Britain likes to believe that Educationally Subnormal (ESN) schools belong to a discredited past: a shameful episode closed, archived, and morally resolved. But ESN was not simply a policy, it was a worldview. One that treated white, middle-class norms as neutral intelligence and Black difference as deficiency. Thousands of Black children were siphoned out of mainstream education, denied exams, and quietly written off by a system that called exclusion “assessment.” The state has never issued a full apology, never accounted for the damage, and never reckoned with how deliberately this machinery functioned.
Recent research by the Runnymede Trust shows that Black Caribbean pupils remain disproportionately excluded from schools, with exclusions functioning as a form of structural racism rather than a reflection of behaviour.
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Black Caribbean children remain disproportionately identified under behavioural categories, overrepresented in exclusions and pupil referral units (PRU), and underrepresented in diagnoses that unlock sustained educational support. The language has softened. The patterns have not disappeared.
This is not an argument that SEND is ESN reborn. It is an argument that Britain dismantled a racist structure without fully abandoning the assumptions that sustained it. Assessment still relies heavily on teacher perception. Behaviour is still read through cultural bias. Support is still unevenly distributed. In practice, some children are protected by the system, while others are disciplined by it. The line between care and control remains racialised, just subtle enough to deny intent.
Educated Out: How Britain Brands Black Children as Defective to Preserve White Supremacy
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The documentary we are linking here, is essential viewing.
ESN: "Educationally Submormal."https://t.co/4OmkBocclp
Britain built racism into its education system with bureaucratic… pic.twitter.com/0QPYGWRFLf
Britain abolished ESN without confronting what it revealed about the nation itself. That unfinished business matters. Because if ESN was wrong and Britain now claims to know better, but the persistence of racial disparity in education is not an accident. It is evidence of a system still unwilling to tell the truth about how race shapes who is supported, who is surveilled, and who is quietly set aside. Until that truth is faced, progress remains procedural, not moral.
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