The seeds of frustration were sewn during my PGCE training year. If left unresolved, frustration can develop into anger. It is this anger which I now use as motivation to contribute to improving the experiences of my fellow ethnic minority trainees, so that they might consider staying in the teaching profession. And so, 10 years after those seeds were planted, I find myself a Black Academic Futures Scholar,[1] nearing the end of my first year of a PhD at the same institution in which I trained, exploring the relationships between ethnic minority trainee teachers, their training environment and those tasked with mentoring them.
Our country is becoming ever more ethnically diverse, but unfortunately our teaching workforce has never managed to reflect this rich multiplicity (Swann, 1985; Worth et al., 2022). In a climate heavily influenced by an administration opposed to engaging with anti-racist lexicon, it is not surprising that I, as a Mixed-Black, former science teacher, join the fight to unpick the structures that contribute to such shameful statistics (Worth et al., 2022).
My research involves collecting an ethnographic picture of the interactions between Black and minority ethnic trainees, their mentors, and training environments over the course of a secondary school training year in England, to better understand the complex interactions involved.
