Show Racism the Red Card: Evaluating the impact of anti-racism educational interventions on the attitudes of young people in secondary school education

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) funded Show Racism the Red Card (SRtRC), in partnership with the University of Kent, to adapt a more generic evaluation tool from the Anne Frank Trust UK (2014, 2016) to evaluate the impact of SRtRC’s anti-racism educational intervention on the attitudes of young people in secondary school education.

The evaluation was carried out with two participating schools based in England – John Lyon School, Harrow on the Hill, Middlesex (South) and Bedlingtonshire Community High School, Northumberland (North East) – via evaluations before (‘pre’) and after (‘post’) interventions delivered during early to mid-February 2017.

Understanding whether, and how, SRtRC is meeting its intended aims will enable the organisation to strengthen its current educational content and form part of a ‘virtuous circle’ of feedback to support the continual revision and development of SRtRC workshops with both young people and adults.

Prior to undertaking this evaluation, the broad aims and intended outcomes of SRtRC’s education work with young people of all ages have been to:

equip young people with a better understanding of what racism is and how it affects individuals (both ‘targets’ and ‘perpetrators’) and society

? increase young people’s awareness of the responsibility to challenge racism in themselves and others, and how this can be done

? increase young people’s awareness of critical thinking and its usefulness in challenging stereotypes and recognising media bias

? enable young people to gain more knowledge about appropriate/inappropriate terminology relating to ethnicity and race.

The evaluation was designed to determine the extent to which the first two of these aims are satisfied by the interventions and examine areas in which the interventions are, or are not, effective in achieving the stated outcomes. These goals were

Prejudice and unlawful behaviour: evaluation of Show Racism the Red Card Executive summary achieved through working with the University of Kent as an external partner and implementing a new and independent methodology for evaluation.

Available resources limited the scale and scope of the evaluation, and so the evidence is primarily relevant to outcomes associated with the first two aims, but also helps with consideration of aspects of the third and fourth aims by highlighting further areas for exploration by future evaluations.