‘I don’t think race matters.” “It doesn’t matter what skin colour you are.” “It’s who you are as a person.” The 11-year-olds of Glenthorne High School, a non-selective performing arts academy in south London, say all the right things about race; small wonder they felt so uncomfortable when a group of them were asked to split along racial lines and into “affinity groups” as part of a new two-part Channel 4 documentary series, The School That Tried to End Racism. When work began on it last year, this televised experiment was always likely to be provocative, but no one could have predicted how relevant it would feel following the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis, the resurgent Black Lives Matter movement and the toppling of
Glenthorne High School – the school that tried to end racism
When a London academy ditched the curriculum in favour of a project about its pupils’ own racial prejudices, it let in TV cameras to record what happened. Now experts wonder if it’s an experiment that could be rolled out nationwide. Gabriel Tate reports
The pupils of Year 7 at Glenthorne High School, Sutton
MARK JOHNSON/CHANNEL 4
The Times