Policing Education: exploring BAME young people's experiences with school-based police officers in Greater Manchester

In February 2018 I founded Kids of Colour, a community project for BAME young people to explore race and identity and to challenge every day and institutionalised racism (Kids of Colour, 2020). As young people continued to share stories of racism in education, using my networks (strengthened by six years of youth work in Manchester), in November 2018 I organised the event 'Kids of Colour on Education'. Attended by 100 members of the public, BAME young people formed a panel to share stories of education in Manchester: including a 13-year-old black boy who spoke of being arrested at school. This opened doors to more young people who connected policing to education in the city, evidenced once more in April 2019 at 'Kids of Colour on Policing', an event I organised with Northern Police Monitoring Project (a group I co-lead). These stories motivated my master's research, which explored the growing demand for schools-based police officers (SBPOs) in Manchester from the perspectives of stakeholders in education (including headteachers and Mayor Andy Burnham). The research concluded that SBPOs supported the racialised policing of BAME young people in their schools and communities.
'I went to this meeting and I heard this call from [...] all the heads that they wanted this.' (Burnham, cited in Legane, 2019)
The above quote, shared by the Mayor through my master's dissertation, confirmed that Greater Manchester is preparing to increase SBPO employment, following London's aim to reach 600 officers in schools (Simmons, cited in House of Commons, 2019) and coinciding with a growing rhetoric from MPs who demand that 'schools in areas with a higher risk of youth violence should be given dedicated police officers' (BBC, 2019). However, as calls for SBPOs intensify, this remains a concealed practice with little academic knowledge of the impact of SBPOs. To date, police are more likely to be based in schools with higher levels of pupils eligible for free school meals (a proxy measure of poverty) (Henshall, 2018). When race and poverty are inextricably linked (Institute of Race Relations, 2019), understanding the impact of SBPOs on BAME young people is essential to ensuring education is not used as a tool to perpetuate racial inequity (Gillborn, 2005) and does not further construct BAME young people as a crime problem. This proposal builds on my masters, aiming to understand the impact of SBPOs on BAME young people in Greater Manchester. It will explore the influences of SBPOs on the educational experiences, trajectories and sense of belonging of BAME young people and how this affects their inclusion in education and society.
Existing literature evidences themes that may emerge regarding individual experience, as well as the societal disparities SBPOs may contribute to. Work from the USA details the extension of criminal justice into schooling, the way racialised disciplinary issues in schools are responded to like crimes and how going to school can feel like 'going to jail' (Heitzeg, 2018, p18). In the UK, as zero-tolerance approaches to non-criminal behaviours become prevalent in schools, the Timpson Review (2019, p34) evidences that black Caribbean pupils are more likely to experience permanent exclusion than their white peers. A critical line of enquiry is how SBPOs may drive up exclusions for BAME young people. As 53% of young people in custody are from BAME backgrounds (Ministry of Justice, 2019) suggesting that schools '"train" a minority of their students to fit the future role of imprisoned offender' (Graham, 2016, p139), this study asks, do SBPOs contribute to the formal exclusion of young people from school and society?