Racist management

Schools are required to respond effectively in dealing with racist incidents in terms of their policies, practices and procedures; there is also a legal requirement relating to the recording and reporting of each school’s annual statistics of racist incidents to their Local Authority for submission to the DfES. 

Many schools find the reality of determining exactly what is and is not a racist incident a challenge.  Every care must be taken to ensure that their Local Authority’s policies are applied objectively and consistently at all times by all staff.

The Behaviour Log is regularly updated to ensure that it meets current legal requirements for collecting all the mandatory information relating to any racist incidents.  This feature instantly ensures that school staff have access to the record of the incident together with information outlining how it was dealt with and, critically, any actions that the school needs to take to avoid such an incident occurring again.

The Behaviour Log allows staff to monitor racism both in terms of the perpetrator and the victim.  The system encourages schools to use every aspect of the data available to create an accurate picture of when and where racism occurs; who are the perpetrators and who are the victims.  Effective monitoring of the data will enable staff to put appropriate strategies and resources in place to protect potentially vulnerable pupils and help eliminate racism altogether.

Although the Behaviour Log is primarily focussed on what we can do as teachers to help children understand the benefits of behaving appropriately, in order to meet DfES reporting requirements, all racist incidents are categorised as being either; child to child, child to adult, adult to adult or adult to child.

The advanced search facilities in the Behaviour Log allow schools to produce reports indicating weekly/monthly trends for all types of behaviour including racially motivated incidents.  The system will also analyse the data and produce reports indicating any statistical variance in terms of gender, ethnicity or age.  This level of detail again provides for a more focussed and targeted approach to addressing racism in individual schools and throughout all schools in the Local Authority.