both hands and I would like to caution a word to express a word of caution in that regard and point to the report that was published in December by the Equality and Human Rights Commission which has questioned the effectiveness of that training and points to a number of reasons why it may not be as effective as some of our institutions hope and I would like to see any training to look seriously at issues of structural discrimination and also issues of whiteness, white privilege and white power and I don't see that taken up sufficiently well in existing training courses that we have. I think that level of training needs to happen in schools as well especially because children don't know how to navigate teachers biases, it's imposed, they don't know what to do or how to face it. I don't know if anybody watched will there ever be a Black British Prime Minister and immediately you could see teachers were announcing and admitting to how they perceived their Black students, their Black African and Caribbean students and they internalised those thoughts and behaviours about them so another thing I mean I did it in partnership with Comfort Levinia and Vanessa with Whiting Participation at this University and I have taken it to carry on in schools which is delivering, decolonising the curriculum workshops and that gives them information as to microaggressions and biases but also different histories that they aren't taught in class about African history, not that the British Empire was I mean truths about the British Empire so a more holistic image of British history in terms of addressing Britain's colonial histories in schools so I think that's something that that would also help yeah. I'll take the question about studying what you enjoy I think there was a lady up there, it's definitely a message in our parents events just trying to get parents to understand that it's their child that needs to do that degree for the next three years minimum and so it's important that they're engaged in that but I would say that it's also worth looking into Whiting Participation parents events as well that is an option to the person up there that was saying about student groups and student campaigns. I know UCL had the wise my curriculum wide campaign which was I think started by staff but then also kind of led a lot by students. I would say get your institution involved but don't let them take over and try and work out how to transfer campaign to policy so a lot of our groups in our sort of college we want to engage with the sabbatical officers we want to engage with the students union so if you've got a campaign use that opportunity because I guess you guys if you've got sabbatical officers their job to do that so yeah that's probably one of the things but I would say again don't don't lose I guess ownership of the campaign and in terms of accessible information leading routes is going to have a year 13 conference so that we can look at ways to try and prepare students for what might be coming without being too negative about the landscape but just kind of helping them and giving them some tools to sort of navigate what might come in the future. Mark? Mark? Yeah I think something you mentioned about seeing a visual representation of teachers especially black teachers as well it's a great point and I love much of it I'm sure many of us may have seen the posters and they bring in social media but I love 56 black men of London movement I think that's awesome and I think that's something we can actually recreate in universities alongside students and stuff so I would love to have like 100 black students of Kingston you know and literally roll that out to schools you know from a perspective of different courses that they study into where they're from culturally wise to heritage parents to careers where they're going to and then opening up to alumni as well and bringing it in so that people can see that the the the issues of like things like knife crime and stuff like that is a minority that's been made by minority group of young people but there's a majority of young people that are extremely talented that don't get mentioned in the news you know personally I think black women is yeah black women. I personally think knife crime is is a minority issue where it comes to the amount of people getting involved in it in comparison to the amount of young people who are doing extremely well in school that are talented are capable that can go really far so for me having that type of incentive that you mentioned about having some visual representation for staff members to see for the government to see for parents to see for community leaders to see for everyone to see that there are a lot of excellent black teachers out there you know BAME however you want to turn it into the term I'll do an extremely well but to create a physical group where that can be rolled out and then go from there training can be done you can have co-collaboration you know and it can be UK based rather than just London based so yeah it's a good idea and on that note I want to thank the panellists so much for being part of this evening. I know that we've run over for time um apologies we've run 20 minutes over but I just want to encourage everyone to go out there as a drinks reception outside um talk to one another share ideas and if you do have any ideas please put them in the suggestions box um if you have already put your name down to be on the mailing list it will be to keep you updated about future events but also about outcomes and it will be good if people shared what happens at their universities share ideas let's do this knowledge sharing where we're looking at what's worked what hasn't worked and how we can move forward together and I just want to thank you all for being here before we will disappear I think congratulations and thank you to comfort before we leave I just want to give you guys just a little