Learning to teach: the experiences of minority ethnic early career teachers in Scotland

Unprecedented levels of global mobility are making culturally and ethnically homogenous classrooms less common. Despite this increasing diversity, representation of minority ethnic teachers does not reflect the wider population; a situation reflected in Scotland, and something Scottish Government is committed to tackling. We know that recruiting and retaining an ethnically representative teacher workforce is complex, covering myriad issues including representations of teaching, experiences of racism, White majority curriculum designs and ethnic role model expectations. Emerging data from the Measuring Quality in Initial Teacher Education project (www.mquite.scot) also supports the view that work needs to be done, and further investigation into the experiences of minority ethnic early career teachers is therefore required.

This proposed studentship will involve a collaboration between two HEIs (Strathclyde and Queen Margaret University), a public sector body (the Scottish Government), the independent regulatory body for teachers (GTCS) and the student, enabled by SGSSS. Such a collaboration ensures that the research is both influenced by policy contexts, whilst also influencing future policy and practice decisions.

The project will give voice to the experiences of minority ethnic early career teachers, exploring their recruitment to initial teacher education (ITE), the ITE experience itself, and the induction year leading to full GTCS registration. Such stories act as counter-narratives to the majority White construction of teaching and teacher education which has maintained an unrepresentative workforce. Although for the successful applicant to decide, we envisage Critical Race Theory as the theoretical underpinning for the study. This provides a way to understand and illuminate widespread and systemic racial tensions across Scottish education and Scottish society more broadly, and how these intersect with minority ethnic teachers' early career experiences.

This project will contribute towards the development of a teacher workforce in Scotland that is truly representative of all racial and ethnic communities.