Breaking barriers: the role of teacher diversity in building inclusive school environments

A diverse teaching body is essential for creating inclusive and enriching educational environments. Teachers from varied backgrounds bring unique perspectives, experiences, and teaching styles that help foster a deeper understanding of different cultures and viewpoints. A diverse teaching staff encourages collaboration, challenges biases, and prepares pupils to engage with the complexities of an increasingly global society, equipping them with the skills to navigate a diverse world with empathy and insight.

We spoke to Leah Morris of Wyndham James Consultancy, a specialist in diverse recruitment, and Andrew Isama, Master of Economics at Eton College, about the barriers to attracting diverse candidates and how these can be effectively overcome.

About Leah and Andrew

Leah has a passion for creating inclusive environments and can identify areas and practices that are prohibitive or restrictive to diverse groups. Leah is able to cast light on the issues faced by current and potential employees and facilitate discussions, make recommendations and devise roadmaps for the future. She is adept at creating safe spaces for discussion, learning and issue resolution. Whether it is delivering training, public speaking, recruiting or in her capacity as a school Governor, Leah’s passion is helping clients to create more diverse and inclusive environments achieved through long lasting legacy change in their recruitment process and practices.

Andrew began his teaching career at Eton after earning an Economics degree from the University of Edinburgh. Andrew is deeply committed to diversity and inclusion in education, public policy, and the private sector. A strong advocate for social mobility, he attended Eton on a sixth-form scholarship and now serves on the advisory board of the Royal National Springboard Children’s Foundation, where he supports students in adapting to new environments and assists schools in refining their scholarship and outreach initiatives.

We asked Leah and Andrew a series of questions about the importance of diversity in the teaching body.

There are numerous benefits for schools who have a diverse teaching body. Please could you tell us about some of these benefits?

Leah: Schools should have teaching environments which are reflective of society. Having a diverse teaching body helps pupils to become global citizens and means they don’t grow up in an environment where they look at other people and in seeing them as different, see them as less. It is also important for pupils to see positive role models, and people who are like them in the classroom.

Andrew: You want children to be able to bring 100 per cent of who they are into the classroom and the learning environment, and where they see members of staff or teachers who look like them, it feels more acceptable for them to bring all of their personality into the classroom. A diverse teaching body also benefits the staff themselves, as being able to connect with people from different backgrounds and different parts of the country or the world can enhance their teaching in the classroom.

What do you think some of the main barriers to attracting a diverse range of applicants are?

Andrew: If you think about the experience of minoritised individuals in education from a young age, a lot of people have still got scars that are healing from their time in school, and schools need to break these down. They can do this by reflecting on their recruitment and retention processes to try and do things differently so that the history doesn’t become the present.

Schools have to be more creative than just putting jobs on TES and education boards. This may mean using social media, or actually going onto campuses to create a physical presence so they can access specific communities and find the people that they are looking for.

Leah: If you are from a minoritised ethnic background and you don’t see any diversity in a school, whether that is in the governing body or teaching body, that is a huge hurdle which makes people from such backgrounds question whether they are going to get anywhere in their career if they join the school.

Many schools claim to be really inclusive in their marketing materials but are not actually telling you about any of the inclusive things they are doing, so this can feel quite tokenistic.

What recruitment strategies can schools implement to attract more candidates from diverse backgrounds?

Andrew: I think that a lot of schools need to be on university campuses more. It’s really important to try and have face to face conversations with groups up and down the country.

They also need to develop a relationship over time when it comes to recruiting. Schools need to have a more long-term approach, and if they are looking to hire when pupils are leaving university, they should be speaking to pupils in their first and second years to create that relationship. I think schools also don’t focus enough on career changers when it comes to recruiting, and how they can convert people out of finance, law, marketing etc as there are a lot of transferable skills that are related to teaching.

Leah: I think that for someone to make it in teaching, they don’t necessarily need to have gone to one of the redbrick universities. Schools need to consider when looking at recruitment whether they consider all degrees and institutions to be equal. A lot of independent schools have teachers from Oxbridge, but if schools are seen to be saying that these are the only people they want, they are automatically cutting down the pool of candidates they have to choose from.

What kind of action can schools take to ensure that they are fostering an inclusive environment, for students and teachers alike?

Leah: Schools should reflect on what makes an environment inclusive, and what makes it feel hostile or un-inclusive. With instances of microaggressions, what does the school do in response to these? Do people get support to be able to call them out, or are they dismissed with people being told “oh you know, you took that the wrong way.”

It is also important to ensure that everyone feels like they can show up as themselves. For example, are people called by their correct names, does the school bother with pronunciation and getting it right? Or instead, does the school kind of fudge it, or even mistake individuals for other people and call them the wrong name?

Andrew: Discussion is really important. You have to get to know the person if you want them to be high performing and thrive in the environment that they are in. An inclusive environment will look completely different at different schools. For example, an inclusive environment in a boarding school setting will be completely different to an inclusive environment in a day school setting.

Recruitment is only one of the first steps when it comes to increasing diversity in schools. What steps should schools be taking to ensure that they are retaining a diverse teaching body?

Andrew: I think if you are a minority coming through a school and are being told to fill in gaps in the co-curriculum programme, and you are not being given anything to help and develop you in the space you are operating in, you may think that you are just there to fill a gap. Nobody wants to feel that way. Instead, schools should allow to individuals to be in spaces where they feel respected and where they can develop.

Leah: It’s about schools ensuring that people can come in and feel like themselves, and how to encourage representation in all aspects of school life. That will including having different foods on the menu, teaching different books, texts, music composers etc across the whole school life, as well as not just reserving black history for a particular month.

Retention starts at the top, so the head and governing body really have to buy into this. They need to reflect on how they care for people within their institutions, and how they can ensure a good experience so individuals are not just regarded as dispensable bodies who can be replaced at will.

What are your thoughts on the kind of burden that is sometimes placed on minoritised staff to really drive the diversity strategy within the school?

Andrew: There’s a part of me where there’s a huge passion and almost a responsibility when I am doing the D&I stuff, not just because I am one of the few minorities at the school, but because I also attended the school as well. It is tiring but I see myself in the kids. I’m doing it so that the kids can have things that I didn’t have.

Leah: It is difficult because essentially anything that is done from a grassroots level is so difficult without top level buy in. There is the obstacle of the resistance of staff who don’t really want to buy into it and don’t want to change.

For minoritised staff who are trying to make change but facing those obstacles, they are reliving that trauma. So when you are seeing that through people and thinking about when that happened to you, it is really difficult. Whenever I am talking to schools, I am imagining seeing my children and other children like them who may have to relive that experience.

What role can data play in guiding diversity efforts in schools?

Leah: When looking at data, you can identify the school’s problem areas that need to be investigated. You can also use data for a comparison of aspects year on year. But it also can tell you things in recruitment such as whether there are shortlisting discrepancies or why certain people aren’t transitioning through the recruitment process.

However, an important aspect about data is being willing to act on what it is telling you. If you produce certain data, then stick it in a drawer and do nothing with it, what is the point in collecting the data?

Andrew: I think the big thing with diversity efforts is that a school might not necessarily see the benefits straight away. However, they might see it in ten or 20 years down the line when the school has minorities who attended the school sending their own kids back to the school because they had such a fantastic experience themselves.

How can the wider school community, such as parents, support the goal of increasing diversity of the teaching body?

Andrew: I think an important part of this is giving the minority teachers an opportunity to actually meet some of the parents away from parents’ evenings, whether this is on the sports pitches or at recitals etc. Having conversations with those parents makes you feel like you are party of the community, as sometimes for minorities stepping into the school it can be quite isolating.

Leah: There are lots of parents who are very engaged. It is important for the school to have open discourse with the parents to understand what they like but also what they don’t like about the school. This means that the school can take things away, understand and make changes. Many parents will have roles which are useful to the school and would be able to support the different initiatives it puts in place. If you don’t have open dialogue with the parents, you won’t know about this.

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© Farrer & Co LLP, October 2024