County Durham teacher tells us about the importance of increased representation in schools
The annual National Education Union conference is being held in Harrogate this week
Last updated 1st May 2025
A County Durham teacher tells us that racism is a genuine problem in the classroom and that it is important to have discussions on how to tackle it.
The annual National Education Union conference is being held in Harrogate this week, where they will discuss a range of changes to policy and rules.
Later today there will be a session on the power to change racism in the classroom.
Nik Jones is a secondary school teacher and the joint district secretary for Durham NEU who is in Harrogate taking part in the conference.
He says that we need to combat racism in classrooms, but it is not something we should leave just to schools.
He said: "It's a problem that schools are really struggling to deal with because yet again, that support in wider society is not there. It is very much a case of everything landing on the school's doorstep and us trying to do things about it.
"We do see a worrying trend towards young people feeling that it's absolutely appropriate to be racist, thinking it is perfectly natural to dislike or to distrust somebody just because of their skin colour, or because of where they come from, or because of their religion. That is a genuine problem.
"We can do our best, we can try and educate, we can try and reason. We can open areas of debate, but that in itself becomes problematic because we’re then duty bound by Prevents to report what we would have to class as extremism, and often that shuts down the ability to have a lot of these conversations.
"It’s a problem for all of society to look at the mirror and decide, are we going to do something about this? Are we going to help? Are we going to invest in strategies to bring people together rather than playing the blame game. It's that culture, more than anything else that causes the problem."