Strong guidance and definitions of what constitutes a racist incident is helpful to teachers, the report says…

Schools must report any racist incident to the local education authority.

Schools advised on race equality

Here is how racism is to be “tackled”: by the identification (with the help of “strong guidance”) of “racist incidents”, and the monitoring and reporting of such incidents, so that the onus is placed upon schools to reduce their frequency.

Always the symptom; never the disease.

It as though the racist himself were subject to episodes of racism, fugues of “inappropriate” behaviour - an affliction like Tourettes, or like being a recovering alcoholic. This week, a bad week: three “incidents” on Monday morning alone. Reflection and self-criticism during circle time - is proper support being offered to the client?

John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, on whether the Church of England contains “institutional racism”: “as a room full of smokers contains smoke”. Nicotine patches all round. Or is will-power all that is required?

This is the school as laboratory of management techniques, a controlled environment in which problems such as racism, economic inequality, social exclusion and so forth can be modelled in terms of the “incidents” they present, their impact on results, and normalisation applied to smooth out the signal - it’s like mixing down a track: a little EQ here, a little compression there, until we get our perfect “wall of sound” with every band at peak intensity.

The crisis of this model always comes at the boundary between the school and the outside world: “parental involvement”, the “culture” of the “home environment”, into which control must be extended in order to prevent interference. The less time children spend at home, the better (unless it’s a nice middle class home)! Or: we must educate the parents, too!

The disengagement of the students from the school system can only appear within this managerial model as the negative impact of some foreign, hostile “culture”, some autonomous force that obstructs the system and prevents it from working with full efficiency. The school’s “culture of learning” must prevail over - well, what? A “culture of illiteracy”? The stubborn, wilful refusal of considerable numbers of human beings to learn?

It is, on the contrary, the “willingness to learn” of the minority of highly successful students that should be regarded as abnormal, as requiring explanation. Not that it is abnormal to want to learn, far from it; but that the disincentives to do so within a laboratory environment where one is oneself the experimental subject are so high. How does one avoid becoming apathetic, when treated with such contempt? And the same question applies to the willingness of good teachers to teach.