'School curriculum should teach more black history'

Heather Paul wants schools to focus on positive contributions made by people of colour throughout history

An education campaigner has called for the school curriculum to include more black history and anti-racism teaching.

Heather Paul, the daughter of Leeds' first black head teacher, says more still needs to be done four decades after her mother's appointment.

Black Lives Matter protests calling for an end to racism and inequality have been held across the globe.

Ms Paul wants schools to focus on positive contributions made by people of colour throughout history.

Her mother, Gertrude Paul, moved to Leeds from St Kitts in the 1950s and trained at what is now Leeds Beckett University.

She was appointed head of Elmhurst Middle School, which later became Bracken Edge Primary School, in 1976, and died in 1992.

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Ms Paul, a lecturer in race and education at Leeds Beckett, said: "There were massive civilizations across Africa and across all the continents.

"Black people existed in terms of creating, engineering, science - the whole kaboodle - but that is not taught - apparently we started from slavery.

"That is socially constructed to dehumanise us."

Gertrude Paul became the first black head teacher in Leeds in the 1970s

She says content could be included in the existing curriculum, adding: "You can look at any part of the curriculum and accentuate the positives, the contributions that black people and people of colour actually made."

Kauser Jan, a teacher at Bankside Primary in Leeds, who sits on the black teacher steering group of the National Education Union, believes there is a mood for positive change.

"There is some change in the air that in my 55 years I've not experienced before," she said.

"I truly believe we will now have the real change, we have to learn from the mistakes of the past in order to stop them happening in future."

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