RIP Jason Arday

 

The Delphic tragedy of Jason Arday has been decades coming.  

When the 'scandal' was in full swing, I didn't know what to make of his claims. At best, I wondered if he was just having a laugh and he'd confess soon with a big grin on his face. The worst I thought was that he was a bit of a Walter Mitty character. No harm in it, unless it's indulged to the point that Walter is handed a prestigious position he wouldn't otherwise have attained.

I don't blame him for taking it. I blame the architects of the system that made currency out of him.

People like (the safely long dead) Dame Shirley Williams, Sir Ashley Bramall and the leaders of the Inner London Education Authority. Privately educated themselves, but committed to destroying a similar quality education for poor kids; scrapping streaming, bulldozing grammar schools, and replacing all of it with a homogenised system that deliberately shortened the race track for the tortoises and hacked the legs off the hares.

Schools were political. Serving up just enough Marx-flavoured education on colour-by-numbers Roneoed handouts to prevent social scabs from healing, and keep new generations of turkeys voting for Christmas.

The suggestion that kids might try for Oxbridge didn't even figure. Careers talks were all about how to get a job in the Post Office.

I should know. I went to such a school. Occasionally.

I barely showed up - except to take my exams, which I scraped through with some last-minute cramming thanks to a home filled with books, plays, kitchen table debate - and thanks to where I chose to bunk off. If truant officers had bothered to look for me, they might have found me in Swiss Cottage Library or deep in the City of London, searching for all the courts and alleyways mentioned in my favourite Leon Garfield books.

None of that was on my school's curriculum. Kids were bombarded with 'race' from day one of the first year. Kids who had mates of all colours and backgrounds who they'd played with every day at their primary schools suddenly found themselves being 'challenged' by teachers working through their own white, middle-class hang-ups.

A black friend of mine liked to sit behind me in our form class and braid my hair. She loved the texture she said, while I loved the styles she created for me.

We were both called before our form teacher and commanded to explain ourselves. While I of course was told I was oppressing her, she didn't get off either, and was apparently guilty of some sort of ingrained servitude that needed to be excised from her brain.

Black kids were frequently embarrassed by teachers' attempts to lecture their classmates on their oppression. One day, when we were all being shown a miserably depressing film about how terrible a London housing estate was and how it was particularly awful for the black people who lived on it, the girl who had braided my hair quietly whispered to me that she wished "they would show the nice parts." That was how I found out she lived there.

Nice.

Asian kids didn't get much peace either. They got the treatment too. Must have been around the third year when we were all ushered into one of the science rooms that had been converted into some sort of crude cinema by sellotaping black art paper to the windows.

We were excited to learn we were going to see an Indian film.

A lady was waiting for us wearing a sari. It was a very nice sari, made from some sort of 'shot' silk that made it look two-tone. Her face however, wasn't quite so magical. She wore a leaden scowl as we all took our seats, looking like she thought the lot of us smelled.

The Deputy Head teacher cranked up a projector at the back of the room and the film began to play. It wasn't a jolly Bollywood romp as we'd hoped it might be, it seemed to be something arty and serious with a lot of people milling around a rural backdrop speaking urgently to each other and looking downtrodden. Nobody really knew what it was about, because it was in Urdu, or Hindi or Tamil (we weren't told which), and there were no subtitles.

As we all looked at each other hoping somebody might know what was going on, the woman in the sari barked at us with sneering satisfaction: "Now you know what it's like not to understand a language!"

This was too much for one girl who snapped back: "I feel like that every time I go to Spain. That's why I take a fucking phrase book."

She was sent from the room.

The rest of us were a bit uncomfortable about that, as it was rumoured her mother was an IRA operative. Nobody with any sense pissed her off.

Irish kids however, were not a priority. When it was then mooted that we might start learning more indigenous languages besides the usual French (the film show apparently having been dreamed up as a conversation starter for this idea), I asked if that meant we might have the chance to learn Erse, Gaelic and Welsh. I was given a flat "No."

Come the fourth year, some of the kids had worked out what was going on and how they could "fuck with it". When we went down to Paddington Rec to choose what sports we were going to do one year, I put my hand up for tennis. It was the only sport I was any good at. I loved it. Actually had hopes of doing tournaments and stuff. I was refused. A large black girl who'd been transferred from another school due to bullying because she was big (probably really only about a size 16 in hindsight) put her hand up and pointedly asked to do tennis. She was immediately given a racket and directed to the tennis courts.

Looking straight at the PE teacher, she walked over to me and handed me her racket. "Let 'er play." She commanded. The teacher grudgingly acquiesced, but then dodged assisting me with any of my strokes and ignored me for the entire term.

There was a camaraderie among the kids who saw the 'right on' teaching staff as the common enemy, no matter how 'chummy' they tried to be.

In terms of culture, it was the age of Two-Tone and Rock Against Racism. We danced to The Specials, The Selector, Madness and The Bodysnatchers. It felt like our teachers wanted to join in, but instead of skanking along, they brought a sledgehammer to the dance hall and smashed it up with their eager 'kindness'.

One afternoon, we were ushered into the school hall for a performance by a black theatre company who were presenting poetry. Most of it was about plantations, slavery and colonialism. It was white this, white that, and ending with the shouted line: "Fuck away with white!"

It was so aggressive, some of the kids walked out. Their black friends went with them, one calling over his shoulder "no man, that's racist." Not the effect our teachers were intending.

Some kids 'played' it like a Stradivarius.

One lad lit up a joint and openly smoked it in the 6th Form Common Room. I went and sat next to him, laughing, warning him a teacher was in the corridor.

"He won't do nothing." The boy said.

"He'll bring you an ashtray maybe." I speculated.

He laughed.

The kids all laughed at the teachers grovelling at them.

Well, now look what their grovelling's done.

 

1344 Words

© Emma Errington - 14 August 2026