My reflections on how the DARPL ELS has impacted my current knowledge, professional experience. My perspective on anti-racism has been hugely impacted by the DARPL ELS. It has has opened up my thinking and reflection not only on racism acts within school from pupil to pupil but to the wider school community and society. 

Curriculum

I feel like the biggest impact has been my thinking around decoloniality in the curriculum and how well represented all of the pupils in my school feel or not. Following the ELS session on curriculum and having challenging discussions around resources, texts, role models and content during the training session left me with a lot to think about and a lot to discuss with the Senior Leadership team at school. It was clear that racism as a topic was tackled in subjects such as Humanities and English but maybe a surface level and apart from that there seemed to be large gaps in our curriculum. We need to develop a determined curriculum to allow pupils to have balanced curriculum delivery and pedagogy which steers away from the Eurocentric approach and considers an Afrocentric approach  and wider perspectives to ensure all pupils feel represented, valued and inspired. Following my time on ELS, I met with the Deputy Headteacher to discuss and implement a curriculum audit around diversity across the curriculum and resources. This audit is being run in the Summer Term 2026. 

As a leader I feel more confident when discussing racism in the wider term with leaders and the staff body. I hope with this confidence and additional staff training via DARPL to empower all staff at my school to feel more confident to deliver challenging thinking and empower pupils to challenge resources and texts to ensure they are being taught a balanced delivery of different topics. 

Anti Racism Ambassadors

Alongside all of the work throughout this course I have also been working with a partner of the DARPL CoP: Show Racism the Red Card, Wales. These collaborations have brough opportunity for me to delve deeper into school issues and tackle them with other senior leaders, staff and pupils. We have conducted a whole school survey in order to understand our student bodies current perceptions, beliefs and challenges. Following this I worked with our Anti Racism Ambassadors to create educational slides for form tutors to deliver around racial slurs and what terminology is acceptable and what would be a hate crime. There is a useful DARPL session on the Virtual Campus around terminology. Following the results of our survey we than completed a survey with students with global majority heritage to get a better understanding of how our students feel in school and the wider community, how well represented they feel and how happy they would be challenging and reporting racism. This data has been extremely helpful in helping us know our learners, understand the context of our learning community and plan our next steps 

• complete a curriculum audit,
• increase the number of anti-racism ambassadors 
• continue to ensure our entire student and staff body are known and well represented. 

Impact on my classroom delivery and leadership

Since completing the DARPL ELS course I have become a much more open thinker with regards to planning, delivering lessons and teaching. I feel that my research in topic areas delves much deeper, more critically, more creatively to ensure the students are getting a balance delivery of topic areas. I am more aware of the texts that I use / don’t use in the sense of who has written them and where they have originated from, the messages within them and how I deliver certain topics to ensure we openly critique bias and consider a wide range of perspectives. DARPL ELS has impacted my delivery in the classroom; made me a better educator for it; widened my thinking and approach to the wider topic of diversity and racism withing education and profoundly impacted my conscious leadership in education. 

To find out more about joining DAN (follow this link): Advocacy Network – DARPL

To find out more about attending ELS (follow this link): Enhanced Leadership Series – DARPL