Mixed-Heritage Young People's Educational Experiences in London: a teacher and classroom toolkit

Society

Mixed-Heritage Young People's Educational Experiences in London: a teacher and classroom toolkit

The Mixed-Heritage Teacher Toolkit is a research-informed resource that helps secondary school teachers and leaders recognise and respond to the distinctive experiences of mixed-heritage young people. Mixed-heritage students are one of the fastest-growing groups in UK schools, particularly in London, yet they remain among the least well-served by existing racial-literacy provision. Our prior research found that these students are routinely rendered invisible by the way schools record ethnicity and design equality, diversity and inclusion work, while at the interpersonal level they are often hypervisible to peers, subject to identity challenges, and required to fit categories that do not reflect how they understand themselves.

The toolkit is designed to address both sides of this pattern: the institutional defaults that produce invisibility, and the everyday interactions teachers can recognise and intervene in. It comprises self-guided professional development modules for teachers and a sequence of classroom lessons suitable for targeted curriculum and tutor-time use. The toolkit incorporates short videos and animations produced by the Portal Trust with young people, and is co-produced with practising teachers rather than delivered to them. It launches in early 2027, will be free to use, and will be distributed through King’s College London partnership networks, Portal Trust networks, and sector channels.

Aims

The project has two linked aims: to produce a practitioner-valid toolkit for secondary schools, and to generate evidence on how academic research is taken up and adapted in teacher practice. Specifically, the project will:

Translate the findings of a prior empirical study of mixed-heritage young people’s educational experiences into resources teachers can use directly in classrooms and in professional development.
Address the institutional dynamics that render mixed-heritage students invisible, alongside the interpersonal dynamics, including peer-level identity policing and teacher misrecognition, that teachers are positioned to notice and respond to.
Co-produce the toolkit with practising secondary teachers across its design, drafting, and piloting, so that it works in real classroom and staff-development settings.
Generate evidence on how a research-based resource is encountered, adapted, and embedded in schools.

Methods

The project runs from April to December 2026 across three overlapping phases, with co-production running throughout. It builds on the prior study Mixed-Heritage Young People’s Educational Experiences in London: An Exploratory Study (Mansaray et al., 2025), which combined focus groups with 50 mixed-heritage young people in London sixth forms, interviews with 42 mixed-heritage university students, interviews with 10 school and university staff, a survey of 104 young people, and quantitative analysis of national datasets.

Secondary analysis. A focused re-analysis of the qualitative data from the prior study, using a coding schema designed to identify examples and themes most useful for classroom and staff-development purposes.
Toolkit development. Drafting of four self-guided teacher modules and a six-lesson classroom set for targeted curriculum and tutor-time delivery, integrated with short videos and animations produced by the Portal Trust with young people.
Co-production with teachers. Three London-based secondary teachers work as design partners across the toolkit’s design and drafting, and pilot it in their own settings.
Independent review. An independent race-equality expert reviews the completed toolkit using a structured feedback template.
Evaluation. Joint analysis of evidence from the pilot and the expert review, generating findings to inform the toolkit’s final version and any potential iterations.