Redressing the ethnic imbalance in the classroom
Nearly 13 percent of schoolchildren in England are from black and ethnic minority backgrounds, yet 95% of those employed to teach them are white. The TC21 project, managed by Sudha Raghavan in the school of education, is trying to recruit more people from ethnic minorities onto teacher training courses across the region, to try to redress this imbalance. "Low numbers of black and ethnic minority teachers means there's a lack of role models for schoolchildren from those backgrounds," said Sudha Raghavan. "It's important to make teachers more representative of the population, to improve social inclusion and combat racism." According to Mrs Raghavan, numbers of applicants from