Diversity & Inclusion Progress

This term we commissioned Flair, who help to build anti-racist cultures, as we strive to create a genuinely inclusive environment.

Following recent pupil and staff surveys, Flair highlighted a number of strengths at South Hampstead, including a strong pupil understanding of race terms and very high levels of racial inclusion for non-White, British students. As a school, we still need to make some headway to ensure the student body is as racially diverse as London as a whole; one of the many ways we are tackling the broader issue of diversity includes our ambitious new bursary campaign and mentoring scheme.

As we continue to progress the school’s commitment to equality, we highlight how various departments address inclusion and diversity through everyday teaching and learning.

• Our Head of Psychology recently joined a number of local state schools and the curriculum lead for our A Level board, AQA. Together, they reviewed the current syllabus, suggesting opportunities to promote better awareness, such as including unconscious bias as an integrative aspect of cognitive psychology.  The group put forward suggestions for a future reformed syllabus to include prejudice and discrimination as a compulsory section in Social Influence, and requested more up-to-date research and studies that have been carried out beyond the UK and US.
• Design students were invited to hear from the award-winning architect and GDST alumna Elsie Owusu OBE this week. As the founding chair of the Society of Black Architects, and a Council member of the Royal Institute of British Architects, she is an outspoken critic of what she describes as ‘institutionalised discrimination’ in her profession and promotes increased diversity in architecture and design.
• Also this week, our Head of Politics invited Rolake Osabia, an artist and PhD researcher in the English department at UCL, to speak to pupils. Her talk provided an overview of Black feminism, laying out its histories, origins and impact, highlighting the importance of terms like intersectionality and misogynoir to analyse how gendered and racialised oppression affects Black women and people of marginalised genders.