Academic urges Birmingham to take up education project aimed at black boys

Oct 27 2009 by Diane Parkes, Birmingham Mail

BIRMINGHAM is being urged to take up a pioneering education project aiming to help black boys succeed in school.

Academic Dr Tony Sewell has visited the city to drum up support for the Generating Genius among local schools, universities and within the local education authority.

Dr Sewell is hoping to replicate a project in which a group of 30 black boys took part in summer schools over four years and saw their GCSE grades improve.

But he says he needs financial and practical help to take on another group of youngsters.

“Generating Genius was responding to the continual problem of why boys of Caribbean origin do badly in schools,” he says. “The problem was also manifesting itself in Jamaica which is 99 per cent black so I had a hunch that it was a much more complex problem than the knee jerk reaction of teacher racism.

“I felt that what we were struggling with was the issue of nurturing our young men so that they wanted to better themselves.”

Dr Sewell, director of the Science, Maths and Information Technology Centre in the department of Educational Studies at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, set up a project in both his home college and universities in the UK.

“We selected a group of boys whose parents had never been to university and who had an interest in science. We took that group of students to Jamaica for a summer school,” he says.

“We then continued that summer school at universities in the UK. We started with ten boys and we then added 20 to the group so that we had 30 in total.”

Those boys spent four summers at special schools run at Leeds and Brunel universities, but they were expected to reach high expectations.

The boys, who were aged 11 at the beginning of the project, were treated on a par with 18-year-old university students and were set various problem-solving tasks in which they were encouraged to think “outside the box”.

At the same time they were offered a range of physical and cultural activities with the backing of emotional support and counselling.

Dr Sewell, who has written about the projects in his book Generating Genius, says the results speak for themselves as all of the boys went on to pass nine GCSEs at grade C or above.

And now he is keen to replicate the project – in Birmingham.

“We are looking to recruit our next cohort of young men,” he says. “And we are looking for support from Birmingham.

“It obviously costs money to organise the Generating Genius programme but if the model works then it is worth the investment. When the alternative is high levels of exclusion and underachieving then it is not expensive.

“We need to invest in these kinds of “long pipeline” models but there are not enough of them in the UK. Too often the Government targets its schemes at sixth formers but boys who are already in the sixth form are already motivated towards university. By engaging boys when they are much younger, it is possible to see the kind of positive development we have seen.”

And he says it is imperative that we do address the needs for these young black men, to prevent them turning to gangs when they are not achieving in education.

“We actually called our group the ‘science gang’ because these young men want to belong somewhere,” says Dr Sewell. “When it comes to boys of Caribbean origin there are two levels of underachievement. There is a small minority that are involved in a street community, violence, guns and crime and they are the ones that hit the headlines. They do have a big effect on the community but the numbers are actually very small.

“But there is a much larger group of boys who are underachieving by getting C and D grades when they should be getting As.

“This is a much larger and more significant group and this is the group we are able to make headway with.”

Dr Sewell’s programme may have been a success story for 30 young men but what of the thousands of black boys across the country who are failing to achieve the grade?

“We cannot capture everybody,” he says. “But there are boys who are banging on our doors and are hungry to learn.

“We are not looking to replace schools, we are looking to provide added value and there is no reason that this model cannot be used for other groups of young people.”

The Birmingham Mail asked for a response to Dr Sewell’s comments from Tony Howell, Birmingham City Council’s Director for Children, Young People and Families, but he declined to reply.

* More Info

Companies or education centres interested in talking to Dr Sewell about becoming involved in Generating Genius or families who would like more information can contact him at sewelltony@hotmail.com