Not a Trend began in the summer of 2020, when Ava and her friend Simmy were still students in South-East London, navigating the landscape of the Black Lives Matter uprising and searching for a response that felt real.
“There was so much talk about performative activism,” Ava remembers. “But even the conversations about performative activism felt performative. We kept asking: what are you actually changing by doing that?”
They wanted to create something that would go deeper. Something that would last. “From the beginning, our goal was to build something that could challenge all of that, something long-lasting, something that brought real longevity to the anti-racist movement.”
Education quickly became the focus. “We’d just finished our GCSEs. It was COVID summer. Some of us were already doing work around democratic education, and my mum was a teacher. We believe that education is an asset we have in our communities that isn’t used to the best of its ability. At the end of the day you’ve literally got a room full of people who are there to listen.”
From the start, the collective resisted narrow definitions of decolonising education. “We realised that most of the work around decolonising the education system either looks at curriculum or behaviour. You’ve got Black Curriculum, which focuses on what we’re learning, and the No More Exclusions, which focuses on behaviour policies and how they affect Black and brown bodies. From early on, we’ve tried to sit in a space that brings those two together and add something else: school culture. It’s about looking not just at what students learn, but at their experiences too.”
For Not a Trend, school culture means the everyday feel of a school. It’s the microaggressions, the biases, the unspoken assumptions. It’s how rules are enforced differently, how students are treated differently, and what behaviour is rewarded and what behaviour is punished. “We’re trying to change what education looks like, and we’re trying to create a space where education is a caring, fun, loving, creative and anti racist environment within UK schools”.
Their work now has three main areas they’re looking to change through their work – curriculum, conduct and culture. They do this through running school workshops, implementing modules for teachers in training, and public education. In schools, they use interactive techniques like drama, storytelling, and imagination. One recent workshop asked Year 10 students to design their dream school and then think through what would need to change to make it possible.
Another used a witch trial role-play to show how history is constructed and how hearing multiple perspectives can actually reveal a fuller truth.
“They literally loved it, which we were really worried about. Year 10 is such a funny year and they could have hated it, but they didn’t. One of them acted as the judge, someone was the priest or the accuser, and we had two witches. You heard from different people’s perspective, and then you finally got the full story”
It’s the filling in of this whole picture that Ava is interested in. “When we talk about decolonising the curriculum and anti-racist education, it seems to be limited to Black History Month, and slotting things into the curriculum. But how can you possibly learn about the industrial revolution without learning about the slave trade? We need to put the two and two together and fill in those gaps because it’s important to tell those stories in full.”
Ava sees Not a Trend’s work having the best impact. “It’s not about us coming in with loads of resources or saying, “Here’s a deep dive on this historical figure”, or “This equation was actually founded by this person instead of this person”. It’s more about changing mindsets, changing the way we teach and the way we learn. How can we make that actually anti-racist?”
This is why Not a Trend also works with teachers in training. “We have supported universities in the past with their ITT programmes giving sessions an anti – racist education,” Ava explains. “We use the same imagination techniques we do with the students. It’s the perfect time to reach teachers, because if they go in with those ideas early, they’ve got a chance to hold onto them.”
Ava’s reflections on equipping teachers in training with more knowledge are shaped by her own experience of school. As an outspoken, mixed-race student, who had undiagnosed dyslexia and dyspraxia, her abilities went underacknowledged. Something she remembers clearly were her A-level grades being underpredicted, forcing her to fight just to apply to the universities she knew she was capable of reaching. “If I was a different person, it would’ve been easier to ask for higher predictions. If I hadn’t argued, I wouldn’t have made it into Leeds.”
Ava’s story isn’t unusual, and it’s shaped the lens Not a Trend brings to every space they enter
“If you’re neurodivergent, if you learn differently, if you present a certain way in class, if you’re seen as difficult, all of those things can count against you. And we know they affect Black and brown students the most. Teachers might not even realise they’re doing it, but they’ll think, ‘Oh, that student’s disruptive’, and suddenly you’re underpredicted or excluded. That has a massive impact on us.”
This clarity around the issues young Black and brown people face, and the kind of internal work needed to make lasting change, has sharpened thanks to the support of the Pathways Fund.
“Without Pathways, we wouldn’t have been able to hire. We’ve now had three members of staff working for Not a Trend on a freelance, part-time basis for the last year and a half, which is massive. We were all uni students. We wouldn’t have been able to do this work for free because we have lives, jobs, and we need to eat. Being able to pay ourselves meant we could go into schools, connect with universities, pay people fairly, and just move things along faster.”
The funding also allowed the team to rebrand and to begin shaping their 2025 strategy. “It gave us space to have proper in-person meetings, those really rich, day-long discussions about what our strategy means, what we’re trying to change. We wouldn’t have been able to do that before.”
One major outcome of that deeper thinking has been a renewed commitment to educating members of the public. This was a strand of work that lived in the background of Not a Trend since it began, but is now becoming more important.
“We’ve been thinking a lot about lifelong learning,” Ava says. “What about people who aren’t in school anymore, or who never had the chance to engage with education properly? Learning doesn’t stop in a classroom.”
They want to take learning into the real world and root it in the community. “Especially for Black and brown communities, arts and culture have always been central. Music, theatre, dance are knowledge spaces too.”
Ava sees opportunities for more education everywhere. “We want to platform the knowledge already in our communities. We want to create exchanges between people who are already doing the work. And we want to show that learning can happen anywhere.”
The Pathways Fund helped make that vision feel possible, not just financially, but emotionally. They’ve used the Wellbeing Fund for rest and reflection, the Organisational Development Fund to continue working with their long-term strategist, and cohort meetups to build solidarity.
There have been challenges too. As the momentum of 2020 has faded, it’s become harder to sustain attention, and get funding, for anti-racist work.
“I think one of the main things for us was, like, when we started, anti-racism was everywhere. And now, obviously, we’re in a dip period. That in itself is difficult. We weren’t really ready to start back then as we’d just began. We were really young, like 15. So even though we had started, we kind of missed it, which made it quite hard to build back that momentum.”
Trying to keep up with the pace of change and trust their original aim of challenging performative activism has been tough in a sector that shifts with the moment. “You’re kind of at the will of it when you work with schools and organisations, which is really annoying. That’s why public education work is so important, because then you’re less at the will of the narrative changes.”
On this point, Ava reflects on what the funding sector needs to do to help support anti-racist work and ultimately help to deliver an anti-racist culture.
“Listen to young people. Think about the brilliant young people you want to serve — and don’t replicate what they’re trying to dismantle. It’s easier said than done, but that’s the point. Don’t replicate bias and blocks through your systems, through your funding models. And don’t pit youth-led organisations against each other for scraps.”