English society and its education system have been through several phases of multicultural education. The current context for race, racism and hope education was discussed by Vini Lander in her BERA Blog. Since then we have had the racist riots of summer 2024 in England, which were ignited following the killings of three young White girls in Southport by a Black young man, Axel Rudakubana, who was wrongly identified as a Muslim asylum seeker. Among White rioters, Muslims and other immigrants became the focus of blame for the deaths.

The riots have raised a particular concern about White children and their community contexts. Meanwhile, some ethnic minority children and their families have had to take strong measures to protect themselves. The education system must recognise the current context in the light of the racist riots, , which were described as ‘nativist’ and ‘acts of ugly violence’ in a blog post by BERA President Marlon Lee Moncrieffe. So how are schools to respond to these new challenges? This BERA Blog special issue, published one year on from the riots, addresses these complex issues and presents some solutions.

The contributions to this issue explore: 

• racial literacy being especially necessary for those who have not personally experienced racism
• deracialised teacher education, in which racial literacy is a mandatory component
• how a teacher’s role should not be confined to teaching only subject knowledge serving a neoliberal system of education, but one that develops, in the learners, critical thinking about the world we live in
• the situation of minoritised teachers in our schools, their added burden of racism, and the emotional weight which often leads them to leave the profession
• an educational approach based on the philosophy of the 17th-century rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) to counter the emotionally charged racialised narratives that schools today are having to respond to
• how schools can facilitate meaningful positive social contact between students from diverse backgrounds
• that educational underachievement of poor White boys continues to be a problem, though not without contention, and how addressing this underachievement gap is an important element in tackling issues of racism.