Supporting career progression for teachers from minority ethnic groups

SUFIAN SADIQ, DIRECTOR OF TEACHING SCHOOL, CHILTERN LEARNING TRUST, UK For the past five years, Chiltern TSA has been running ‘BAME into leadership’, a programme that seeks to support teachers from minority ethnic backgrounds to develop the skills and knowledge needed to progress in their teaching careers. Teachers from minority ethnic backgrounds are underrepresented across leadership levels in education, especially at the very top – under three per cent of all teachers and just 1.3 per cent of headteachers are black or black mixed-race (CST, 2020; DfE 2020). We know that in many areas, the majority of pupils in a school are from a minority ethnic background, yet this is very rarely represented among school staff, especially within senior leadership teams. It feels disingenuous to try to inspire students from BAME backgrounds to aim high in the future, to tell them that they can be future leaders in their area, when they can see that hierarchies within school staff are raciali