Britain’s big school scandal
Many black children in the 1960s and 1970s were wrongly sent to special schools for the ‘subnormal’...
Subnormal: A British Scandal
Thursday, 9pm BBC1
Aged six, Noel Gordon was sent to a special school, which back then had a shocking name – a school for the educationally ‘subnormal’ or ESN. But Noel didn’t have a learning difficulty.
In fact, Noel now has 13 qualifications, including a postgraduate certificate in education. But his early years haunt him…
‘I was told I was stupid, a dunce,’ says Noel, 54, from north London. ‘Thinking you’re stupid knocks your confidence. Having those labels put on you, you become that person.’
Shockingly, Noel was just one of hundreds of black British children caught up in an extraordinary scandal during the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, black children were disproportionately sent to ESN schools because of the racist stereotype that black children had lower IQS and weren’t as academically capable as white children.
In this documentary, we also meet Maisie Barrett, who struggled with dyslexia but was told she was ‘backward’, and Anne-marie Simpson, who was sent to an ESN school for bad behaviour when she was simply experiencing trouble at home.
Eventually the scandal was exposed and a damning inquiry in
1985 blamed racial prejudice.
‘The rate at which black children were being sent to these schools was shocking,’ says education campaigner Professor Gus John. ‘They were justifying all those tropes that had been around during the period of enslavement where people believed that black people couldn’t be expected to be as intelligent as white people. It was scandalous.’