SWU Executive Committee Member Rebecca Austin reflects that where political will to protect the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) is absent, or actively being unpicked, it raises a harder question for us as a profession: where do we place ourselves as change-makers?
As social workers, we hold ethical values and principles that span every part of a child and family’s life, their experience of home, community, education, health, and the wider systems around them. Part of our role is to explore harm across all of these areas, and to consider the short- and long-term impact of the systems our children and families move through.
Recently, my own practice has brought me back to a child’s experience within education: their sense of belonging, their identity, and their safety within the school environment. This reflection sharpened when I heard Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch’s speech setting out plans to scrap the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) altogether, arguing the duty has become a “minefield” that exposes public decisions to legal challenge. The PSED currently requires schools and other public bodies to actively consider how their decisions affect people with protected characteristics, including race, and to foster good relations between different groups. Hearing this made me think about where we might end up if these duties are unpicked, in a system that already struggles to build inclusive, belonging environments for its Black pupils.
Where political will to protect these duties is absent, or actively being unpicked, it raises a harder question for us as a profession: where do we place ourselves as change-makers? We are not simply observers of the systems our young people move through, we are participants in them, with real capacity to influence practice in the schools, courts, and institutions we work alongside. If the wider political environment isn’t driving this work, the responsibility to do so doesn’t disappear, it shifts more heavily onto us.
Records, Race, and Adultification Bias
As social workers, we have the privilege of viewing a child’s education and other records when we make requests to schools. But are we reading those records closely enough, with adultification bias in mind? Reflecting on my own training, I couldn’t identify a single point in my education where adultification was named or explored, despite how central it has become to recent conversations in the profession.
Adultification bias is the process by which children, particularly Black children, are perceived as older, more responsible, and less innocent than they are, seen through a lens of deviancy rather than vulnerability. Dr Jahnine Davis, a UK’s leading researcher on the subject and a member of the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, describes it as a persistent, ongoing form of dehumanisation rooted in racism, one that begins before birth and continues across a child’s life course. Language plays a central role: words like “streetwise,” “aggressive,” or “hard to engage” can strip a Black child of the vulnerability that would otherwise trigger a safeguarding response, and instead position them as complicit in the harm they’ve experienced.
This isn’t an abstract concern. A 2022 report by the Commission on Young Lives, chaired by former Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield, found Black children were excluded from school at roughly three times the rate of White children, and named adultification bias as a key driver, Black children being viewed as older, less innocent, and therefore more responsible for their own behaviour, which is then used to justify harsher discipline. The 2020 Centre for Mental Health and Ubele Initiative report on the adultification of Black girls similarly found that Black girls in the UK are frequently perceived as loud or aggressive when they are actually anxious or distressed, with the genuine signs of harm overlooked as a result. More recently, the Black Equity Organisation’s 2024 report on the state of Black education in Britain found that 47% of surveyed Black pupils felt their school curriculum failed to reflect their cultural heritage, alongside stark under-representation of Black staff at every level of the school workforce. The Youth Justice Board has echoed this pattern in its own resources, noting that racialised children, particularly Black children, are less likely to be seen as vulnerable and more likely to be met with suspicion within the justice system.
This matters for us directly, because the records we read and rely on are rarely neutral. Dr Karen Treisman, a specialist clinical psychologist nationally recognised for her work on trauma-informed practice, has written extensively on how the language used in case records “stories” a child, shaping how they come to be seen and treated by every professional who reads that record afterwards. Careless, vague, or one-sided recording doesn’t just describe a child inaccurately; it actively shapes future decisions about them. This is echoed in safeguarding case reviews, including the Child Q review, where the absence of a safeguarding-first approach meant Child Q was treated as a suspect rather than a child in need of protection, with the review finding a high probability that adultification bias and racism influenced the decision to strip-search her.
This matters because young people are still forming their sense of who they are, and the lens through which we see them shapes the lens through which they come to see themselves. Meeting a child with care and compassion isn’t separate from our safeguarding role, it’s central to it, and what we write about a child tells them, eventually, what we think and feel about them.
Where the language used tends toward adultification, this doesn’t just misrepresent an individual child, it reinforces wider stereotypes, and the effect can be sharper still in rural communities where representation is limited and a young person may have few other Black adults or peers around them to counter that narrative. What we write also doesn’t exist in isolation from harmful popular narratives about Black people more broadly, and can intensify a sense of “othering” among those who haven’t personally experienced racism or don’t have close relationships with people who have.
This isn’t a peripheral concern. The University of Leicester’s Rural Racism Project (2023–2025), the most detailed UK study of its kind, found that minority ethnic people in rural England commonly experience racial stereotyping and exclusionary treatment, and that rural identity is often quietly equated with whiteness, positioning minoritised people as outsiders. The research also found that rural racism is frequently dismissed as irrelevant or limited to overt incidents, with more subtle, everyday forms overlooked. For a Black child in a rural school with little visible representation, this context matters, it shapes how isolated an experience of racism can feel, and how much weight our records and language carry in either reinforcing or challenging that isolation.
So are we, as professionals whose legal frameworks and ethical codes place a child’s wellbeing as paramount, thinking hard enough about the impact of records that misrepresent them and about the ripple effect when a young person is subsequently viewed through that same misleading lens by every other professional they come into contact with?
The Impact Beyond the Child
Research increasingly recognises that racism experienced by a child doesn’t stay contained to that child, it moves through the whole family. A 2024 briefing from Centre for Mental Health and King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, based on research with parents and teenagers from UK racialised communities, found cascading effects across families following experiences of racism, affecting parenting, the parent-child relationship, and the mental health of the family as a whole. Parents described constantly working to limit their children’s exposure to racism while also having to answer their children’s questions about it. A related King’s College London study similarly found that parents’ and children’s experiences of racism are closely entangled, running through the parent-child relationship, identity, and environment, rather than sitting as separate, isolated events. This fits a wider “linked lives” framework in family research, where discrimination experienced by one family member doesn’t stay isolated but spills over to affect others, and some research suggests that seeing your own child discriminated against can be more distressing for a parent than experiencing discrimination yourself.
There’s also a growing UK evidence base on the longer-term mental health cost. A longitudinal study using the Next Steps cohort found that exposure to racism at age 17 increased the risk of psychological distress at age 25, evidence that the effects of racism experienced in adolescence aren’t short-lived, but can shape mental health well into adulthood. A related UK study, drawing on young people’s own accounts, found that experiences of racism led to feelings of loneliness and isolation, and that young people felt the burden of having to change how they presented themselves just to be perceived more favourably and protect themselves from judgement. Together, these studies point towards the need for systemic, structural school-level responses rather than incident-by-incident handling, responses that address how staff are trained and how the curriculum addresses race, not just how individual episodes are resolved.
I raise this because it matters for how we frame concerns to a school: the impact of how a situation is handled rarely stops at the child. Where we know a family and see that a child’s sense of belonging isn’t being fostered, or that they’re experiencing racism, part of our role is asking what support might reduce these stressors for the child and the family around them and being alert to additional barriers some families face, such as engaging with a school where English is an additional language.
A Right to Rectification
One tool we and the young people we work with have is often overlooked: the right under UK GDPR to request rectification of inaccurate personal data. Where a child’s record misrepresents them, through biased language, omission, or a one-sided account of an incident, a formal rectification request can be a direct, practical route to challenging that record, rather than simply noting our concerns and moving on.
Repair, Not Just Record
Rectifying a record is a necessary step, but it doesn’t on its own repair the harm a young person has experienced, or prevent it becoming something they carry into adulthood. This is where restorative justice frameworks have real value for our practice. Rather than treating an incident as resolved once it’s been recorded and amended, a restorative approach asks who has been harmed, what that harm has meant for them, and what would need to happen for that harm to be genuinely addressed, not just noted. For a young person who has felt unheard or misrepresented, being part of a process that actively repairs that harm, rather than simply closing the file, can be the difference between an experience that resolves and one that lingers unresolved into their adult life.
Protective Factors: Community, Faith, and Belonging
It’s important to hold this alongside what protects children, not just what harms them. Faith and cultural communities consistently emerge in the research as a source of resilience.
A 2024 study of Black and South Asian Muslim children in East London found that religiosity is an important protective factor and coping strategy for children navigating discrimination (Murray et al., 2024). The same study flagged a clear gap: we still know very little about how children in UK faith communities experience resilience in their own words. Wider research points the same way. Faith-based practices, intergenerational storytelling, and collective solidarity, the sense of belonging to a group that has each other’s back: shared identity, mutual support, community that shows up for you, have all been linked to identity safety and cultural pride among Black children facing structural adversity. Identity safety means feeling secure in who you are, rather than having to constantly defend or explain your identity. Cultural pride means feeling positively about your heritage and background, rather than internalising negative messages about it.
A related but different dynamic concerns children of mixed heritage. These children may not fit neatly within a single racial or cultural category, and that in-between position, belonging fully to neither group, can bring its own difficulties. A DfES-commissioned study of mixed heritage pupils in Birmingham schools found this group, now the fastest-growing minority ethnic population in English schools, faced distinctive and often invisible barriers to belonging and achievement (Tikly et al., 2004).
More recent evidence offers a more hopeful picture. Analysis of the Millennium Cohort Study found no evidence of poorer socioemotional wellbeing among mixed race/ethnicity children at age 5–6, compared with their peers (Nazroo et al., 2018). Where difficulties do arise, they appear to be better explained by socio-economic circumstance and system-level miscategorisation than by identity itself. In other words, it isn’t being mixed heritage that causes harm. It’s misrecognition, being misread or mishandled by systems, schools and records included, that aren’t built to recognise a child who doesn’t fit neatly into one box. Misrecognition can mean a child being assumed to belong wholly to one group when they identify with both, having one part of their heritage overlooked or treated as less important, or simply not being asked how they see themselves at all.
I raise this because it matters for how we frame concerns to a school. The ask isn’t only “stop doing harm.” It’s also “actively resource belonging.” The risk rarely lies in a child’s faith or mixed heritage identity itself. It lies in institutional systems built around discrete, legible categories, ones that struggle to accommodate children who don’t sit neatly within them. That’s the same structural blind spot that underlies adultification bias more broadly.
Engaging Schools: A Different Starting Point
It’s also worth naming an asymmetry that shapes how we approach these conversations with schools. The National Education Union has been explicit that anti-racism is not currently covered in teacher training in England, and that there is no formal guidance for Initial Teacher Education and Training (ITE/T) providers on the subject (NEU, n.d.).
Research commissioned by the NEU found that where anti-racism content exists in teacher training at all, it tends to be delivered as a one-off session rather than embedded across the curriculum, an approach shown to be ineffective in building the confidence teachers need to respond well to racism in the classroom (Smith and Lander, 2022). A separate Runnymede Trust study of teachers in English secondary schools reached a similar conclusion: low racial literacy among the workforce is a structural gap, not simply a matter of individual failing, and it leaves many teachers unsure how to respond when race and racism come up in their classrooms (Joseph-Salisbury, 2020).
It is worth being honest, too, that my own social work training didn’t specifically name or explore adultification bias, despite how central it has become to recent safeguarding practice. But social work training starts from a different foundation. Anti-discriminatory practice and social justice sit at the centre of our professional standards and ethical codes, not as an add-on. That gives us a stronger starting point for recognising and naming these issues when we encounter them in a child’s record or a family’s experience.
This matters for how we approach schools. If a teacher hasn’t received training that equips them to recognise adultification bias in their own language or practice, that’s a structural gap in their profession’s training pipeline, not necessarily a mark of individual prejudice. Naming this doesn’t excuse harm, and it doesn’t reduce our responsibility to challenge it robustly where it occurs.
But it does change the tone of the conversation. We’re not approaching a school as adversaries calling out bad actors. We’re naming a systemic gap that our own profession, by comparison, has had more grounding to work from. Framing concerns this way, as an invitation to build shared understanding rather than only a complaint, can make schools more likely to engage constructively, while we still hold firm on the outcomes a child and family need.
Building Belonging: Organisations That Can Help
Alongside challenging poor practice, part of our role is actively building a child and family’s sense of belonging and identity, something that shouldn’t rest solely on us or on the school. A few organisations offer practical, ready-to-use support in this space:
The Black Curriculum (theblackcurriculum.com) is a social enterprise working to embed Black British history into the national curriculum year-round, rather than confining it to isolated moments. They deliver youth curriculum programmes for ages 8–25, educator and school training on embedding Black history into planning, and a resources portal of classroom-ready lesson plans for KS2 and KS3. For families and schools, this offers a concrete way to help a child see their history and identity reflected in what they’re taught, rather than left out of it.
Black Men Teach (blackmenteach.co.uk) is a network raising the profile of teaching among Black men and building a community for Black male educators, in response to the stark under-representation in the profession, only around 3.5% of teachers in the UK are Black men, and just 1% of headteachers are Black. For a Black boy in particular, seeing more Black male role models in a school workforce can be a meaningful, practical part of building belonging and challenging the kind of stereotyping that feeds into adultification.
My Cultur-ED (mycultur-ed.com) is a cultural diversity consultancy that works directly with schools on their statutory duties under the Equality Act 2010. Their offer includes staff training on responding to racist incidents, pupil workshops on racial and cultural literacy, support for developing an anti-racism (“Sticks and Stones”) policy, parent/carer workshops, and a confidential incident-support service for school leaders. Where a school’s response to a racist incident has been inadequate, this is a resource we can point schools toward as part of a constructive, remedial ask not just a criticism.
Signposting families to these kinds of organisations, or recommending them to schools as part of an improvement plan, is one practical way we can support belonging directly, rather than leaving it entirely to a system that isn’t always getting it right.
Connecting With Alienation
Part of what we’re describing throughout this piece, misrecognition, exclusion, being seen through a distorted lens, has a name in itself: alienation. Understanding it as a concept can help ground much of what we ask professionals to notice in practice. Dr Neil Thompson’s work through the Neil Thompson Academy offers a useful starting point, exploring how alienation shows up not just in obviously “toxic” environments but in the everyday experience of not being fully seen or valued, and pointing to solidarity, genuine connection and being met as a full person, as part of the antidote.
Understanding alienation in the abstract is only part of the task, though. To support young people experiencing it because of race, we also need to understand where the narratives producing that alienation come from in the first place. Roger McKenzie’s Roots of Racism course, run through the GFTU Educational Trust, offers grounding here, tracing the historical roots of the narratives that continue to shape how Black children and adults are seen today. As the course’s framing suggests, we can’t change what we don’t see, and seeing the roots of racism is often what allows us to start recognising its present-day expressions, including in our own records and language, through a different lens.
Building a Genuine Safeguarding Culture
Safeguarding is everyone’s responsibility, and the culture that fosters it cannot rest on individual goodwill alone. A genuine safeguarding culture is one where a child’s experience of harm is recorded with the same rigour as their reaction to it, where adults are accountable for reflecting honestly on their own role in an incident, and where a child who has been hurt doesn’t have to fight to have that harm recognised.
On a final note, I would like to consider how social workers are part of the solution. Where young people are operating within cultures where this doesn’t yet exist, the question for us is not whether it’s someone else’s job to fix, it’s how we, as professionals bound by ethical codes that tell us to uphold these principles, actively support them.
References
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Black Men Teach (n.d.) About. Available at: https://www.blackmenteach.co.uk/about/
Centre for Mental Health and Ubele Initiative (2020) The Adultification of Black Girls: Adultification Bias and the Safeguarding of Black Children. London: Centre for Mental Health.
Centre for Mental Health and King’s College London Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (2024) A Constant Battle: Racism and Family Mental Health. London: Centre for Mental Health.
Chakraborti, N., Fowler, C., Clarke, A., Keighley, R., Yip, A. and Kuppan, V. (2025) The Rural Racism Project: Towards an Inclusive Countryside. Leicester: University of Leicester, Centre for Hate Studies.
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