Dialogue Of The Deaf

Tony Sewell telling it like it is. There's none so deaf as those that will not hear.

However, Sewell called for a rethink of educational strategies for black students.

“One of the ways that we’ve got it wrong is that we’ve been bogged down with the socialist route and agenda, which is not necessarily our agenda, and what we’ve done is concentrated on a very small group of disaffected black youths.

“It seems to me – strategically – that we’ve missed a whole way of going about it. We’ve got to come to the government and not say: ‘here’s a group of black children underachieving and what are you going to do?’

“What we want to actually say is: ‘here are the big strategic ideas and this is the group we want to focus on’." Sewell stunned the group when he called for the exclusion of the badly behaved minority in favour of the wellbehaved majority.

“In some schools, children are openly dealing drugs, they are openly violent with teachers, they are not coming to school on time.

“They never do any homework, they never have any of their bags with any schoolwork and they are bringing in a culture from the street of gangsterism right into the classroom. And then you sit down and say ‘we are concerned about exclusion rates?’

“To be honest, in some of those schools half of those students should have been out and if I was the head teacher I would kick them out because they deserved it," he said.

Other members of the panel violently objected to Sewell’s view.

“All you are doing is perpetuating that system of selection that has been refined by rejection," said German.

“There are too many schools like that which are not fit places to educate children," German added.

Paul Phoenix interjected: “We have got racism in our education system to a level that it is almost becoming acceptable.

“How can we expect any child to go into a system that tells them, one, ‘you don’t exist’ and two, ‘your foreparents did absolutely nothing for the benefit of humanity?’

“Would any of us walk into an environment that treats them the same way that the education system treats black children?" Phoenix asked.

You might think Sewell's ideas were common sense, to be applied to all children irrespective of race. German and Professor John, whose "Communities Empowerment Network" is funded by the National Lottery, don't think pupils should be excluded even after carrying out a sustained campaign of harassment against a teacher - including death threats.