ACERT – Page 12 – Advisory Council for the Education of Romany and other Travellers

Storytelling, Education & Wellbeing

ACERT 2023 Conference promises to be an exciting event

Live and online. Don’t miss it!

Friday, 3 February 2023
10:00 – 16:00
John Lennon Art and Design Building (JLADB Space),
Duckinfield Street,
Liverpool, L3 5RD

Chair for the day Richard O’Neill

Welcome by Baroness Whitaker (ACERT Patron) and Patricia Joliffe of Liverpool John Moores University
The development of the GRTSB Pledge – Sherrie Smith, Ruby Smith, Emma Nuttall
Implementing the pledge in schools – Paula Strachan, Jonathan Green
The importance of story and poetry – Oein DeBhairduin, Richard O’Neill, Mitch Miller, Raine Geoghegan
Improving mental health and wellbeing – Sheldon Chadwick, Candace Thomas, Sally Carr, Violet Cannon Smith
Community involvement – Rosa-Maria Cisneros, Lisa Smith, Oein DeBhairduin.

Our conference, seeks to address these issues from the perspectives of schools and communities. We will hear how the GRTSB Pledge is being implemented in Schools and Higher Education and the role of the communities in providing culturally appropriate resources for curriculum. We’ll discuss how we can extend its reach and impact, looking at the role of activists and governments.

Recognising how discrimination and exclusion can damage mental health, we’ll hear about work among Showmen and other Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities to recognise the issues and promote well-being.

Published story-tellers will share their work and we’ll preview new resources about Roma holocaust survivors. We’ll hear how Roma and Irish dancers have joined other communities in Coventry to share their stories with the wider community.

Finally, we’ll look at the failure of recent governments to recognise the barriers and challenges faced by families accessing their educational entitlement, and try to develop a framework for a campaign across all education sectors, in the run-up to the 2024 election, to reverse the pattern of exclusion, underachievement and discrimination.

Our rescheduled conference will focus on ways to recognise and respect the cultures and identities of all Romani and other Traveller communities. We’ll hear from the originators of the GRTSB Pledge, head teachers of schools implementing it and students who recognised the need for it.

Health resources co-created with Roma Pupils

For six weeks, four Roma pupils from Fir Vale School (Sheffield, UK) worked closely with GPs, medical staff and other professionals to co-create resources that can be reused by different services and the NHS. The girls helped produce Child Vaccinations flyers, HPV flyers and a video diary on their own journey of receiving their HPV vaccines.

GP Roma Pupils Project

Sikavas tumenge sar pes džas te očinel pro HPV (Romanes)

Cesta počas ktorej sme sa dali očkovat’ proti HPV virisu (Slovakian)

The Roma pupils also created two flyers that are Open Access and made with the intention to share widely and be reused by different services. The HPV Vaccinations and Children’s Vaccinations Flyers are downloadable below. The flyers are in three languages: English, Slovakian and Romanes.

Child-Vaccines-Info-ENG-Brochure-Poster-Portrait-A3 Download

O Očkovanie Prekalo Čhave (Child Vaccine info Romanes)

Očkovanie Detí (Child vaccine info Slovakian)

HPV-flyer Download

O INFORMACIJE PALO HPV (Romanes)

INFORMÁCIE O HPV (Slovakian)

For more information on this and other projects go to visit https://rosasencis.org

Census 2021 findings

Main points

Participants’ accounts portray considerable variation in the individual preference for a nomadic lifestyle, which impacts personal circumstances such as access to services, employment and family relationships.
Close relationships with family were recurrently described as fundamental to Gypsy and Traveller values and well-being, but a move away from traditional lifestyles and, with this, greater separation from family, was felt to be occurring.
Diverse views were expressed on gender roles, with some stepping outside of what were seen as traditional gender roles among Gypsies and Travellers, and emphasising the importance of education for young women, while others valued arrangements described as traditional among Gypsies and Travellers, such as men being the primary breadwinners, while women are responsible for care of family members and the home, with their work outside the home flexing around these roles.
A range of experiences and relationships were described regarding non-travelling communities; some felt comfortable and accepted while others described past negative interactions resulting in wariness of the settled community and a preference for socialising with other Gypsies and Travellers.
As well as a sense of loss associated with an evolving culture, some participants focused on new opportunities for themselves and the next generation, embracing new ideas and values, for example, in relation to education, housing, healthcare and gender roles.
Running through participants’ accounts were experiences of perceived prejudice and hostility in many aspects of life, which influenced decisions about whether to disclose or avoid revealing their Gypsy or Traveller identity with employers, educators and non-travelling people; in some cases, the choice was removed and they were “outed” either directly by others or indirectly by their accent, address or surname.
Throughout discussions about sharing their identity, participants recurrently expressed a desire to be recognised as an individual, not on the basis of preconceived ideas about their ethnic group.

Download full report

Most excluded minorities

GRT Access to Education HEPI Report 151 Download

The Think Tank Higher Education Policy Institute, has published a new report on access to education among Gypsies, Roma and Travellers (Gypsy, Roma and Traveller) authored by Policy Manager Dr.Laura Bressington.

Laura will join our next Education Support Network meeting on Wednesday, 30th November at 2pm online.

Gypsies, Roma and Travellers: The ethnic minorities most excluded from UK education is an informative report that looks carefully at definitions and draws attention to the dangers of homogenisation – focussing sharply on the need for careful data collection and handling. In her own use of data she demonstrates that these communities are hugely underrepresented in Higher Education.

Evidence

Gypsy, Roma and Travellers of Irish heritage have the widest attainment gap in measures of pupils achieving a good level of development in early years education;
Gypsy, Roma and Traveller pupils have some of the lowest rates of attendance and the highest rates of permanent exclusion from schools;
in 2020/21, 9.1% of Gypsy / Roma pupils and 21.1% of Irish Traveller pupils achieved a grade 5 or above in GCSE English and Mathematics, compared to a national average in England of 51.9%;
young people from Gypsy / Roma and Irish Traveller communities are the least likely ethnic groupings to enter higher education by the age of 19 – just 6.3% of Gypsy / Roma and 3.8% of Irish Travellers access higher education by the age of 19 compared to around 40% of all young people;
Gypsy and Irish Travellers are the UK’s ‘least liked’ group, with 44.6% of people holding negative views against them – 18.7 percentage points higher than Muslims; and
Irish Travellers face a ‘mental health crisis’, with one-in-10 deaths caused by suicide.

Recommendations

For Government

Improved Data Collection. The current lack of information means that the full scale of the problem remains invisible.
Funding. The small scale project local project funding available at the time of writing is inadequate to the scale of the problem which is a national one.

For Higher Education

Access and Participation Plans such as the Higher Education Pledge which create a welcoming environment are to be welcomed
There is a need to include the history and culture of the various Travelling groups in the curriculum. Including works by members of the communities and including relevant data can improve understanding of the different Gypsy Roma and Traveller communities