Equity, Diversity & Inclusion

Racial Equity and Cultural Literacy

Ewell Castle School is committed to working towards racial equity and cultural literacy.  We agree with the statement from the Flair Impact organisation that 'understanding ethnic minority experience is the first step to fixing it', and we also believe this also applies to other minoritised and under-represented groups. 

Ewell Castle School is working at becoming an anti-racism school that also takes a zero-tolerance stance towards Xenophobia, Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism.

Our journey to becoming an anti-racism school Working with Flair Impact, Show Racism The Red Card and others 

Ewell Castle School is proud to be working towards being an anti-racism school.  Whilst the Ewell Castle School pupil community enjoys a breadth of diversity, with many of our pupils and their families representing a wide range of culturally diverse backgrounds, there is however, some way to go in seeing this level of diversity reflected in our staff body. 

'In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, a growing societal awareness of the harmful impact of racism upon all our society, and because we wanted to equip our young people to respond far more effectively and confidently to racism, we chose to work with Flair Impact to help us to reflect and understand ourselves better.  As a result, we have the inspiration and the impetus to act decisively, and tackle racism and unconscious bias wherever we find it.  We are now much more confident in our ambition, not just to raise awareness of racism, but to become an anti-racism school.' Silas Edmonds - Principal of Ewell Castle School

Staff Training on Decolonising the Knowledge and Flair Impact Organisation

During January 2021, Ewell Castle School staff underwent a series of training on 'Decolonising the knowledge' (with a focus on Anti-Racism) which was designed and led by Alexandra Brown (Decolonial and anti-racist consultant and activist).  In a bid to further embed anti-racism within our School culture, during the 2021 summer term, Ewell Castle School began working with the organisation Flair Impact, to help 'build a culture where all ethnicities thrive.'  Staff and Senior School pupils took part in a Flair Impact organised survey, to help us better understand where we, as a school community stand in regards the four key anti-racism insights that Flair Impact measure, and propose strategies for, via their survey and metric driven platform.  Our ultimate goal was to 'measure, track and overcome racial bias' and become an anti-racism school. 

We wanted to better understand and measure key anti-racist metrics, benchmark ourselves to other schools and ultimately help change our culture so that anti-racism, diversity and equity are at the centre of everything we do.

The four key anti-racism insights covered by Flair Impact in their survey were:

• Racial Awareness
• Racial Diversity
• Racist Behaviours
• Racial Inclusion-barriers

As well as this, our work on anti-racism has highlighted that 'the lived experiences of black, brown and other racialised groups are not a monolith,' as such we understand that our attempt to 'racial inclusion barriers', requires an understanding as to how the intersections of ones racial identity interplays with gender, class, sexual orientation etc.

Show Racism The Red Card

Since summer 2022, we have held a number of staff insets and talks, and are continuing to work with Flair Impact and more recently with Show Racism The Red Card, as we now plan to deliver more specific pupil-focussed programmes.  As a School, we know there is still much to be done, but we believe in the importance of the work our staff and pupils are undertaking, and we will continue to pursue whatever actions and training is necessary to ensure we succeed in our goal of becoming an anti-racism school.

Anti-Bias Hemisphere Training

The School has partnered up with award-winning diversity specialist Rare.  They have developed a powerful new anti-bias tool called Hemisphere.  Hemisphere is a new type of anti-bias training blending videos of real candidates at interview, animations and interactive exercises, the e-training distils over 15 years of experience and knowledge on race and social mobility into approximately one hour of learning.  The training is being rolled out to staff commencing summer 2023.