Show Racism the Red Card APPG 2023

Earlier this month, Show Racism the Red Card’s All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) met to hear from keynote speakers including the outgoing and incoming general secretaries of the National Education Union (NEU) in Kevin Courtney and Daniel Kebede respectively, who spoke on the need for anti-racism on the national curriculum.

“All subjects can de de-colonised. This means looking at what voices and perspectives are being taught and why.

The NEU thinks that we need a new and modern approach, which is anti-racist, to teaching about migration, belonging and empire. This is so we can properly respond to and reflect changing classroom demographics in Britain.

Racism is on the rise and that’s why we need to talk about the need for schools to actively talk about racism, understand what is happening in their community, and ensure they have an anti-racist plan for their school, college etc. no matter what the social or cultural mix of the school.

The curriculum is one vital way to do this and we think the goals of the national curriculum should explicitly address racism.” – Kevin Courtney

Kevin also touched on how subjects like English Literature and History could easily be more inclusive and how local histories could be incorporated to represent local contexts in addition to analysis of overarching government policies, recommendations from reports and implementation of curricular and educational change.

The SRtRC APPG was established in September 2017 with the aim of increasing UK government support for the work of the campaign and raising the profile of our antiracist education work with MPs. The pandemic unfortunately had restricted the number of meetings we have had since 2020 but we have had 4 successful AGM’s to maintain the APPG.

We have now changed the main focus of the APPG to lobbying MPs to get antiracism education on the National Curriculum and in 2023 are aiming to hold 4 meetings around this theme inviting key note speakers from the world of Sport, TV and Academia to address the meetings.

At this meeting we launched a Parliamentary Candidates manifesto pledge (that we are hoping all candidates in the next General Election will commit to).  This manifesto pledge is

“Anti-racism education is key to combating racism in our society and I am committed as an MP to lobby the UK Government to put antiracism on the National Curriculum.  For this to be successful we must have time and funding for teaching and other school staff to be trained in antiracism”.

The current officers for the Show Racism the Red Card APPG are as follows: 

Kim Johnson MP: Secretary.

Chris Stephens MP Chair.

Co-Chair – Caroline Noakes

Co-Chair – Bell Ribiero-Addy

Vice Chair – Mary Foy

Vice Chair – Rachael Maskell

Vice Chair – Kate Osborne.

Vice Chair – Anne McLaughlin MP