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CCN: = Dr Clive Chijioke Nwonka, Interviewer
INT: = Baroness Lola Young of Hornsey, Interviewee
Recording starts
CCN: Hi, I’m Dr Clive Chijioke Nwonka, Associate Professor in Film, Culture and Society at University College London and an Associate of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the study of racism and racialisation here at UCL. Today, it’s a pleasure to be joined by Baroness Lola Young. Baroness Lola Young of Hornsey became one of the first black women members of the House of Lords in 2024.
Raised in foster care in North London, she studied at the New College of Speech and Drama, then worked as an actress, before becoming Professor of Cultural Studies at Middlesex University. Later, she worked in arts administration, before receiving an OBE in 2001 for services to black British history and becoming an independent cross-bench member of the House of Lords.
She’s active in campaigns on modern slavery and ethical fashion. In 2017 she was on a Man Booker Prize judging panel and she is also Chancellor of the University of Nottingham. Her new book, Eight Weeks: Looking Back, Moving Forward, Defying the Odds is a deeply moving and inspiring memoir that tells the remarkable life story of Baroness Young, from her childhood in foster care, to becoming one of the first black women in the House of Lords. Throughout the podcast, we’ll be discussing Lola’s latest book, its themes and some of the ideas that have shaped Lola’s writing, scholarship and public life. So, Lola, welcome to the podcast.
INT: Thank you for inviting me on, Clive, thanks.
CCN: So, I have this wonderful book in my hands here, Eight Weeks: Looking Back, Moving Forward, Defying the Odds. An amazing book. It was a pleasure reading. It really gave me amazing insights into, you know, your life history, the present and beyond as well. How would you describe the book?
INT: It’s hard. It’s hard because obviously it’s about me, but my original plan was to write an autobiography where I wasn’t the centre of the narrative, which is a bit kind of a dumb desire. But, no, the reason why I say that is because I was reluctant to do something which was simply about, oh look at me, look where I’ve come from and look where I’ve landed up, as if there was some kind of straightforward trajectory, and that success is defined in a particular way.
So, what I wanted to do was, yes, to speak about my experiences but hope that people would understand that they could extrapolate from those to the predicaments that are endured by many children and young people in the care system, and that there are policy initiatives that need to be driven forward to change these situations that a lot of care experienced people go through, both during that experience and subsequent to it. So, I would describe it as a little bit of campaigning, a little bit of advocacy, a little bit of attempting to heal, help people heal and come to terms with some of their experiences.
CCN: Well, I think that’s really encapsulated in how the book opens. It’s amazing. A very, very kind of brief dedication where you say ‘for all the others whose stories are yet to be told.’ So, it seems to me that the motivation for writing about this particular moment in time in your career was about looking back but also, as you mentioned, advocacy in looking forward as well, but that collective experience of looking forward.
INT: Yeah, it’s so interesting, Clive, because I’ve had quite a lot of correspondence from various people, literally internationally, and some have been from people who have had similar experiences, as you might expect, and some of which are quite heart-breaking really, but all of whom have been very positive about it. Then I’ve had some responses from people who’ve had ostensibly happy childhoods with conventional family upbringing, but for whom there were some dark alleyways that they weren’t quite sure they wanted to go down.
And so, me writing about me travelling down some of these dark roads has helped them to think through what they might gain from doing so. So, it’s been a very interesting experience in terms of the responses to it. So, I’m pleased actually, to be honest. I hadn’t sort of in my wildest dreams expected some of the responses that I received.
CCN: One of the chapters that has most encapsulated me was the one titled Back to the Beginning, and you offer this really forensic recollection of Tufnell Park Road, becoming very kind of clear, and in many ways, it’s really kind of related to the book’s front cover. So, it’s a very, very striking image. Can you describe what the image is for people?
INT: Yeah, sure. So the front cover features a photograph of an elderly white woman, who’s got grey hair and specs, and she’s looking down on this quite well-fed looking baby. I guess I’d be about, I don’t know, maybe about a year old in the photograph. Interestingly, although I can’t say I remember that particular moment, even I can’t remember that but I do remember this thing about the feathers in the hair, and in this photograph you can just about see some feathers in the hair. That relates to that period which is the early 1950s. So, we had lots of American programmes on television, most of which were Westerns, most of which featured what we now refer to as Native Americans being shot at, you know, denigrated and all the rest of it.
But there was this sense, that I would say I’d read into that photograph now, of recognising that I was other and maybe trying to align my otherness with the otherness of the, what were then called Indians. Do you see what I mean? So, it’s like this… otherwise it’s a very strange kind of thing to have these odd feathers stuck in the head. And I do remember being given one Christmas an Indian headdress, as it was called.
And I just want to say, that photograph came to me only a few years ago. It was sent to me by one of Daisy’s… which is the name of the woman in the photograph, who looked after me until she died, from the age of eight weeks. So, the photograph came from her great-granddaughter, who’d seen that I was in the House of Lords and wrote me a note about all of that and said I’ve got some photographs, would you be interested in seeing them? And that was one of them and she very kindly said I could use that as the cover.
CCN: Wow, it’s again a very, very striking black and white image. It again really kind of embodies what the opening chapter of the book is all about and in that chapter, Back to the Beginning, again this really forensic recollection of life, you know, in North London on Tuffnell Park Road. And often we think about North London as this melting pot of inter-raciality and multi-culture and conviviality and community but, of course, you know, in the 1950s, it was a very, very different experience for people, particularly black people.
INT: Yeah, absolutely. I mean I literally was spat at in that street, in that very road and there were all kinds of horrible racist slogans painted on walls around the Archway, and this was that world. So, again to try and situate it for people, Windrush literally had landed three years before I was born and that was mainly… well, it was all adults, I think, on that particular ship. But most of the people who came here then appeared to be from the Caribbean and they’d come to settle, for one reason or another, to go into work and particularly in the public services and, you know, this was going to be their life and they were adults. So, those who had children, and I think many of them left them behind in the Caribbean to come later, or they were yet to start their families.
With the Nigerians that I know of, who came round that same sort of period, they had a different intention. They came here to study and so I’m not going to say that made their experience easier but at least they would know that it was going to be temporary. So, they came here to study. Many of them went to what are now quite posh parts of London, North London, which weren’t then and, in fact, Tufnell Park Road wasn’t a posh road in those days. I mean it’s kind of hard to compare in many respects but it certainly wasn’t, you know, these ultra-expensive houses because house ownership was relatively low at that time anyway. But, yeah, you know, there was that kind of obvious overt racism that was all around, but there wasn’t anybody to take me through that or explain that to me, where that had come from or what it was about or even to acknowledge that it existed; that simply wasn’t there then.
CCN: It’s really interesting that you talk about the ethnic specificity of both migration, immigration, Windrush, post-Windrush as well, but also the locations around London. So, for instance, West London was always seen to be the kind of Caribbean, you know, Trinidad and Tobago kind of settlements around, you know, the Rachman era. Then maybe North West London was more kind of Jamaican. But certainly in North London, as you mentioned, there seemed to be a stronger critical mass of West African, i.e. Nigerian persons there. And even still, you didn’t find that there was a community of people, even in your schooling days, that you could gravitate towards for that education.
INT: No. So, I think, I mean it would be so interesting to do a proper study of that period. The nearest I came to it was the person that I call Kayin in the book, who is actually a cousin, and whose parents I stayed with for a period, they had a whole sort of network of friends that were, I think, mainly from Lagos actually, even to be more specific than Nigeria, and they used to meet up at weekends. So Kayin’s father was studying at Cambridge and he would cycle to London. He would cycle from Cambridge to London and see his friends, and they were situated around Haverstock Hill, Hampstead, Chalk Farm, that kind of part of North London, which, as I was kind of suggesting earlier, is quite posh today, or certainly very expensive at any rate to buy.
And it was interesting because some of them were even buying houses in those areas at that time. It wasn’t a house buying culture in the general population at that time. People were still recovering from the Blitz and the Second World War and the impact of all of that. So, it was quite an interesting moment to look at those different communities. And even from various sort of anecdotal things I’d heard from the Nigerians that I did know around that… well, I didn’t know any around that time, apart from Kayin’s mum and dad, but later on, I got to know that they did meet up together. And even in my care notes, there’s a note to say that my mother had taken me to some kind of gathering in Chelsea around Sloane Square.
So, these were people, I’d guess, we’d say middle to upper-middle class people. They were well-educated or going to be well-educated, expected to have a university education and then take those skills and that knowledge back. So, there weren’t that many children around. In fact, at my primary school I think I was the second or third black child in that school. So there weren’t… and I think one of them, one of the other ones had been adopted by a white family. So, there wasn’t that consciousness. We had one black teacher, a certain Mrs Beryl Gilroy but that was it, you know, that was it.
CCN: Well, interestingly enough about your school days, in the book you detail how, as a 11 year old, you made a choice not to go to the grammar school, Camden School for Girls, but to Parliament Hill in 1962, but also you reflect upon how this was quite a big turning point in your life, particularly in terms of issues of class.
INT: Yeah, very much so. My best friend at primary school did go to Camden and there was a moment where I thought, oh that would be nice to go with her but I guess I can’t fully explain it myself, but I had a deep consciousness about class and about race that came from… it must have come from somehow extrapolating from my own predicament and trying to understand and make sense of what was going on around me. But I knew, and I can remember very strongly that I knew that I wanted to go to a comprehensive school and not to the grammar school, which was associated with a certain kind of snobbery and privilege to me, even at that time.
And actually Parliament Hill School was interesting because it had been a fee-paying grammar school. So, it still had a little bit of that reputation but it was also one… it must have been one of the earliest comprehensive schools because when we were in – when would it have been? – 1964, I think, we celebrated ten years of being a comprehensive school. So, that would have meant turning comprehensive in the mid-fifties.
So, it was a very interesting sort of time to be in that school. Some of the teachers that were there had been there when it was a fee-paying grammar school but again – what was it? – something like, I don’t now, a thousand girls, 1,100 girls there, all-girls school, and I can remember a couple of students who were of South Asian descent and then maybe one or two others that were of African descent, either via the Caribbean or the Continent. But there weren’t many of us black or brown girls there at that time.
CCN: What really captivated me about the book is that, whilst on the one hand, it’s a memoir, it’s told in an extremely non-linear, non-chronological narration, you know. You weave in the prolonged archival search about your background and history in the care system with your experiences, and I guess your ascendance, into the House of Lords. What was the thinking process regarding kind of the methodology of narration?
INT: That’s such an interesting question because I was kind of persuaded to write this autobiography and when I first started to write it… well, what I said to my friend when he said, ‘oh you’ve got to write your autobiography,’ and I said, ‘yeah but if I do, I don’t want to do some linear and then, and then,’ and, as I say, this kind of map this trajectory from children’s homes into the House of Lords. I didn’t want to do it like that and so I started it several times and got loads of different versions over a period of years, and I kind of couldn’t hit the right note for me. And then when I got hold of my notes, my care notes, it kind of made it made more sense. It helped make more sense and I could justify that non-linear approach, which still makes a kind of chronological sense.
So, it’s almost like trying to take the reader on that journey that I had and through this kind of strange life, which was full of ups and downs, gains and losses, successes and failures, and that’s what life is like. I wanted to say, you know, that’s what life is like and when you’re growing up, you kind of know that but I think, for a lot of young people who I hope, and I know that quite a few care experienced young people have had access to the book, I want them to understand that’s what life’s journey is about.
That sounds a bit of a cliché and what have you but it isn’t linear, it isn’t straightforward. It isn’t kind of all mapped out in a way that you can sort of plot along a straight line, and that’s what I wanted to convey because, especially when I was in my teens, I mean I didn’t know what the heck was happening and so I sort of wanted the reader to get a little bit of a sense of that.
CCN: Well, I think it’s definitely true to me, having read the book, that the non-linear nature of your upbringing and your life is mirrored by, you know, the academic rigour, the archival research in trying to unpick and collate all this material pertaining to yourself and the care system. What was the process of the archival research that informed the book like for you?
INT: Yeah, again that’s a really interesting question because I mean, as I’m looking across my room now at piles of stuff, and I’ve actually been trying to sort out some of my papers and artefacts and goodness knows what into a semblance of an archive. I’m at that stage where I’m trying to think well, what am I going to leave behind me? And where’s it going to go? And what might people be able to glean from this? And that’s part of that idea of saying, black British history and heritage is not a linear thing and it’s not a homogenous thing. It’s like it’s not just about Windrush and it’s not just about Nigerian students, it’s about a multiplicity of experiences and we need that to feed into the national story.
So, you know, aware that, with my great years, I’ve lived across a really quite amazing period of history in general but also the history of this country, from kind of the woman on the front of the cover that we talked about earlier, Daisy, she was born in 1886. Now, even as I say that, it kind of makes me think oh my gosh, you know, towards the end of nineteenth century, and I was in her care. And so she was brought up on a diet of, you know, Empire and imperial valour and strength and all the rest of it and then, there’s the First… well, the Boer War, she used to talk about people she knew around the time of the Boer War, the First World War, the Second World War, etc. etc.
So, all of these things have been swirling around and part of my life, and so I did kind of think of myself as a kind of living archive, if you like, and I’m not going to pretend that it was entirely methodical but I knew that I also wanted to say about memory. So, Clive, this is the thing about my memory. I have a very good memory and I remembered lots of detail, a lot of which was corroborated in the notes. There were some things that were a bit off and they’re interesting in their own right, but memory is comprised of all of these different things that are around you all the time and it’s very sort of unreliable in many respects, but totally reliable when it comes to trying to pin down – pin down not quite the right term but it’s this emotional landscape that you have. That’s the important part of the memory for me, is what was going on emotionally and how that interacted with what was going on politically, culturally, historically and so on.
And then again, of course, you’re looking back and even though I’ve got a good memory, there’s lots of things that I can’t remember. I can’t remember the colour of the wallpaper or anything like that. We didn’t even have colour photographs in those days, so I haven’t got any kind of reference points. So, some of that detail is not there but then I remember some things so pin sharp that that was a basis. I guess I went to my memory, first of all, but also I should say Kayin also has a good memory and there were some things that she remembered that corrected my memory. So, it was a very interesting process but, as I say, I can’t claim to have been totally, rigorously, academically methodical.
CCN: What really struck me with those opening chapters was you talk, of course, about some of the quite traumatic inherent experiences of being a black person within the care system in that period of time in North London, but you also make these quite stark distinctions between your experience of living in care in North London vis-à-vis your experiences in Vicarage Road in Middlesex. Now, these aren’t too far away landscapes but in the context of the fifties and sixties, what were these distinctions for you?
INT: Well, you say they weren’t too far away in landscapes but they might as well have been and, in fact, they were in terms of just in the simple fact of public transport. I mean it just simply wasn’t as well developed. We didn’t have… well, we had the Overground. So, when I went to the other place before that, the place in Hertfordshire, the village in Hertfordshire, there was Overground there but I mean, again it’s really hard to put yourself into that place.
But just as a small example, you wouldn’t know when the next train was coming. So, now we complain if the indicator board is not working on the Piccadilly Line but there was no such thing. So, you just had to kind of guess and hope that… so you’d be waiting for a bus and you don’t know if you’ve just missed one, if there’s one up the road or what have you. So, from that place in Middlesex, sitting on a bus for the best part of 45 minutes, it was a long way away.
And so in Holloway and North London and Tufnell Park, I might see the odd one or two black children and young people and a few more adults, and you began to see places that were selling okra and what were considered to be exotic vegetables and you began to see hair products emerge specifically for black people in some of those areas. You go out a little bit further into that place like Middlesex and there’s none of that. And I’m trying to think, in that home, there may have been one or two other black children there but in the one in Hertfordshire, I think there was one other black child there.
CCN: As much as you talk about these experiences, both in Hertfordshire and in North London in particular, you do talk, you know, quite forensically about particular environments and landscapes. So, you talk about Highbury Fields and Archway and Hampstead Heath and Kentish Town and Gospel Oak and Caledonian Road, is it fair to say you’ve got a love-hate relationship with North London?
INT: Oh, I think it’s all love but, yeah, let’s say I think it’s probably 70-80% love and maybe a little bit of hate. I mean the worst times, and I remember talking with Andrea Levy about this, we both remembered the times when Chapel Market was being pamphleted by the National Front. But I mean I suppose I didn’t think of that as a specifically North London thing. To me it was like okay, I know not to go to Chapel Market on Saturday morning. So, I knew that landscape.
Whereas if I was in Middlesex or Hertfordshire, I didn’t know where I shouldn’t be going and, in fact, it all felt like it was all a no-go area. There were no reference points for me. There weren’t any other black faces there, so I didn’t even know that black people could survive in those kinds of extreme places so far away from London, and so alien in composition, you know, in terms of there weren’t the kinds of shops. There were loads and loads of cars. I mean when I grew up on Tufnell Park Road, you’d get a car every like ten minutes or something. People didn’t have cars to the same extent at all. No, I love North London. I couldn’t live anywhere else, I think, in London, or probably in England actually, although I make little forays into the countryside now.
CCN: Well, with that in mind, in Chapter Nine I do find a particular joy in you talking about, I think what we have is a kind of shared history in that my first coming into, I guess, an intellectual and emotional understanding of Arsenal as a football club was through cousins who live on Avenell Road, who took me to the 1991 League Title parade, which was also where you lived for a number of years, and where you first came into Arsenal Football Club as well.
INT: Yeah, but I wasn’t there during that time. So, the one I remember was – what would it have been? – 1971/72?
CCN: ’71 yeah.
INT: When we won the Double and that was the time when I was working in the children’s home and I took the kids to see the Tutankhamen Exhibition. So, that was around that sort of time and it was… well, how can I describe it? It was a very jolly atmosphere around the place at that time and I think that the Arsenal connection grew actually. It was there as a thing when I was younger, when I was actually living in that home because I did have this thing about everywhere around is either a children’s home, or the site of a failed foster placement, and the grounds were just up the road across Highbury Fields from the Arsenal.
There was all these places in Highbury. New Park there was another children’s… there was a National Children’s Home on Highbury Hill. There were two children’s homes in other streets and then in the other street, that backed onto the street, there was another two children’s homes. So, it was all children’s homes and children’s homes and I thought, what have I got that’s unique about me that isn’t about my status as a kid in a children’s home?
And I do remember – I bet she doesn’t even remember me doing this – picking up a postcard that had something to do with the Arsenal Football Club on it and sending it to a friend and saying, this is where I live, you know. So, it’s that sort of sense of… and because, of course, the Arsenal was so famous then. I mean they’ve always been one of the kind of best known football clubs in London and so everybody would know the Arsenal, even if they didn’t go to matches or didn’t support them. And, of course, there was the Underground Station that was named for them. So, yeah, it was very much a feature of that area and tried to bask in that as much as possible.
CCN: Well, again it’s interesting that you’ve had such a varied career. You worked in kind of arts and cultural governance. Of course your political career, which we’ll talk about in a moment as well. You also were an actress as well and that’s quite interesting, that there is a very famous drama school in the area that’s produced many, many kind of performing arts people that we know, the Kent brothers and beyond as well. How I first came into understanding you and your work, of course, was as a PhD student in this very building about 15 years ago when I found a book, Fear of the Dark, in the UCL library and that became a really important text for me in my PhD work and beyond as well. Is it fair to say that what really informed that work was borne from some of your experiences as a black woman in North London in the fifties and sixties as well?
INT: Yeah, definitely and, in fact, I think, as I recall, I opened the introduction with a story of me playing the witch in the playground and wondering what was all that about? And interestingly, twice now at signings and events, people have come up to me with copies of Fear of the Dark and asked me to sign them. So, that’s pretty amazing to me. Again, you know, the idea that people have kind of kept hold of this book for all that time. And I think it was definitely… and I’m going to try and explain something quite complicated, complex and layered.
So, there was that experience of being care experienced, which then meant for me that I didn’t go to university because I didn’t get the grades that were good enough. So, then I had this kind of I’m a failure intellectually or academically and my friends all went to university and got their degrees, except for one; she did something else. So there was this idea that I’d failed again. I was inferior again. There must be something wrong with me again.
So, eventually I managed to get onto this part time degree course, Cultural Studies, at Middlesex and that was again a very pivotal moment, although I don’t really talk about that in the book. But again there, when I was there, some of the other postgraduate… well, some of the other undergraduates and then later postgraduates, I couldn’t relate to at all. I couldn’t relate to people, whether they were teachers or students, and this happened at drama school as well, who affected a kind of ‘yay, working class, right on,’ kind of position, but came from a place of privilege. And in those days, nobody was talking about white privilege but that’s exactly what there was there and people just didn’t know how to acknowledge that.
And I remember there being one lecture, and I think there were two of us black students in the group, that was about what was called pseudoscientific racism. And I mentioned that quite a lot in Fear of the Dark and it was the two of us, we sat there and we tried to explain how it was very difficult for us to sit there and hear these descriptions of eighteenth century categorisation of black people as inferior, and going through all of their physical and psychological traits and everything, and saying these are basically not even human, and having all of those examples read out again and again and again. And again today we’d say it’s quite triggering and other people just couldn’t get what that was about.
So, all of that got layered into Fear of the Dark as well and I think… well, I know that that title was deliberately ambiguous around that, because it’s fear of the dark people and it’s fear of the dark and it’s fear of sitting in the dark in the cinema watching these dark people being put into these positions on screen. So, yeah, it was quite complicated, and I can’t honestly say that I thought about all of that at the time but looking back, that’s what was going into that.
Plus when I finished my first degree and people at Middlesex said, oh you want to do some postgraduate work and I thought oh yeah, I’ll do a Diploma or a postgraduate certificate. And so when somebody said, oh why don’t you do a PhD, I was stunned because there was no way that I would have been able to see myself… you know, PhDs were for geniuses, right? They weren’t for the likes of me.
So, that sort of sense of bringing that history of academic failure and, if you like, also kind of, not exactly failure socially but just… I don’t know, it was really much more about the academic failure and then sort of being quite successful, and then not daring to think that I could actually be even more successful in an academic context. So, that was quite a revelation.
CCN: So, in 2004, again in the book you detail how you became one of the first black women in the House of Lords. You talk about one of your opening experiences of seeing Norman Tebbit across from you in the room and thinking about his famous cricket test from the eighties. I mean that, of course, is a very, very historical moment for you and you’ve done so much in terms of your policy work in that 20 year period. I’m thinking about you, of course, being the Chair of The Young Review, looking into the outcomes for young black men in the Criminal Justice System. Of course, your Children and Families Bill in 2014. What has been your highlight in terms of work you’ve done you think in the House of Lords in this period?
INT: Yeah, I think that’s relatively easy to answer because people ask me that quite a lot and they ask me that in the context of the work that I’m doing now, which is really around a strong focus on forced labour and eliminating forced labour from supply chains. So, then we get into this kind of esoteric sort of field, which I’m not going to go into now, you’ll be pleased to hear. But I got into that, so it was 2009 when it was just a piece of Sliding Doors moment, I was asked to put down an Amendment to the then Labour Government about criminalising domestic servitude and forced labour.
And very few people, including Parliamentarians, could believe that it actually wasn’t a crime then but somehow how had this escaped the statute books? Well, there is a history and a kind of logic to that, which I won’t go into now, but getting that Amendment accepted by the Labour Government at that time was actually quite difficult and it went down to the wire, as they say. It was literally… I was ready to call a vote, having secured Conservative Party support, Lib Dem support and most of the cross-benchers support, I knew that if I took it to a vote, the Government would lose and I think they came to realise that would be a really bad look for them, to lose on that type of Amendment. And I’d like to think our arguments were really persuasive as well. And eventually it did get criminalised.
And that actually was a kind of precursor to the modern Slavery Act, and we can talk all about what that means and the use of that terminology and so on and so forth; that’s for another discussion. But in many ways, that was a ground-breaking piece of legislation. And so it’s cumulative, trying to get to grips with, particularly businesses. My sort of approach is that if I, as an individual, did some of the things that businesses do, I would expect to go to prison, but businesses somehow can say we didn’t know what was going on. We didn’t know there was people being treated like that in our supply chains. That’s not acceptable. So, I’m into human rights and environmental due diligence and that’s what I’m pushing for now.
CCN: To conclude, I want to go back to the beginning again, that opening dedication in your book, ‘for all the others whose stories are yet to be told,’ because the book, again as I mentioned, has weaved consistently into each chapter, I think, experiences both within and regard to the care system, Islington Council, its children’s services across nearly 70 years. So, with that dedication in mind, what do you see, both through policy and experience, as the key issues relating to the care system and black people that we’re still grappling with now.
INT: So, I think care experience in general, it’s very difficult and then you’ve got these extra layers, if you like, if you can express it that way, that you pile on the top and one of them is about race and then there’ll be others about disability or neurodiversity. So, there’s all of these different strands and the baseline of this kind of being care experienced. So, it’s very interesting to me.
I was at a conference, the Black Care Experience and the title of the Conference was Now Do You See Me? And I can’t help but say it that way, now do you see me? And it’s like saying, so we’re both again highly visible and invisible. And the day before that conference, I’d been at a meeting which was to launch a report about black children in the care system and how their needs culturally, and with regard to heritage, aren’t being fulfilled. Such basic things as not knowing what to do with black kids hair, not knowing what to do with black kids skin. These are issues, of course, that you might have for white kids too but not in the same way, especially when you’ve got trans-racial fostering and the bulk of people working in the care system will be white. But even having said that, it was interesting to note in that report how some black foster parents were saying, we don’t know what to do with black kids hair.
So, there’s all of these kinds of what might seem quite trivial to some people but when you sort of load them on top of this thing about being in the care system, they become really big in terms of how you experience them. So, that sort of paying attention to those kinds of details is really important for the system. And I think I say in the book that the problem with systems is that they’re not there to improve people’s lives. They’re there to perpetuate the system and if you don’t fit into that system, then you lose out. So, the thing is how can we dismantle the system in a productive way?
So, the kinds of conversations that I find most interesting come from care experienced young people today, many of whom are so bright and articulate. And, as I say, at this Black Care Experience Conference a couple of weeks ago, listening to those young people talking about what they’ve been through, some of them finding it incredibly difficult but nonetheless ploughing on through that. And to me, it’s not just about listening to them, it’s about how can you, as a perpetrator of the system, develop something which is about supporting those young people in conjunction with them, not just sort of saying what do you think and then going away and doing your interpretation of it. But in conjunction with them, what kinds of things would they like in order to make their lives easier and, to some extent, mitigate the carelessness and the difficulty of being in the care system?
So, that’s what it’s about for me and it is difficult. I’m not saying it’s not difficult but interestingly, some of us have some really good ideas and they would be about just rethinking, for example, a children’s home because even saying it sounds kind of Dickensian. It’s about do the boys hall or whatever. It’s like what are we talking about? A children’s home. So, how can we rethink what that means? And who’s going to do that rethinking? Well, it’s got to be the children who have been through that system and understand what it means. So, much more involvement.
It’s interesting to me that Scotland, even though not everything kind of works 100%, and Wales to some extent, seem to be more or less… how can I put it? Are not so conservative, not so risk averse in terms of trying to rethink how you put together a package of care. So, for example, they’ve already decided that this thing of the corporate parents, this idea that if you’re in the care of Islington, Islington are your corporate parents. Well, for a start, that is such a horrible phrase. I mean corporate, how can a corporation be your parent? It’s horrible and stigmatising. So, people are thinking about how you can rename that.
But also who is that? Let’s say it’s a community parent instead of a corporate parent. Who is that? What other agencies might be involved in the process of ensuring that you can have a decent life once you’re in that system and beyond? So I think also to look abroad and see predictably what happens in places. In the Nordic countries, there’s some interesting work going on there. So, it’s being prepared to rethink, and I think we are in a position of relative strength because the Government is still relatively new and perhaps susceptible to some new thinking .
CCN: Lola, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been an amazing and quite generative conversation. The book is amazing and thoughts for our future conversations as well.
INT: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me and I look forward to any responses that come in. I’m happy to hear from people. Thank you.
Recording ends 38:43 minutes