Ms Shreya Chaturvedi:

As part of the Yellow Flag programme, all schools in the programme are required to go through diversity and equality training. This includes all teachers and staff in the schools. This gives them the opportunity to discuss relevant and sometimes controversial issues they are not able to talk about within the daily routine of the school.

Up to now we have reached approximately 2,563 school staff through this training. In October 2018, we conducted an independent evaluation, results of which show that 70% of the schools said their staff had a better understanding of racism, 72% said their staff had a better understanding of cultural diversity and 63% said their staff had the opportunity to discuss and raise relevant issues. These are positive findings considering the limited scale as we are only able to provide two hours of training to every school that we go to. This is not even enough time to go deep into the relevant issues. Given this limitation, these are positive findings.

We have also developed an additional digital training course, which is the Yellow Flag self-awareness training, through which we encourage teachers, other school staff and parents to do in groups. This helps to explore hidden biases and how people can make sure it does not affect their delivery in the classroom. The fourth step of the programme requires an intercultural survey to be done by all students and parents of the school. In a lot of those surveys, many statistics and open-ended answers come out, which make the teachers realise they are probably not thinking about the issue enough. They are supposed to develop an action plan based on that, which makes sure they are addressing each and everything that comes up in the intercultural survey. Even then, as I said earlier, the bias is so ingrained that as a development worker - and many more people before me - I have had to point out certain issues that are particular to the treatment of Travellers. We have to make sure the issues are pointed out and that they do something about it. We are happy to provide the committee with many good examples in schools, especially primary schools, that have included Travellers extremely well. They have made meaningful connections with the children's parents and with community organisations. This is an example of good practice and we would be very happy to provide the committee with the names of those schools.