Subnormal, a devastating documentary produced by Steve McQueen, reveals how Britain’s education system in the 60s and 70s was stacked against Black pupils – and still is today
Last year, documentary maker Lyttanya Shannon began looking for contributors for a new film on a disturbing period in British history. Her focus was the Black British children who found themselves unfairly removed from mainstream education in the 1960s and 70s. They were sent to what were known as “dustbin schools” – places for those deemed “subnormal”. And black children were four times as likely to be sent to them as white children.
So raw was their pain, Shannon tells me, that it was hard to find anyone willing to discuss their time in such institutions on camera. “40 years on, the trauma was still very present,” she says. “One lady had a terrible experience. She had come over from Jamaica, started at a mainstream school, but was then sent to an ESN [educationally subnormal] school. We met in a pub, and when we asked her to share her experiences, she just burst into tears. She said she hadn’t even told her children she’d been to this school.”
