Diversity & Inclusion

Listening and Learning Together

We are dedicated to listening to our community and empowering our students with the knowledge, awareness, and confidence to critically evaluate social issues and confront prejudice wherever it arises.

We want to assure everyone connected with Brentwood School that we are fully committed to tackling and eradicating racism and we continue to work closely with our community to meet this challenge head-on.

Brentwood School Today

Our ambitious long-term strategy for our school considers how our values – Virtue, Learning and Manners – can help us achieve our goals, including our commitment to anti-racism and diversity. These values permeate the whole school, and we use them regularly to reflect on and explore subjects that are of importance to all of us.

The children of today will play an important role in shaping our world and a key part of our role at Brentwood School is to help our students understand how they can do good in the world, not just well in their exams.

There is, of course, more we can do. And we will.

There is a sign in the Old Bean Library that reads: ‘Here in the past may the present find arms to fight the battle of the future.’

We cannot change the past, but we can evaluate it critically to better understand both what has helped our school endure as a place of learning that has enriched the lives of so many, and how we need to do things differently now and in the future.

Our Commitment and Actions

Diversity and inclusivity is one of our priorities. Here are some of the advancements we have made so far:

Students are provided opportunities to reflect on and talk about diversity and inclusivity through Year Group assemblies and discussions. Students also run their own assemblies, events and activities.
We have updated our Equal Opportunities audit to include how we look at the recruitment of staff, rebalancing the underrepresentation of BAME applicants and working on creating a consciously inclusive recruitment strategy. An area we are already focusing on is ensuring this strategy is effective in drawing in applications from people of all demographics. We are working and learning from others who have made significant strides towards achieving this.
We have analysed annual data comparing the performance of students in public examinations. We want to be sure – based on evidence – that BAME students are not underperforming, so we are undertaking an annual analysis of the value-added performance of BAME students in public examinations.

We recognise that the positive developments outlined above do not mean we have completed our work in the area of promoting diversity and anti-racism, and our work is ongoing.

The cultural diversity of the school is highly valued by pupils, who demonstrate exceptional tolerance for all members of their community.

ISI Inspections Report

Diversity and Inclusivity in the Curriculum

We have, in recent years, updated our curriculum as part of our work on diversity and inclusivity. We do not shy away from confronting difficult questions about our country’s past.

The examples given below are not exhaustive, and our annual Equal Opportunities audit, which is presented to Governors, ensures that we maintain the momentum required for us to achieve our goals.

Examples include:

History

The Key Stage 3 History curriculum was comprehensively re-written in March 2019. Our overarching theme is “History is Every Story”, with an emphasis on inclusivity and relevance to our students.

In Year 7, we focus on World Civilisations, including explorations of Benin, Mansa Musa in Mali, and Baghdad through the lens of Firas Alkhateeb’s Lost Islamic History. We spend one term (of nine, in Key Stage 3) on the Tudors and this includes consideration of the key question, “Was Tudor Society White?”, using Miranda Kaufman’s Black Tudors as a key text.

We have a strong emphasis on social history, using historians such as Anne Hughes and Emma Griffin, as well as explicit topics on the rights of women in the nineteenth century and the role of women in war. We also look at the struggle for recognition and rights for LGBTQ+ people through the study of the “Swinging Sixties”.

Our unit on Empire explores the social, political and economic consequences of colonialism, and develops students’ critical understanding of the period; teachers choose a particular region to study in-depth, such as India or South Africa. We have a unit on slavery including the Middle Passage, the conditions of slaves in the Caribbean, and the end of slavery (using texts such as David Olusoga’s Black and British).

When our students learn about the First World War, they study the contribution of Empire and Commonwealth soldiers, making use of Stephen Bourne’s Black Poppies. We also have a unit on migration, looking at the reasons for migration and its impact over several centuries.

Throughout the History curriculum, we examine a range of perspectives and develop critical reading skills; through a developing understanding of historiography, students consider interpretations, examine bias and evaluate evidence.

We are proud that we teach our students how to think, rather than what to think, and we believe that our curriculum helps develop the necessary skills, key historical concepts, and knowledge necessary to understand, and indeed to flourish in, our world and society.

English

We are working hard to ensure our English curriculum is inclusive and diverse. We believe that the canon is an important part of our literary heritage, but one that is expanding and evolving. There is no literary period that can be explored in a contextual or cultural vacuum. Through our choice of texts, interpretative approaches, and through discussion, we examine issues such as disability, cultural identity, gender, race, social inequality and social justice.

The Year 7 modern novel unit includes teachers’ choices of text across continents, cultures and genders. Some popular choices include: Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo, Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian, Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne.

In Year 8, students study autobiographies from around the world, including Malala Yousafzai’s I Am Malala, under the theme “Celebrating Cultural Identity”, before studying an anthology divided into regions and continents.

For our Year 9 “Love and Relationships” unit, students explore different forms of love across the ages, from the perspective of writers of different eras, ethnicities and genders.

Our current IGCSE curriculum includes poetry by John Agard, Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker, prose by Moniza Alvi, Maya Angelou, Kate Chopin, Rose Tremain, Susan Hill and Alice Munro, and non-fiction texts by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Benjamin Zephaniah, George Alagiah, Jamie Zeppa and Adeline Yen Mah.

A Level students study Margaret Atwood with focus on alienation and ‘new feminism’, and poems on the themes of sexuality, gender and race.

Our IB students undertake a deliberate postcolonial interpretation of a number of texts, as well as studying texts by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Toni Morrison and Carol Ann Duffy.

The Bean Library also offers students a number of reading lists of recommended fiction and non-fiction texts, with a deliberate spread of continents, cultures, genders, sexualities and time periods.

Prep School Enhancements

Some recent advancements in diversity and inclusion at the Prep School include:

Changes to the Prep RE curriculum, which centres on many issues regarding inclusion and acceptance.
An update to topics, which now includes slavery and racism in football.
Our Music curriculum includes African drumming, stamping tubes from the Solomon Islands, a history of the blues and songs from around the world.
Students study inclusive comprehension material.
Regular guest assemblies also include those from BAME backgrounds.