Lemn Sissay left behind a troubled childhood to find success as a poet, writer and broadcaster with work highlighting, in particular, the plight of children in care and inequality. He talks to Julie Nightingale.

Rebel with a cause

As a child at secondary school, Lemn Sissay discovered poetry was something he loved.

Lemn was born in Wigan in 1967, where his mother, a young student from Ethiopia, came under pressure from social workers to give him up. Renamed Norman, he was handed to a white working-class family for ‘long-term foster care’.

As he grew up, the relationship with his foster family began to break down. Bright but disoriented, he found solace in poems, writing and reading them, and his interest was spotted by teachers, including one who gave him a book on the Liverpool Poets. But good though the book was, the words it contained were not what inspired him.

“It wasn’t about the book, it was about the fact that the teacher had given it to me,” Lemn says. “I’d found something that I loved and was encouraged to pursue it. It’s not that poetry was the answer for a kid in care. It was that opportunity to discover your worth through becoming good at what it is that you love; that’s the key to education.” 

Unflinching view 

And he certainly became good at it, growing up to be one of the country’s best-loved voices as a poet, author, theatre writer and broadcaster, speaking often on children’s rights and equality issues. He has an MBE for services to literature, was official poet for the London Olympics in 2012, is chancellor of the University of Manchester and, in 2019, was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize for writers who take “an unflinching, unswerving” view of the world.

He’s achieved it all despite leaving school with one GCSE and living through a terrifying period as a teenager that included spells in council care where he was racially and emotionally abused. Legal battles with the authorities, and episodes of mental illness followed. His experiences inform much of his work and his most recent memoir, My Name is Why, details his life in institutional care and the 34-year fight to gain access to his records.

The care system has moved on significantly since his own childhood but is far from fixed. Some 73,000 children in England (1%) are in the care of the state and the statistics in terms of their life chances are bleak: just 17.5% of looked-after children gained a pass in GCSE English and maths in 2018 compared with 59.4% of children not in care (see https://tinyurl.com/rpszwz2).

Things can fall apart Lemn thinks one reason why problems persist is that adults are deeply wary of looked-after children because of what they represent. “We fear the subject of children in care because it acknowledges that things can fall apart in families and I think that’s something we all fear in our own families,” he says. “A child in care is living proof of the dysfunction at the heart of all families, that things can be difficult and not always as we wanted them to be.”

The role of government as parent to these children is not something ministers are ever judged on and yet, legally, that’s precisely what their role is, he says. It might change society’s tolerance of the poor educational outcomes for children in care if government were held to account in this way. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, as a corporate parent, our government and educational institutions could judge themselves on how the worst served are served, as much as how our top band do?” he says. “The kid in care is the least served by our institutions and the most in need. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we judged our educational institutions on how we treat the kid in care?”

For teachers now who want to reach out to looked-after kids or explore the whole topic, a good way in is through literature.

“Take a look at the literature that you’re teaching and you’ll find that there are kids in care in that literature – Heathcliff was an orphan, Superman was a foundling, the X-Men were in care, Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre, James and the Giant Peach, Harry Potter was a foster child. All the complexity of being a child in care is all in those stories. And all of these characters go through similar processes to a kid in care – loss, depression, rebelliousness, running away, coming home; all of the classic storylines actually have a kid in care in mind.”

Positive discrimination 

Lemn was one of the speakers at this year’s ASCL Annual Conference where the theme was ‘Diverse Leadership’, and he welcomes any changes in education in terms of increasing the numbers of education leaders who are from black and minority ethnic (BME) backgrounds.School leaders and others in education can help drive the agenda for change still further by challenging orthodox thinking at government level but also looking again at their own fundamental principles, ideas and practices, he thinks.

“For example, I’ve heard it said in various educational institutions that positive discrimination can’t really work because it risks lowering the bar. But there has always been positive discrimination. It’s just that the discrimination has been in favour of white males,” he says, pointing as one example to Oxford and Cambridge colleges where the portraits of leaders who dominate the cultural landscape of Britain still mostly feature white men.

Are we saying that all of those men were more capable than any of the women in society at the time and more capable of being able to run institutions? It’s just not true. They had access and they were the judges and juries of what was good so you have to question all of that or you have to say to yourself, well, simply, positive discrimination has worked for one group of people so how do we make it work for everyone.

”It’s a rebellious idea – positive discrimination is illegal, unlike positive action – but it’s in keeping with the challenging spirit that has led Lemn to take on established thinking throughout his life and for which he sees poetry as the natural format.

“As a child, there was a bit of the rebel in me but I think poetry is a rebellious form in itself. If you read TS Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, you find a lot of rebellious animals working their way into the minds of rebellious kids. I was one of them.”

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“I’d found something that I loved and was encouraged to pursue it. It’s not that poetry was the answer for a kid in care. It was that opportunity to discover your worth through becoming good at what it is that you love, that’s the key to education.”

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ASCL Annual Conference

Lemn Sissay (www.lemnsissay.com) was a keynote speaker at the ASCL Annual Conference in March 2020 – look out for images, speeches and videos at www.ascl.org.uk/annualconference

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Julie Nightingale
Freelance Education Writer
@JulieMediumHare

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