School drops ‘white male’ house names to promote diversity

♦ A school has denied “political correctness” forced it to drop the name of a celebrated merchant with a history of slave trading.

St Mary Redcliffe and Temple School, in the district of Redcliffe in Bristol, was criticised for naming one of its five houses after Edward Colston, a Bristol-born merchant who effectively ran the Royal Africa Company in London. The school had come under pressure for its links to Colston in recent years, but resisted calls to drop the name.

Now, the school has said it is to rename all its houses. Colston is to be renamed in honour of Katherine Johnson, the Africanamerican mathematician, whose calculations helped work out how man could land on the Moon during the Apollo missions. A school spokesman said: “After consulting parents/carers, staff and students, we made the decision to change our house names from all being linked to white males, to a much more diverse range of people from a variety of countries, religions, ethnic, financial, language and life backgrounds.

“This has not come from a position of ‘political correctness gone mad’, but from a genuine desire to have role models with interesting stories, which demonstrate our ‘Alive’ values. We know some people dislike change and we respect that.”

As well as a statue of Colston, there are roads, buildings and homes named after him. The use of his name across Bristol is increasingly controversial.