Advancing Anti-Racism in Education Across the UK : Critical Conversations, Actions, and Impact

Advancing Anti-Racism in Education Across the UK offers a timely and original account of how anti-racist education is being imagined, contested, and advanced across Scotland, England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Arising from a four-nations programme of seminars, analysis, and publication conducted between 2024 and 2026, the book examines the conditions under which anti-racist educational reform becomes durable rather than symbolic within curriculum, institutional practice, and democratic life.

Framed through Moncrieffe’s critical institutionalism, the book develops an original triadic architecture organised around epistemic reform, institutional embedding, and civic translation. Emerging from the comparative evidence itself, this framework provides a distinctive way of understanding how racialised power is reproduced and challenged across knowledge, institutions, and public culture. Drawing on keynote contributions, seminar discussions, participant testimonies, interviews, survey responses, and fieldnotes, the book shows that anti-racist education must be understood not as an additive diversity initiative, but as a deeper struggle over legitimacy, belonging, professional accountability, and the public purposes of education.

Set against a wider context of anti-DEI backlash, nationalist retrenchment, and intensified struggles over belonging and democratic life, the book brings together critical voices and grounded insights from across the four UK nations. In doing so, it makes a major new contribution to contemporary debates on educational justice, democratic renewal, and the conditions under which anti-racist educational reform becomes durable.