DARPL Conference 2023

It’s a ‘Work of Heart’ learning together: ‘troubling, committing and inspiring’.

It’s been a remarkable academic year across Wales in Diversity Anti-Racist Professional Learning (DARPL) in education, childcare and play. The DARPL Community of Practice led through collaboration, professional and lived experience was designed and established in 2021 by Chantelle Haughton, Principal Lecturer in Cardiff Metropolitan University, following her work with Professor Charlotte Williams within the Ministerial Working Group. Welsh Government (2023) advocate that DARPL is essential to realising the Curriculum for Wales. 

June 8th 2023 was an historic heart-fuelled day in Wales, bringing together over 250 top-tier leaders in education and childcare from across Wales to the first National DARPL Leadership Conference, determinedly focused on anti-racist leadership responsibilities and taking DARPL forward through national structure and purpose. The DARPL conference built on the firm foundations already in place. DARPL, funded by Welsh Government, works towards our anti-racist Wales by 2030, calling for zero tolerance of racism in all its guises.

Chantelle explains, “This has been a sea-changing academic year, with serious commitment to action from regional consortia, WJEC, Qualification Wales, NAEL, large key educational institutions and organisations, schools, colleges and childcare settings. Our small, dedicated team in DARPL and superb growing community of practice, we’re feeling surprised, exhausted, re-inspired and intentional beyond hopeful whilst dismantling the usual. We’ve still got huge work to do in education. We are working through synergies of discomfort aiming for complete cynefin, authentic determined curricula and zero tolerance to racism. Educators across our country are starting to step into brave spaces.

This year in DARPL we’ve impacted over 20,000 educators. We’re under no illusion, we need to challenge and support many more education leaders as we head deeper into DARPL Phase Two from September 2023. Together through reciprocal professional learning and positive action we can future-proof impact as we move towards achieving our Anti-Racist Wales. We look out and forward. Where are you in this work? What are you doing? What professional learning is happening in other sectors beyond education across Wales? How can we connect further? What are the lessons being learnt? What are you doing in your work?

“DARPL provision is for the grown-ups but keeps the children at the heart. Looking back into my own childhood at a treasured video clip of Mrs Campbell calling out my name with a sense of serious fun and highest expectations, we know beyond our community my classroom peers and I would have been described as ‘children from deprived backgrounds’. However, we know that we grew and learnt in the richest learning arena with a unique mix of the World right on our doorstep. Because of that, here we are finding ways to draw on our diverse perspectives in holistic realistic Welsh history and connectedness to sharing our global citizenship.

We are all malleable in our early years of life, for me, looking back these two words sat together ‘Tiger - Bay’ are synonymous with resourcefulness and alternative wealth in knowledge. Through DARPL, in deconstructing and relearning, the education and childcare workforce are exploring wider ways of knowing and being for all children across Wales at the core of Curriculum and it’s exciting. There is a strong creative pull together in being the change. We need to dig deep, looking at where are we with our own collective understanding of racism in education in Wales overt, covert, systemic and institutional. DARPL helps educators explore how to lead the change we want to see.”

“The emotional and intelligent response, with an openness to unlearning and relearning from the leaders at the DARPL conference, was tangible. But the proof is in the future. In leadership, practice, policy and research, we need to hold each other in support and challenge. Together, we are determined to reimagine the experience of our future generations in an anti-racist Wales. The leaders in that room have the future in their hands. We considered, are we preserving tradition or truly shaping the future? What’s our leadership legacy really going to look like? We are not here to waste time and opportunity, are we?

A leader who attended the conference responded in their feedback: “DARPL has changed what I thought I knew. How did I get to this point in my life, in my work not learning, reading or supporting the perspectives of global majority people? I feel troubled, committed and inspired. Thank you. DARPL has been the strongest, most impactful professional learning for me for a very long time! We’ve got lots to learn and lots to do, we’re ready.”

Jeremy Miles, Minister for Welsh Language and Education said: “We are committed to embedding anti-racism right across the Welsh education system. The support for the first national DARPL anti-racist leadership conference has been overwhelming. Our educational leaders are key to driving the change towards anti-racist leadership.” Baroness Floella Benjamin said: “I talked about my childhood journey to the UK resulting in my bestselling book ‘Coming to England’, reflecting on my experience of overcoming adversities and obstacles through positive attitude and learning to face them with a smile. My time with the leaders in Wales set out to inspire and support their anti-racist leadership and for us all to think even more about ‘Childhood lasting a Lifetime’.”

Dave Goodger, CEO of Early Years Wales said: “What an absolute privilege it was to be in the room! Your event was inspiring, uplifting, moving, informative and motivating. One day, you will look back at this, and the legacy of your work in DARPL with absolute pride. I know, of course, that you also wish this work wasn’t needed, but it so clearly still is. The ripples you are creating, (or waves actually), will make a change in the lives of our young people. Every speaker shared their story with incredible fortitude and passion, with dignity and purpose; I am grateful to each of them for their part in the day and the contributions they made.” DARPL is proud to be a heartbeat in progressive national racial equity conversations and step-change in Wales. For more information on DARPL go to darpl.org.

Article by Chantelle Haughton SFHEA National Teaching Fellow, DARPL Director and Founder, Principal Lecturer in Early Childhood Education