So, yeah, Kingsbury High School is a very large mixed gender, single academy school in Brent, Northwest London, with about 2000 students. It’s split into two sites, which will become relevant based on how the protests unfolded. I think that at the moment they’re going through a transition where they brought in a head teacher who's got much more experience working for big international financial institutions and banks like Barclays, than any time in the classroom, and had six years as a head in Capital City Academy in Brent and has been brought to Kingsbury to shift it towards becoming a more corporatized academy than it already is. It has a senior leadership team that doesn't really reflect the students that we're teaching - predominantly white middle class. And again, relevant for later, there aren't any Muslim members of the senior leadership team, whereas about half of the school during Eid would be off.

They're kind of holding on to the old grammar school traditions in a lot of ways, for example the Latin mottos and graduation and all those aesthetics that feel quite uncomfortable and alien and irrelevant to a lot of the students that are there. They also pretend to be doing some quite progressive things around school exclusions. They've got a specific designated area in the school for disruptive kids, which they try to say is a way of preventing them from going into alternative provisional or from off-rolling them. They're kind of still educated separately on a separate site within the school.

[…] Obviously there was an escalation of violence and conflict in Sheihk Jahra and in Gaza, [May 2021]. Like I said, there is a very big Muslim population in the school, but not just Muslim students, lots of students I think, were connecting that sort of issue of international and global justice, with the kind of consciousness that already been embedded from the Black Lives Matter uprisings and I think those connections felt very, very clear. As soon as things started [to escalate in Gaza and other occupied territories], you could feel a palpable sense of agitation and concern amongst the student body. In a lot of classes they’d just be asking questions like “what do you think of this? What's going on?” I personally feel like I did and I felt prepared to engage with it, but I think a lot of the teachers didn’t have the vocabulary or awareness to really deal with it.
In that initial period, I didn't think that much would have separated it from other schools around the country, but then things really kind of exploded once a member staff in sixth form had been overheard saying that one Israeli life is more important than a thousand Palestinians and a group of six form students confronted him and filmed the confrontation, during which he doesn't deny having said that, he merely says “you shouldn't have been eavesdropping on my conversation. I wasn't speaking to you.” So that then gets posted on TikTok and is viewed by, I think over 150,000 people… tens of thousands of people watched it essentially.
And then the school kind of goes into a bit of a meltdown because it starts getting a barrage of criticism from the community, sort of saying, “why do you have this racist teacher teaching there?... This is outrageous.” And as far as I'm aware, that teacher was then put under formal investigation, but they kept most of it pretty hush hush. But then the school’s response to that media profile, (there was an article in the Kilburn times about it https://www.kilburntimes.co.uk/news/kingsbury-school-investigates-alleged-middle-east-crisis-comment-7987236, which was the only media reporting of what had happened), was just complete shutdown. So “don't engage, don't teach about it. Don't talk to students about it, don’t ask me questions about it, shut it down… just deflect and move on.”
Then there was a kind of form time [discussion time following registration], which was only 15 minutes - a PowerPoint presentation, which was sent round to everyone and was basically the party line within the school, which was BBC Newsround - four minutes, including, I thought, again quite dangerous and misleading language around ‘religious conflicts’, and ‘clash of cultures and civilizations’. And then a 20 second speech from Joe Biden, giving his two pennies worth, to which two students in my form put their hands up and said, “well, he's just signed off for 40 billion in arms deals to Israel. So how is he a neutral, unbiased figure?” So the students, I think, could see through so much of the prevarication that was being projected onto them by the staff. […] they [many senior staff members] really projected their own ignorance onto the students. They were sort of saying “it's a very nuanced and complex issue and the students at home are getting very one-sided opinions from their family”, with a lot of coded Islamophobia in the way that that was being framed. […] There was a lot of ignorance and lack of awareness, which, when coupled with a complete lack of humility and unwillingness to learn from the students and engage with them on their own terms, served to just enrage the students even more because their questions weren't being answered. Their sense of injustice, which is obviously completely understandable and justified, was not being met with any kind of curiosity or validation from the members of staff within the school.
And I think it’s also worth mentioning that from the PowerPoint, the school's kind of party line was that the appropriate way of dealing with this is to write a letter to your MP. So that was the main outlet that was given to students. That came after a whole slide of prescriptions of what's not allowed to happen - so “you're not allowed to have any flags or symbols on you, you’re not allowed to bring in or wear any Keffiyehs. And there were literally students in the corridor, walking in in the morning, having their bags rummaged through and having Keffiyehs being confiscated. There were a lot of posters being put up around the school - more sort of awareness raising but also some [using] language that I wouldn’t necessarily use about Zionism and anti-Semitism, but again [that was] something that should have been engaged with, and space provided to talk through it rather than seeing teachers going round and just ripping it off the walls. So it was just quite a polarized kind of atmosphere within the school. […] the video came out on the Tuesday and [then] the protest was organized, I think via TikTok and Snapchat and word of mouth. So we knew something was going to be happening on the Friday.

And then Friday comes around and I'm on the lower site, which is key stage three. And I go into the playground, […] I'd say there were 60 to 70 kids very much involved in it and then more kind of on the outskirts just watching. And yeah, they were holding up Keffiyehs and holding up banners and they were chanting “free, free Palestine!” There was a bit of a game of cat and mouse really - they were sort of in one area and then teachers would go there and then they’d run to the other [end]. They stayed in this big herd, and as one big group. But again, teachers were kind of going and ripping down and confiscating posters and Keffiyehs. A few students had their phones confiscated because they were filming it, which is one that I understand a bit more based on safeguarding concerns.
[…]Some obviously felt very passionate about it and others I think joined a little bit more opportunistically. Some kids that I taught, who tended to be very boisterous in the classroom, definitely appreciated the opportunity to make their voices heard in a larger mass, which I'm not denigrating in the slightest because I think those moments can be really politicizing and important for those kids who might not have previously had that kind of awareness or consciousness.
So it spills over from break time into period three, but for the most part students on the lower site were shepherded back to their lessons. Already, in the week prior to that, I had students being taken out of my classes in the middle of teaching, to have their hands washed because they had Palestine flags on them. […] I thought it was absolutely absurd what was happening.
After that [the first protest], I go to the other site and I see that there's an even bigger number of students there and I was just quite impressed that this had been coordinated across the two sites of the school, happening at the same time. I'd say about, 70 - 80 [were present] on the upper site, and they refused to go back to class. I was teaching for the last two periods on the upper site and half of my class was missing […]. Interestingly, out of the kids that stayed in the class, there was skepticism of the motivations of the students who were out protesting, sort of “what's the point?” “It's not going to change anything” “who are they protesting against? What's happening?” They're not really understanding why it was happening or seeing a connection between the local and the global, and [they were] also highlighting people who might have been on the protests opportunistically rather than people who did genuinely care about what they were doing.
This group who outside were kind of running around – more cat and mouse, and running down the corridor chanting “free Palestine!” And by the way, that had been happening throughout the week. You’d be in your classroom and you’d just hear people chanting in the corridors, “free, free Palestine!” And so there was a crescendo that was essentially kind of coming to this, this Friday protest.
Because these were older years - year 11 and year 12s, once senior leadership or members of staff were confiscating posters and phones, it became a lot more confrontational. So some teachers were sworn at by students and sort of “free Palestine!” chants became “fuck [name of a staff member] or something like that. So it became a bit more personal because I think there were layers to it. I think members of staff who were quite unpopular amongst students… it became a bit of an outlet to kind of vent some of those frustrations as well. But again, I think [it was] symptomatic of the fact that there were no attempts to have restorative conversations prior to that, or to engage with the students on their own terms about what their experiences of school were like.
So yeah, it kind of petered out by the end of the school day. I think there was a sense of achievement and empowerment. I felt from a lot of the students that had taken part of it, a sense of pride. Definitely none of the students who had been on the protest, (or at least the ones that I spoke to or had a teaching relationship with), felt the need to apologize for having missed the lesson. They felt a sense of vindication that they were on the right side of the issue and felt almost even more affirmed in that, on the basis of the resistance that they received from the teachers.

Then the school took quite a draconian approach to the students who took part in those protests and quite nimbly got around the fact [that they were] victimizing them for protesting, [by saying] they were instead punished for having sworn at a teacher or having used their phone in school. About 25 students were put in internal seclusion for a week. […] Having said earlier that I think the protests were quite representative of the diversity of the student body, I think the students that got targeted were disproportionately Muslim and Black - Black Muslim students in particular. […] The head teacher was usually sitting in that internal seclusion room with them. You’ve probably seen what a lot of them are like. So there are these booths and you can't talk or speak to the person next to you… for a whole week. And then six students, I think six overall, were given fixed term exclusions, so they were out of school entirely for a week. I think that level of response spread around the school quite quickly. So as far as I'm aware, I might be wrong, it didn't feel like there was any kind of follow-up to the Friday protests. It felt like that punishment had acted as somewhat of a deterrent to similar kinds of actions escalating.

I understood why some students who didn't go on the protest had some questions about what the protest was actually for. For example, I know it was in response to the racist comments that this teacher had made, but I don't think that there was a clear demand from the protests that we want this teacher out of the school.
There were definitely many missed opportunities but I wouldn't say that there was anything the students should have done differently or otherwise, I think it's remarkable what they did to begin with. […] they were putting themselves at risk, by even bunking lessons and participating in the protests to begin with. And I think you learn by doing and I'm sure lots of them will have learned from that experience. The next time that there is a protest there may be more concrete demands attached to it. But again, they were not given any kind of support from any adults in that situation to make that protest maybe have some kind of meaningful outcomes to it. Other than, a meaningful outcome is for all of those students who took part in that, that feeling of collective agency and power, which I hope will have motivated and inspired a lot of them. And I think a lot of the consciousness and awareness of what's happening in Palestine and the way that that connects to other global justice issues, I think will also resonate any stay with a lot of those kids, even the ones that didn’t take part in the protests. So that’s why I think that's why what they did definitely deserves to be archived because I'm sure it will have a lot of ripple effects far beyond the ones I'm able to comprehend or put my finger on.

[Extracts of conversation via zoom, Sept 2021] ________CW: Racism, school exclusion

The next question is really just, what happened?

Do you think anything about the students' actions could have been done differently to push the school in a different direction of response?

Can you start by describing the school a bit?