A Parents Guide to Understanding Black Lives Matter and Resources
Dear Parents and Carers,
At Curwen, we believe strongly in our ethos of TEAM and RESPECT, and this is firmly embedded in our curriculum. As part of this, we do not limit our learning by teaching ‘Black History Month’ and instead ensure BAME history is planned, contextualised and embedded throughout our curriculum. We want our curriculum to reflect the communities that we serve, and we seek to provide children with opportunities to talk about, understand and develop their own sense of identity as well as respecting that of the school community. We give children opportunities to explore and discuss their own thoughts and beliefs, to celebrate our similarities and differences and to learn from one another. We also seek to celebrate the country we live in, the heritage of our pupils and their families through many ‘special’ events such as Democracy Week, International Week and Family Week.
We are sure that you know that at Curwen we are committed to challenging all forms of discrimination and prejudice, and we want to re-state that commitment. Ordinarily in school we respond to local and national events, and strive to give children the time and space to understand, question and develop their viewpoints on the world around them. We are aware that the current Black Lives Matter movement will be affecting many of our families in a wide range of ways, and we believe it is very important for the children to understand and be able to talk about this. We know that we are not able to support you with having conversations about this in school as we usually would, so if you are finding it difficult to talk to your children about some of these very difficult and sensitive issues, we have sourced some good child-friendly resources to help the children to understand what is happening.
A parents’ guide to understanding Black Lives Matter:
https://yoopies.co.uk/c/press-releases/blacklivesmatter
BBC Newsround has some excellent resources:
Special report on Racism in light of recent events - https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/52978346
Fact file - http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/find_out/guides/uk/racism/newsid_1703000/1703905.stm
Cbeebies presenter Ben Cajee for younger children:
https://metro.co.uk/2020/06/12/cbeebies-parents-message-racism-12844374/
Blue Peter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LLBDsVREaI
This publication has activities to do with race, difference and diversity:
This is clearly not an exhaustive list, so we would be very happy for you to share useful resources with us that we can use or any books that we can purchase for our school library. Let’s keep this very important conversation going so that we can all learn, understand and stand up for equality together.
The Curwen Team
