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Gus John
Augustine Gregory John (born 11 March 1945) is a Grenadian-born writer, education campaigner, consultant, lecturer and researcher, who moved to the UK in 1964. He has worked in the fields of education policy, management and international development. As a social analyst, he specialises in social audits, change management, policy formulation and review, and programme evaluation and development. Since the 1960s, he has been active in issues of education and schooling in Britain's inner cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and London, and was the first black Director of Education and Leisure Services in Britain.
He has also worked in a number of university settings, including as visiting Faculty Professor of Education at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, as an associate professor of education and honorary fellow of the London Centre for Leadership in Learning at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London, and visiting professor at Coventry University. A respected public speaker and media commentator, he works internationally as an executive coach and a management and social investment consultant.
Gus John was born in the village of Concord in Grenada, Eastern Caribbean, to parents who were peasant farmers. At the age of 12, he won a scholarship to attend secondary school at the prestigious Presentation Boys College in St George's, the island's capital. At the age of 17, he joined a seminary in Trinidad, where he spent two years as a theology student.
At the age of 19, he went to England, transferring to the Theology programme at Oxford University. He became Chair of the Education Subcommittee of the Oxford Committee for Racial Integration (OCRI), and recalls:
OCRI as it was called then was run by a woman who became a veteran in the anti-racist movement, the late Ann Dummett and her husband the late Professor Michael Dummett. As I engaged in the middle 1960s with the English schooling system and with academia at Oxford University, where I was a member of the African and Caribbean Students Society, I soon became convinced that Britain faced two momentous challenges. One was to determine who and what it was and what its place in global politics was as it tried to remake itself after two devastating world wars, with only two decades separating them. The second and closely related challenge was to determine how it would deal with the legacy of Empire.
Having been a Dominican friar from 1964 to 1967, John split with the order because of the church's links with apartheid South Africa. In the late 1960s he took employment as a gravedigger by day while working by night in an inner-city youth club.
Maintaining his interest in "schooling and education, youth development and the empowerment of marginalised groups within communities", John became a community activist. In the mid- to late 1960s, he became a member of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD), the civil rights organisation led by David Pitt. In 1968, he started the first Saturday/Supplementary school in Handsworth, Birmingham, with a group of colleagues. After working on youth and race in Handsworth for the Runnymede Trust, he went in January 1971 to Moss Side, Manchester, where he continued organising and campaigning on four issues in particular: housing and the specific difficulties for young people to get houses on their own; employment for black school leavers; the way the community was policed; and the quality of schooling outcomes for black school leavers. The following year, as he recalled:
I had got some money from the British Council of Churches to set up a hostel for young black people, because they were sleeping on their friends' floors or sleeping rough in Moss Side, the reason being that their parents had been decanted to places like Sale and Partington, as part of the whole so-called regeneration business. And they continued to gravitate back to Moss Side, they would be here until after the last bus left, some of them would be in the night time dives – shebeens as we used to call them – and there was generally a sense of drift and disaffection amongst them. That made them even more in danger of getting involved with the police.
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Gus John
Augustine Gregory John (born 11 March 1945) is a Grenadian-born writer, education campaigner, consultant, lecturer and researcher, who moved to the UK in 1964. He has worked in the fields of education policy, management and international development. As a social analyst, he specialises in social audits, change management, policy formulation and review, and programme evaluation and development. Since the 1960s, he has been active in issues of education and schooling in Britain's inner cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and London, and was the first black Director of Education and Leisure Services in Britain.
He has also worked in a number of university settings, including as visiting Faculty Professor of Education at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, as an associate professor of education and honorary fellow of the London Centre for Leadership in Learning at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London, and visiting professor at Coventry University. A respected public speaker and media commentator, he works internationally as an executive coach and a management and social investment consultant.
Gus John was born in the village of Concord in Grenada, Eastern Caribbean, to parents who were peasant farmers. At the age of 12, he won a scholarship to attend secondary school at the prestigious Presentation Boys College in St George's, the island's capital. At the age of 17, he joined a seminary in Trinidad, where he spent two years as a theology student.
At the age of 19, he went to England, transferring to the Theology programme at Oxford University. He became Chair of the Education Subcommittee of the Oxford Committee for Racial Integration (OCRI), and recalls:
OCRI as it was called then was run by a woman who became a veteran in the anti-racist movement, the late Ann Dummett and her husband the late Professor Michael Dummett. As I engaged in the middle 1960s with the English schooling system and with academia at Oxford University, where I was a member of the African and Caribbean Students Society, I soon became convinced that Britain faced two momentous challenges. One was to determine who and what it was and what its place in global politics was as it tried to remake itself after two devastating world wars, with only two decades separating them. The second and closely related challenge was to determine how it would deal with the legacy of Empire.
Having been a Dominican friar from 1964 to 1967, John split with the order because of the church's links with apartheid South Africa. In the late 1960s he took employment as a gravedigger by day while working by night in an inner-city youth club.
Maintaining his interest in "schooling and education, youth development and the empowerment of marginalised groups within communities", John became a community activist. In the mid- to late 1960s, he became a member of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD), the civil rights organisation led by David Pitt. In 1968, he started the first Saturday/Supplementary school in Handsworth, Birmingham, with a group of colleagues. After working on youth and race in Handsworth for the Runnymede Trust, he went in January 1971 to Moss Side, Manchester, where he continued organising and campaigning on four issues in particular: housing and the specific difficulties for young people to get houses on their own; employment for black school leavers; the way the community was policed; and the quality of schooling outcomes for black school leavers. The following year, as he recalled:
I had got some money from the British Council of Churches to set up a hostel for young black people, because they were sleeping on their friends' floors or sleeping rough in Moss Side, the reason being that their parents had been decanted to places like Sale and Partington, as part of the whole so-called regeneration business. And they continued to gravitate back to Moss Side, they would be here until after the last bus left, some of them would be in the night time dives – shebeens as we used to call them – and there was generally a sense of drift and disaffection amongst them. That made them even more in danger of getting involved with the police.