How can we improve teaching young people about real socioeconomic inequality in schools?

Would you like to be part of a small team working to improve the quality and accessibility of school resources about socioeconomic inequality? If so, The Equality Trust are looking for current and ex-teachers who would be able to support our work on developing new, inequality focused resources for schools, and would love to hear from any interested Fellows.

Wilkinson and Pickett’s books The Spirit Level (2010) and The Inner Level (2018) have made a compelling case for the multiple effects of income inequalities. The Equality Trust is developing a project to translate this research on the drivers, scale and impacts of inequality into accessible, engaging activities for use by teachers and other learning facilitators.  Their goal is for a full suite of flexible and interactive classroom materials that can be used at all key stages and across a variety of subjects.

Colleagues are invited to take part in workshop activity to develop materials that will be piloted and evaluated and then disseminated directly to schools and via current local groups, activists and speakers, encouraging and facilitating links between them and interested schools, colleges and universities in their local areas.

The workshop will begin by giving an overview of the work of the Equality Trust, associated campaigns and the specifics of the education project. There will be some input on the framing of the work through the SDGs (sustainable development goals) and key messages from the Spirit Level, the Inner Level and other sources.

The workshop will then continue with a ‘sharing’ of existing materials in parallel with the opportunity for participants to share their perceptions/thoughts on these. The remainder of the workshop will be a co-production of schemes of work addressing the issues raised, producing ideas for activities that would support the schemes of work, giving due regard to the identification of content support required to build the activity to a deliverable form. These ideas will be passed to a developer to work on, with subsequent workshops fine tuning and ratifying the developed material.

Want to get involved?
If you would like to get involved, please email Jo Wittams, project lead at The Equality Trust. Jo, and Dr Neil Herrington from the University of East London, will be attending the next RSA Inequality in Education Network meeting on the 12th November, to give a short presentation aside from the main agenda, and answer any questions.

Wanda Wyporska is a Fellow of the RSA and the Executive Director of The Equality Trust.