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“I can still smell the old wooden flip desks. Oh, and being racially abused on my first day,” he says.
A student hurled racial slurs at him in the classroom but wasn’t reprimanded – the teacher simply told him to sit down.
The school didn’t teach a curriculum. Although Noel was given a book to write in by a teacher, he was never taught basic grammar or how to spell. He did some basic addition and subtraction but during classes, he mainly did crafts and played games.
His parents only realised what kind of school it was when Noel, then seven, was punched by a 15-year-old boy, and his father visited for the first time.
Noel recalls his father saying to the headmaster, “This is a school for handicapped children” – using an outdated term. He says the headmaster replied, “Yeah, but we don’t like to use that word, we call them slow learners.”
The realisation was devastating, but Noel’s father felt powerless to change things.
Noel wasn’t given the chance to take exams and get qualifications. On reflection, he says being labelled educationally subnormal made him feel inferior for the rest of his life, and gave him a lot of psychological problems.
“Leaving school without any qualifications is one thing, but leaving school thinking you’re stupid is a different ball game altogether. It knocks your confidence,” he says.
© BBC
A new BBC documentary tells the story of how black parents, teachers and activists banded together to force the education system to change.
© BBC
The term “educationally subnormal” derived from the 1944 Education Act and was used to define those thought to have limited intellectual ability.
“That label made children feel inferior,” says education campaigner Prof Gus John, who came to the UK from Grenada in 1964 as a student, and soon became aware of the issue.
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