This Chapter is based on an interview of 100 minutes’ duration with the renowned Grenadian activist, politician and author Bernard Coard. Our discussion revisits his seminal 1971 work on institutional racism in British education, How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System, and explores his response to the dramatisation of the scandal he uncovered in the Small Axe episode Education. The interview also considers Coard's involvement in the spinoff BBC ONE documentary Subnormal: A British Scandal, and his critique of the current state of UK education.

In 1967, having gained a Masters degree in comparative politics at Sussex University, Coard began a PhD in development economics. He also worked as a youth leader in Deptford, and then, from 1969, as a teacher in two London schools for the ‘educationally subnormal’.

I never met a middle-class or upper-class kid in any of those schools. Neither in the seven that I did youth clubs for, nor the two where I taught full time. Not one middle-class or upper-class kid. [They were] all white working-class and Black from the Caribbean. The schools were both co-educational. I would say that most of the teachers were good people. [But] They can't do the good work that they are capable of because the system is not constructed for that. The curriculum they have to work with, the expectations that are laid down for them […] that is a social crime in itself. […] [In Education] it would have been just as valid for McQueen to have a classroom where there is a sympathetic, empathetic teacher who is trying his or her best, but constrained by what […] level is expected of the children. That would have been another way to do it, but what he did [with a bored and disengaged teacher] was perfectly authentic because a quarter of my experiences were like that.