Diane Abbott MP UN Forum on Minorities and the Right to Education 15th - 16th December 2008 Intro:  Importance of education as a means of creating equality amongst a population – giving young people the tools with which they can access opportunities in later life, giving young people the opportunity to change their life situation.  Lucky enough in the UK that there is a strong general consensus that equal access to education is vital BUT this does not necessarily play out in reality. Black education:  I have spent over 20 years campaigning for higher educational achievements amongst the Black and ethnic minority population in the UK.  Issues that comes up time and time again is the over-representation of young Black people being excluded from school, the lower grades they receive at benchmark exams such as SATs and GCSE and the lack of diversity in the UK teaching workforce, particularly in ethnically diverse areas like London.  School exclusions: A former director general of the prison service said in 2001 “The 13,000 young people excluded from school each year might as well be given a date by which to join the prison service some time later down the line”. School exclusions are a serious problem – children who are excluded are much more likely to never receive a full education, to be unemployed and even to fall into crime. There is a possibility that Black children – particularly boys – are excluded from school more than there peers as a result of some form of institutional racism: being assumed to be more violent/disruptive/unruly than their peers.  Lower grades: Although the situation has improved in recent years, Afro-Caribbean children, and boys in particular, still fall behind their peers in tests and exam results. Research has found that whilst black children outperform their