Inspiring inclusion
July sees the world celebrate Black Leaders Awareness Day – a day focusing attention on the need for diverse leadership. Here we talk with John Lynch, co-creator of our BAME Mentoring and BAME School Insights programmes about its importance…
Each July, Black Leaders Awareness Day enables people from all cultures to experience the wisdom of past, current, and next-generation black leaders through speeches, quotes, and videos, with the day building collective understanding of the impact these leaders have had through history and continue to have today.
John Lynch, who was one of only a handful of black Headteachers in Sussex throughout his career, believes it is critical to celebrate black leadership: “It’s so key that all young people have role models and leaders to look up to. If a young person of colour can only see white leaders around them and is surrounded by literature and cultural references that exclusively paint white people as shaping history they grow up with a distorted world-view and a diminished view of their own potential. We need to redress that imbalance.”
SLN funds a number of diversity and inclusion programmes that John has helped devise including the BAME Mentoring programme. The programme matches young learners of colour in school settings with role models already at university, to help break down barriers and encourage them to see university as a viable and desirable option to consider pursuing.
The programme not only helps inspire young learners of colour, but also gives university students of colour the opportunity to develop important leadership, communication and mentoring skills.
John believes the programme gives young students something he missed in his own career: “What I lacked in my development as a leader were role models I could look up to or seek guidance from and that’s why I feel the BAME mentoring programme is so important. The programme gives university students and school pupils the opportunity to share, support and inspire each other and is a programme that should be available to all pupils with protected characteristics in all schools.”
John also helps to advise and support schools wanting to create more inclusive environments through the SLN funded BAME School Insights programme. The programme sees a team immerse themselves in, and analyse a school’s day-to-day life, as well as talking to its learners and teachers of colour, before advising on new school practices and resources that can be simply woven into school life to celebrate diversity and enable the creation of inclusive learning environments for all.
John explains: “My style of leadership developed around my core values and my lived experience as a black man which helped me to appreciate the importance of inclusion and diversity. My aim was to create and maintain an institution where relationships were at a premium and the attainment and well-being of pupils was shaped by the way they were cared for and valued.
“Our BAME Schools Insights programmes enables leaders to see their learning environment with a fresh perspective that allows for the creation of significantly more inclusive and inspiring learning environments for all. Every single leader who has gone through the process has said that it has invigorated and revitalised their staff and helped create an environment that everyone feels proud of.”
Feeling inspired? Find out more about the programmes John has helped to devise and runs by clicking here.