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The powerful, student-led calls for a racially just English literature curriculum that emerged from the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement have been systematically subdued (see Boakye, 2022). My with secondary school English literature teachers from south-east England, diverse in age and ethnicity, and teaching in multicultural schools, reveals a story of performative change. This neutralisation has left classrooms critically vulnerable to the resurgent ethnonationalist rhetoric that now dominates the political landscape.

In 2020, BLM generated a potentially transformative energy. In English literature classrooms, digitally adept students used open letters and online platforms to demand an end to a curriculum centred on a White literary canon, urging for anticolonial approaches and the meaningful integration of Global Ethnic Majority (GEM) voices (Begum & Saini, 2019). My in-depth interviews with 11 English teachers investigated what happened next.

From radical demands to performative gestures

The radical demand for curricular change was systematically neutralised by performative institutional gestures. Participants aptly described this process as ‘lip service’, a ‘ purely performative’ response, shown by school statements of solidarity in ‘assembly announcements’ and the conducting of ‘representation audits’ that ‘led nowhere’. Examination boards expanded text lists to include GEM options, but they decoupled these actions from essential material support. This created an impossible situation for teachers, who faced a scarcity of GEM primary texts and a complete absence of pedagogical tools like lesson plans and sample examinations. Forced into singlehandedly writing a curriculum, one teacher lamented that exam boards provided ‘barely any resources’, leading them to generate ‘endless past papers’, continually questioning whether they were ‘creating the right kind’. This logistical void, set against a backdrop of systemic ‘anxiety over results’, bred a deeper, more personal crisis of confidence. Having been taught through overwhelmingly White curriculums (Peters, 2015), teachers felt profoundly ill-equipped to teach unfamiliar GEM literature or navigate the fraught, ‘really difficult’, ‘contested’ and ‘uncomfortable’ conversations about race that this new material demanded. Consequently, as one participant noted, schools predictably cycled ‘back to the heavily resourced’ canonical texts. As a result, the offer of choice functioned as a perfect alibi for inaction. As one department exemplified by doing ‘a lot of chatting about change but not a lot of getting anything done’, the performative process actively maintained the epistemic status quo and preserved the dominance of the White literary canon.

‘The offer of choice functioned as a perfect alibi for inaction […] the performative process actively maintained the epistemic status quo and preserved the dominance of the White literary canon.’

Five years on from the 2020 peak of BLM, the consequences of this institutional failure are stark. The political lexicon has shifted decisively. The tentative space for discussing antiracist notions like ‘reparation’ has been foreclosed by the mainstream acceptance of shockingly racist terms like ‘remigration’ (Sriprakash, 2023; Liew, 2025). The minimal ground gained has been eroded. Where the curriculum was once critiqued for a lack of diversity, it is now more fiercely defended as a bulwark against a perceived cultural threat. Reform UK has mobilised against even minor ‘twisted’ changes, pledging a ‘patriotic’ curriculum to ‘make Britain proud again’ (Chantler-Hicks, 2025).

The classroom as a site of containment

The English literature classroom has proven to be a key site where the transformative potential of social movements is systematically subdued. Our collective failure to build robust support structures when the moment was ripe demonstrates how institutions maintain racial inequities through empty gestures. The task now is to learn from this neutralisation. True change requires moving beyond the symbolism of diverse text lists to confront the material and epistemic structures that make their meaningful teaching difficult. It is a struggle for the resources, training and political will to ensure that the opening for a truly reparative education does not close as quickly as it .

The Illusion of Choice: The performative expansion of text lists offered the appearance of diversity, but without pedagogical support or teacher development, it became a perfect alibi for maintaining the status quo.

References

Begum, N., & Saini, R. (2019). Decolonising the curriculum. Political Studies Review, 17(2), 196–201.

Boakye, J. (2022, June 7). Why are books on the English school curriculum still in the grip of straight, white men? Guardian.

Chantler-Hicks, L. (2025, September 11). Reform on education: All headlines, no policy lines. Schools Week.

Liew, J. (2025, September 10). What is the endgame in this toxic immigration debate: Is it friends and neighbours thrown out of the country? Guardian.

Peters, M. A. (2015). Why is my curriculum white? Educational Philosophy and Theory, 47(7), 641–646.

Sriprakash, A. (2023). Reparations: Theorising just futures of education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 44(5), 782–795.

Author Note

I have no known conflict of interest to disclose.

This research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Correspondence concerning this blog post should be addressed to Adrian Fernandes, New College, Holywell Street, Oxford, OX1 3BN. Email: [email protected]