The REAL Project: a positive response to the problem of ethnic minority achievement

The REAL Project (Realising Equality and Achievement for Learners) is the first national project specifically working to improve the quality of gifted and talented education for pupils from black and other minority ethnic (BME) backgrounds and those who are learners of English as an additional language (EAL). 

‘Our G&T policy rests on the principle that ability is evenly distributed, so schools’ G&T populations must be broadly representative of their whole school populations.  REAL starts from the assumption that diversity is positive and to be valued.’
Tim Dracup, Assistant Director - Improving Pupil Performance Division, DCSF

REAL is a network led by London Gifted & Talented. We identified schools and local authorities which had made strides towards meeting the needs of our target groups to derive interesting practices from their own real life contexts.  Initially, we worked with three London local authorities (Haringey, Hounslow and Islington) and three in the Black Country (editor: international readers see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blackcountry/uncovered/what_is.shtml) (Sandwell, Wolverhampton & Walsall), with 21 schools in total. The big idea behind REAL was to create transferable and scalable ideas and resources. The core medium through which these are presented is the REAL Toolkit, an online bank of guidance, tools, resources and DVD-based training materials (www.realproject.org.uk).

The project supports schools in engaging with a complex and often political agenda, with national G&T policy subjected to accusations of institutional racism arising from the persistence of under-representation of certain groups within G&T populations, the turbulence caused by international new arrivals and the hard facts of endemic under-performance within certain minority groups.  Each of these issues is often compounded additionally by disadvantage. The power of the network is that it has enabled constructive and confident approaches to meeting these challenges at a local level and, through a sustained dialogue between partners, a range of successful and defensible approaches are emerging onto a wider platform. These are challenging some of the core assumptions behind G&T education at school, local and national level and are bringing down some of the barriers to inclusion and achievement.

Consider an example. The issue of international new arrivals is of national importance in the UK, which is creating significant pressure on the system. We wanted schools to be able to work from the assumption that any new arrival is potentially G&T.  We worked with Hounslow Language Service to refine their initial assessment process for all new arrivals to make this positive principle a practical reality. New assessment materials, such as the use of mother tongue interviews and tests of vocabulary size (1,000 word level tests) and language development, have been tried and refined in local schools.

‘We got involved with REAL to look at how to pick out G&T new arrivals quickly … our experience has been that students who may have been added to the register in a minimum of two years are, through this new route, likely to be on it after eight weeks.’
Manny Vazquez, Hounslow Language Service.

This initial assessment process has been trialled in other schools and local authorities where it has been adopted in its entirety or adapted to fit local capacity and need. The key to innovation through the network has been the identification of a set of core principles behind what works and refining the understanding of what these can look like when applied to different contexts.

So what were the key questions? The issue was not that new arrivals couldn’t be identified as gifted, it was more to do with ‘what evidence do we need?’ and ‘how much is enough?’. A critical consensus can emerge through networking, which is valued just as much by confident schools and local authorities with developed systems as it is by those who are more immediately needy.

It is also interesting to note that the majority of engagement with REAL has been from colleagues outside the narrow G&T community, which is giving the network an additional dynamic. Bringing together different roles and perspectives, and giving this dialogue an imperative and focus at all levels, is another critical success factor.

The network has thrown up some interesting challenges to the labels that we apply to the discussion of practice. Often what has been said to work in G&T can be labelled as elitist. Where what works is labelled as ‘exemplary’ practice (which is so often is highly specific to its own context), this situation can be perpetuated. The REAL network has focused on identifying ‘interesting’ practice and making that accessible. We have learned that often what makes practice transferable is preserving the ‘authentic voice’ of the original context.  Asking questions of the individual network members to elicit that voice and also moderate their claims has been important, too. ‘Innovative’ is another one of those words. What we have found is that ‘innovative’ relates to the ‘potential to effect change for others’. There are some really impressive practitioners in the network but they don’t always see what they are doing as new or innovative for them.  Bringing out their wealth of interest and experience and giving it a voice has been hugely rewarding.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mr Matt Dickenson is the Equalities & Achievement Adviser for London Gifted & Talented, in London, England, United Kingdom.

 

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