Study reveals how race, faith and free speech are negotiated in English schools amid global debates on equality, expression and impartiality.
A University of Birmingham study is illuminating how issues of race and faith equality are negotiated in England’s schools at a time of intense debates internationally around free speech, anti-racism, and political impartiality.
The research study, titled Free Expression at School: The Making of Youth Engagements with Race and Faith, is co-led by Professor Karl Kitching and Professor Reza Gholami alongside colleagues Dr Aslı Kandemir and Dr Md. Shajedur Rahman.
Funded by the Leverhulme Trust, the almost three-year study combines national survey data, policy document analysis, classroom observations, youth participatory methods, and interviews with teachers, policymakers, and key stakeholders. The study was motivated by growing concern over how free speech is being used as a political tool, paradoxically, to restrict conversations about inequality in educational settings.
“There’s been a lot of debate over freedom of speech at the university level, but this overlooks the experiences of young people before university or before adulthood. So we wanted to ask the question, why is policy and political debate not addressing young people’s freedom of speech and wider expression in school contexts?” Professor Kitching explains.
The study emerges against a global backdrop of moral panics and debates about the presence of anti-racist and LGBTQ+ inclusive education in schools. US president Donald Trump, for instance, is seeking to abolish the Department of Education and denounce Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) programmes. This presents challenges to human rights and comprehensive and inclusive education for young people.
“Education has become the battleground in lots of countries for hard-right culture wars, and it's obviously very effective to use the figure of the child for particular political goals,” says Professor Kitching. “The idea that children's innocence is being lost, for example, is a very charged and effective method of convincing people that something's wrong in the school system, and that ‘woke ideologies’ are part of the reason for it. These claims lack any kind of meaningful evidence base.”
In England, debates have centred on the perceived dangers of having anti-racist and faith-inclusive conversations in schools. In 2020, the former Minister for Equalities, Kemi Badenoch, now leader of the Conservative party, argued that the teaching of white privilege in schools was illegal if presented as fact and 'unnecessarily antagonistic’, while the Department for Education has published and updated guidelines around discussions of politically ‘contentious’ issues, encouraging impartiality.
Professor Kitching points out that there is an explicit contradiction here. “Policy and politics has become so polemic around this, where, on the one hand, you see people talking about freedom of speech and protecting freedom of speech, and on the other hand, we see efforts to actually stop certain things being talked about, or at least being taught about in schools. Our research is really trying to get underneath some of those issues.”
Education has become the battleground in lots of countries for hard-right culture wars, and it's obviously very effective to use the figure of the child for particular political goals. The idea that children's innocence is being lost, for example, is a very charged and effective method of convincing people that something's wrong in the school system, and that ‘woke ideologies’ are part of the reason for it. These claims lack any kind of meaningful evidence base.
The University of Birmingham team conducted a nationwide survey of over 3,000 year 10 pupils (aged 14–15) and more than 200 year 10 teachers across 29 schools in nine English regions. Sampling was carefully stratified by geography, population density, and school type to reflect the diversity of England’s educational landscape.
The results were striking. While many young people said they cared deeply about race and faith equality, a large proportion expressed discomfort speaking openly in front of peers even when they felt safe and listened to by their teacher. When a peer said something they strongly disagreed with, over half (52%) of students said they are likely to keep their feelings private in response. The study found that overall, young people often self-censor on race and faith equality issues in schools, including regarding reporting discrimination, due to multiple factors including worries about offending others and concerns about judgment or being disciplined. Overall, only 34% agreed that most pupils treat each other with respect, showing that how students perceive each other within school environments is one of the reasons affecting whether they exercise their right to freedom of speech.
Dr Rahman, Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, highlights a compelling set of findings: “Students surveyed say that they learn about socio-political issues from social media rather than from school, but they're also pretty positive towards their teachers’ practice and support to handle things like race and faith issues in principle. Yet most students also responded that they would not, or were unsure of, their confidence to report racism or related experiences they face in school. The study also found a significant minority of young people felt their teachers were not always well-prepared to lead an accurate discussion about racism.”
Dr Rahman points out other key findings; 43% viewed ‘unfair treatment of people like me because of our skin colour, ethnicity, religion, or nationality’, as a worrying issue. 61% of those from Black, African, Black Caribbean and Black British backgrounds, 55% of those from Asian or Asian British backgrounds, and 37% of white students also agreed with this view. Moreover, whilst 47% of students surveyed felt that their school taught their community’s history accurately, although this depended on geographic location and area, young people of Black and Asian backgrounds were at least 2.5 times more likely to disagree that the history of people from their racial or ethnic background is accurately taught in their school.
The research team carried out lesson and assembly observations alongside focus groups and interviews in six schools in Birmingham and London, and ethnographic work in four additional schools during the second year of the study.
“We wanted to examine the social structures and dynamics within schools,” explains Dr Aslı Kandemir, Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. “[We found that] young people are very racially literate, or literate in terms of inequalities in the wider society, but they believe to what extent they would prefer to express themselves should be their own decision. They want to bring their own agency, and to highlight that they are a citizen of the school, a citizen of this country or this society, an equal member of the society.”
The discourse around Britishness was integral to the societal context and the study’s findings. “There's been a lot of debate about fundamental British values, how meaningful they are, and how they affect schools. There’s also been a debate on how they affect religion, and minoritised young people,” Professor Kitching explains. “British values are spoken about in a very top-down way, but we’ve seen that the effects are a lot more subtle than direct. It has a paradoxical silencing effect, whereby if you challenge the mainstream political view, you risk being seen as un-British.”
The study points out that, currently, race and related prejudice issues are addressed primarily in Key Stage 4 (14-16 years) through the Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE) subject, but that these conversations need to be tackled in the entire curriculum and go beyond one subject for inclusive youth empowerment and engagement. The study calls for a revised curriculum that broadens civic and political education for young people, which also explicitly and critically addresses the work of racially and religiously minoritised communities in creating social change in Britain. As part of this, Professor Kitching argues for the development of the secondary school-level subject of Citizenship to include political education in a way that educates and empowers students to develop their own view on citizenship and related rights and freedoms. “How we look at the democratic process involved in schools and young people needs to change so we are enacting the value of democracy and seeing it more from a bottom-up point of view."
The study also utilised participatory research methods to reveal insights, including a ‘Photovoice’ exercise where pupils submitted photographs reflecting their experiences of race, faith, and freedom of expression, and discussed them in a workshop. Collectively, they support Dr Kandemir’s observation that many young people have strong interests in conversations on equality and human rights and exploring them. A Youth Advisory Group was also consulted to help interpret findings from a student perspective.
Teachers are navigating this complex terrain, with some expressing discomfort about addressing politically sensitive topics, citing behavioural management as a key obstacle.
“Teachers themselves wouldn't say too much that they're struggling with these issues, in part because there's such a successful disciplinary culture around these things that relates to child protection policies,” says Professor Kitching. “We also have an exam system that doesn't facilitate us to talk about these things. But you will come across teachers who say things like, ‘I don't think I can push this issue with these students because they're too disruptive, or because it'll spiral out of hand’.”
This issue is compounded by the limited teacher training currently offered. “You can really see the difference when there is a teacher who is comfortable with these issues, is agentic, and makes the space to talk about them,” Professor Kitching explains. The study highlighted that in more open school environments, students felt more able to confidently talk about race and faith related issues. For example, where Black Lives Matter was discussed in their school, surveyed students were 2.5+ times more likely to say teachers present several sides of an issue, than in schools where Black Lives Matter was not discussed. These findings challenge political claims in England that Black Lives Matter is being taught in an ideological way in schools. At the same time, young people’s expectations of school as a place to learn about social and political issues varied depending on geographic location and area, experience of poverty, and lower achievement contexts. The study recommends that teacher training and educational guidance must address and recognise this.
“Initial teacher education requirements have become narrower and narrower regarding how to approach and examine complex issues on inclusion,” Professor Kitching points out. “So to some degree, the new early career student teachers might be even less capable of talking about these things than some of the more experienced teachers who know their students really well,” he concludes. To help address this, the team is developing a Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programme informed by their findings, equipping teachers with tools to build confidence in managing difficult conversations and supporting student voice more effectively.
The final report and its outputs come at a crucial moment for British education. The government is currently considering a new Race Equality Act, and the findings from this study present a crucial opportunity to address current policy reform in the areas of curriculum and assessment, school inspection, teacher and student wellbeing, as well as political impartiality and teaching issues that are sensitive in particular classrooms.
Professor of Public Education
Professor Kitching's research and teaching focuses on challenging multiple inequalities in education, in childhood, and in young people's lives.
Research Fellow
Dr Aslı Kandemir is exploreig how race and faith-based expression is formed across school and public spaces before adulthood.
Professor of Sociology of Education
Professor Gholami's research is internationally recognised and focuses on questions of belongingness, diversity, inter-communal relations and community engagement in education.
Research Fellow
Dr Md Shajedur Rahman, is studying how race and faith-based expression is 'made', enabled and limited through a number of factors.
