LONDON, UK — A community-led campaign launched during Black History Month by barrister, linguistic justice advocate, and Founder of BLAM UK and Afro-Creole Languages Week, Ife Thompson, is calling on UK exam boards to end the structural exclusion of African language families and Afro-descendant Creoles and Pidgins from the GCSE Modern Foreign Languages MFL curriculum.
The campaign, backed by an open email action sent by many concerned parents, educators, and community advocates, targets major UK awarding bodies including Pearson Edexcel, WJEC, AQA, OCR, and the regulator Ofqual. An online movement led by Thompson across TikTok and Instagram Reels has already generated over 50,000 views.- Letter is here : https://docs.google.com/document/d/18wwpsdwG36-ANV4RguEq2hHO7bP5B8xsaGnN42BtXFw/edit?tab=t.0
Despite the Department for Education confirming that awarding organisations hold the sole authority to introduce new language qualifications to the GCSE specification, Pearson and WJEC have indicated they have no plans to expand their offering to include African and Caribbean languages.
Currently, GCSE qualifications cover a wide array of European, Asian, and Middle Eastern languages. However, African language families, including Yoruba, Igbo, Swahili and Twi, alongside African Pidgins such as Nigerian Pidgin and Sierra Leone Krio, and Caribbean Creoles such as Jamaican Patois, Bajan, and Saint Lucian Kwéyòl, remain shut out of mainstream formal accreditation.
BLAM UK founder Ife Thompson issued the following statement:
“The decision by exam boards to only exclude African and Afro-descendant language families from the GCSE curriculum, while all other languages from the world’s language families are included, is a form of institutionalised anti-Black linguistic racism. From a movement lawyering perspective, to deny Black students a GCSE accreditation in their heritage languages and the use of their language as a means of educational attainment and cultural learning directly breaches international human rights protections regarding cultural identity and educational access. The awarding bodies stance we state, cannot be compatible with the public sector equality duties under the UK Equality Act 2010, which they are legally bound to. The language families currently excluded from the GCSE offering fundamentally shape Black British English, the newest, most dynamic, and fastest-growing language variety in this country today. Refusing to validate the foundational roots of Black British speech within our educational infrastructure continues to contribute to our linguistic erasure in the UK”
The campaign demands that exam boards and Ofqual take immediate steps to:
- Provide transparent criteria used to select languages for GCSE qualification development.
- Formally audit and address the severe underrepresentation of African and Afro-descendant language families across current specifications.
- Establish robust consultation mechanisms with African and Caribbean communities, linguists, heritage-language educators, and youth organisers.
- Construct a clear, time-bound pathway toward developing and accrediting GCSE qualifications in these language families.
The campaign insists that the national curriculum must reflect the linguistic reality of modern Britain and accord African and Afro-descendant language families the parity, respect, and institutional backing they are legally and culturally owed.
Media Contact:
BLAM UK
Email: hello@blamcharity.co.uk
Website: blamuk.org
