My nine year old was called the N-word - schools can't cope with racism (2025)

Haddy Folivi’s son was nine years-old when his behaviour, out of nowhere, seemed to shift. Her calm boy, who usually tells her he loves her “10 times a day”, was beginning to withdraw; he was unlike himself. “It was really difficult to get to the bottom as to why. Eventually we decided to go through his PlayStation and just saw all of this racist abuse,” the 47-year-old recalls. “He was called ‘n****r, he was called ‘black monkey’, ‘monkey’” – all from boys at school he’d considered friends.

This was not only happening across gaming platforms, she soon learned, but in the playground of his state primary too. “It was heartbreaking,” Ms Folivi, a publicist, says.

Racism in schools has been flagged to successive governments as an area in need of fundamental change, but progress appears sluggish. Between 2022-23, 11,619 pupils in England were suspended for racist abuse – up 23 per cent from the year prior, per figures from the Department for Education. Some 95 per cent of young black people reported witnessing or hearing racist language at school, according to 2020 YMCA research, while 41 per cent of black Britons identify racism as the largest barrier to young black people’s educational success.

Part of the rise is down to increased awareness among students and parents – but some headteachers have said they think the problem is getting worse, with pupils influenced by far right rhetoric on social media and the news. Some have said divisive political events like Brexit have led to people becoming more comfortable using incendiary language at home, which children then bring to the playground.

The shocking 2020 case of Child Q – the 15-year-old girl strip-searched by police without an accompanying adult present after being wrongfully suspected of possessing cannabis – seemed to sound alarm bells over institutions’ treatment of black children. But little long term action has followed. A survey of parents published this year by Black Learning Achievement and Mental Health, a charity, found that 48 per cent of their children attended schools that did not provide any anti-racist lessons or workshops.

Ms Folivi “was really disturbed” on learning what had happened to her son. The family was asked if they wanted to progress the case as a hate crime with the police, but decided to allow the school to handle it internally.

“It does make you wonder where they’re getting the language from,” she says of her son’s young classmates, “and whether it’s being passed down. Children repeat a lot of things that they hear, whether it’s via social media, whether it’s in the home.”

Within her family, who moved from London to Peterborough three years ago, this has sadly not proven a lone incident; her daughter has fended off similar slurs at her state secondary school, she says – issues that have cropped up since they left London. But from state to private, and across the UK, the problem is entrenched, one 16-year-old from London explains.

He says a boy recently walked into his private school with a buzzcut, “saying that he’s going for ‘the white supremacist look’” – before showing pictures of racist gangs to friends. “Other boys in my class looked at me and laughed,” the teenager says.

These are not isolated cases, he points out, but part of a wider culture that is seemingly overlooked time and again; he and a black friend have been told to hand over their sweets to another pupil “because we were slaves, and he would whip us, and we should be picking cotton, and we should call him ‘Master’”. Almost every day, “some form of the N-word is thrown around, they call me ‘monkey’, ‘watermelon-muncher,’” he says.

He says school messaging has made the problem worse – history classes have involved makeshift auctions, where the only black student in class was ‘sold’ to white pupils. “My school’s favourite phrase is that ‘we are a very diverse school,’ and I think a lot of the teachers look around, particularly white teachers, and they think that it’s a comfortable environment for everyone. That’s definitely not the case given that almost all of the pupils are white.

Naomi Evans is a teacher and mother-of-two who co-founded the organisation Everyday Racism with her sister, Natalie, after a video of Natalie confronting two men hurling racial abuse at a ticket inspector went viral on Twitter (now X). Its purpose is to provide education and training on anti-racism in institutions from schools to workplaces.

She experienced racism as a girl, and says the problem is still happening now, but schools are not equipped to cope. “We get a lot of parents writing to us and saying: ‘I’ve brought [an incident] to the school’s attention, nothing’s changed, or they’ve tried to do things, but they’re not really confident in what they’re doing.’”

In a survey from Not So Micro, a social action project addressing racial microaggressions and advocating for anti-racism training in teacher education, and the Centre for Mental Health, 76 per cent of teachers reported not knowing how to deal with questions over anti-racism when asked by students, while around 60 per cent said they didn’t know what a microaggression was. This leaves young people despairing, the charities say; when schools can’t appropriately tackle the issues on their turf, it affects the way pupils see going in at all, with knock-on effects to their behaviour, and their mental health.

Ms Evans says that another barrier in tackling the issue is that some 90 per cent of teachers and more than 93 per cent of leadership teams are white, according to their research. “Teachers want that understanding and knowledge [of how to handle race issues at school], but a lot of the time, they’ve never experienced racism, and they never will, so they don’t understand how to address it.”

In March, a coalition of organisations including Everyday Racism held a panel in Parliament, urging senior leaders to back their campaign to #TakeRacismSeriously. They believe that to effect change, strategies must be fourfold: making racial literacy training compulsory for teachers, instituting a clear policy for anti-racism within schools, ensuring that black history is a fundamental part of the curriculum, and providing mental health support for those affected by racism.

Too often, Ms Evans adds, schools operate under the belief that deep-rooted racism can be solved with an assembly, or one-off teacher workshop. “Obviously in one session, you’re not going to be able to address everything. And then once we’re gone, what’s left?,” she asks. Anti-racism strategies “need to be part of their ongoing practice.”

Ms Folivi agrees that “there’s a lot of talk around change, but very little happens thereafter. It’s usually a tick box exercise. Unfortunately, whenever there’s an attack on a black person, people are like, ‘Oh, we must do something,’ and there’s a lot more talk about diversity, equity and inclusion. Then it goes quiet again, and then it’s usually back to the status quo.”

Where schools are failing to step in when problems arise, it is being left to parents to both comfort, and counsel, their distraught children. “My son in particular really struggled to understand why people would be discriminated against because of the colour of our skin,” she says. “I’ve had to consistently educate them both in terms of being strong in who they are, knowing that it’s upsetting [to be the subject of slurs], but that it can’t impact who you are as a person.”

Still, it’s a lot to expect anyone to take – let alone children – particularly when schools seem to be repeatedly making the same mistakes. A concerted effort is needed – from teachers, and parents of non-black children – Ms Folivi adds, to really ensure the future looks different for the next generation.

“There has to be generational change – families talking to their children about racism, making it clear that it’s not acceptable,” she urges. “That’s where real change will come.”