Chris Richards

West Indian Supplementary Service, London 1974-1975

Recent winners of Royal Photographic Society Award for Photographic Publishing. All books 36 pages, printed in England, staple bound, 14cm x 20cm. The London Borough of Waltham Forest’s West Indian Supplementary Service was an intervention to support children from families of Caribbean origin in the borough’s primary and secondary schools. Bernard Coard’s critique “How the West Indian Child is made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System” (1971) made a significant contribution to debates around the apparent relative failure of black children to thrive in mainstream education. Though not simply a response to Coard’s publication, the Supplementary Service aimed to enable black children to negotiate the demands of the school curriculum more successfully — by explicitly encouraging an understanding of language variation (dialects in relation to ‘standard’ English) and by teaching about Caribbean culture and black history. Most supplementary teachers worked with very small groups of children withdrawn from mainstream classes for short periods each day. With older students, provision was more flexible and could become more innovative, especially when mainstream classes were reduced following exams.