‘I wanted to give something back, to challenge and change perceptions’

Dr Ken Greaves is an Educational Psychologist working with autistic adolescents and adults, and children and families from ethnic minority communities. In this oral history for the British Psychological Society, he explores his childhood and career with Dr Melernie Meheux.

You can watch the whole conversation on YouTube: what follows is an edited transcript.

Ken, it's a real pleasure to meet you and to talk about your career, and a long list of accomplishments in over 20 years of specialised work with children, young people and adults who have autistic spectrum conditions and other neurodiverse conditions.

Your parents were part of the Windrush generation. Tell me about your early years.

Wow, that's a long time ago. I was born in Haringey, and I went to the local schools, and my experience was a very positive one. Haringey was where most of the Windrush families were placed. But when I was about eight or nine, we moved to another area. My dad took up the offer of council house in Walthamstow, thinking that our education would be better. But unfortunately, it wasn't.

It was a very different experience for me and my family, my two brothers and my sister. We were the only black family at school, and we were subjected to a lot of prejudice and racism. It was a time when there were a lot of concerns expressed by politicians, particularly Enoch Powell, about the Windrush generation coming to England and immigrants taking over the jobs of the indigenous. That led to us being bullied, physically bullied. Being the eldest of four, I felt very inclined to protect my brothers and my sister, which meant that I fought back. This became an issue with others, particularly my teachers, who did not necessarily see why I was involved in these fights. I didn't feel that my school experience was one of learning. It was more of a trauma. Every day that I was going into school, it was like a warzone. I wasn't feeling protected by my teachers. They saw me as a behaviour problem. 

There was a person that came into the classroom, and the teacher pointed towards me. The person said, 'Oh, hello, Ken, I'm doing some research in schools'. I remember going willingly along with this person then, and being introduced to some puzzles, I can't remember anything more than that. But this person seemed to be a nice person. And I did what I felt was fun… I was quite pleased to be singled out for a little bit of attention. And then I don't remember anything else, until I received a letter to take to my parents. The letter indicated l would be best placed in another school, for pupils with behaviour difficulties. 

If you think about those puzzles now, and in the context of some of the practice that still goes on, what do you think they were?

Based on a WISC or whatever it was, a psychometric assessment, big time. And, obviously, I've administered them in the past, and I've been trained to use them, but they were definitely a tool to assess me. I don't think that I fared really badly on the assessments, but I do remember that the overriding concern was my behaviour. My voice wasn't listened to, from the point of view of why I was involved in such situations with others, inside as well as outside school.

My parents weren't involved in the process, until the decision was made. Then my dad was very assertive about this. He arranged a meeting with the school. The head teacher said that because I was a behaviour problem, it would be best if I was placed in a special school for children who had emotional behavioural difficulties. My dad was quite angry about that. And he basically said, 'No, I will discipline my son'. That led to me being put on a weekly report to my dad, and him taking control of the activities I was involved in at school. His premise was 'no, you're not going to do things that you particularly enjoy, such as football and sports. Your focus should be on academia'. That's quite common within Caribbean families – education was the way to move forward. I remember him saying to me on more than one occasion, 'You will never get on in this world unless you have letters behind your name'. That really stuck with me throughout my life. Obviously, I'm fairly qualified now. But at that point, I felt that there was some injustice, that my dad was not seeing what was happening to me and my brothers and sisters. 

I did buckle down. When I transferred to middle school, the experiences were much better. 

At the moment, there's a big increase in media attention around ESN schools, educationally subnormal schools… it's been discussed in the Houses of Parliament. How do you feel about the fact that you could have gone to one of those schools, if it weren't for your parents saying no?

If I put myself back into my shoes, when I was a nine-year-old, feeling traumatised, very upset at home, crying myself to bed, I would have gone for going to a school where there was much more cultural diversity, if it was put to me that the teachers would respect me and provide me with an education that was akin to my development and understand my culture. I would've probably seen the positives of that. But I wasn't aware at that point it was to do with intellect, and about this feeling that Afro-Carribean children would be best placed in a separate environment, because they were inherently and innately unintelligent in comparison to the white population. 

So now, I feel extremely fortunate that my dad stuck up for me. I hasten to add, I had some very good white friends… I was in the minority, but I was accepted by the time I hit middle school, and I was very popular, for some strange reason! And so now, I'm horrified. With the book that I've been looking through, and the programmes that I've watched, it's triggered a lot of trauma that I had suppressed. That's also been borne out from the Covid experience that we've all had, and George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement. I've had more time to think and reflect on my journey as a very mature and experienced psychologist.

Tell me more about those middle school experiences, and who were the influences.

The school was more relaxed, I think my dad was more relaxed, he'd seen me turn a corner. He was still very cautious about me taking on extracurricular activities, but did let me play football, and I learned to play the clarinet. So it was a more enriched experience, and I was seen in a positive light as a good pupil. 

I then transferred to a senior school around 14, where I lapsed in my behaviour… a group of schools amalgamated, different pupils who had different perceptions, some of them still quite racist. There was this element of bullying… I've always been a person that's been an advocate of those that have been bullied. And at times, it may have looked that I was the bully, but I was protecting those being bullied. My head teacher could see that perhaps I might be getting involved in aspects of deviant behaviour outside as well as inside school, and he took me aside to say, 'Look, you've got a lot of potential here. If you stick to playing sports, studying, I think you'll go far.' I listened to him. 

This was the 70s. There were issues to do with the National Front, discrimination everywhere, and in that context there weren't many opportunities for black people to further their education. But to cut a long story short, I did manage to succeed in my A-levels. I became head boy, surprisingly, and a pupil representative on the board of governors. When I look back, I think 'goodness gracious, where did that come from?'

Why did you choose to study Psychology?

I was always asking questions as to why people were perceiving me and my family as different. We were being victimised, we were feeling vulnerable. I remember disowning my culture. If my friends were saying, 'we're going to have fish and chips tonight, what do you have?', instead of saying, 'I'm going to have rice, peas and chicken', I'd be saying things like, 'I'm probably going to have pie and mash'. Really wanting to identify with the white culture so I could blend in, which was obviously not right, when I look back on it. So I was always asking those questions. 

As I matured into a student, I wanted to find something that complemented my A-levels, which at the time were biology, statistics, and sociology. This new subject called Psychology was brought to my attention, and I looked at and thought it was something I would possibly be interested in. But at that point in time, Psychology was perceived as a fairly weak subject to study. My father wanted me to train to be a medical doctor, and I didn't particularly like cutting things up, dissecting. I stuck to my guns and eventually applied to study Psychology, with the view of it answering questions that I'd always had. 

The university I went to, Reading, in 1979, was a very good course. You could do a Bachelor of Science or a Bachelor of Arts, depending on what your persuasion was. I was very interested in the social aspects of psychology. That led to me progressing towards clinical, but also realising that my impact would be better in education. 

So in spite of all those challenges and transitions, you did go on to get on the teacher training course, at the Institute of Education. You managed to get one of 40 places, from something like 10,000 applicants. What was that like, thinking about your history and some of the narratives that you'd heard about yourself? 

There was no one like me at university, a working class black student, who did not understand the university system. I was extremely different, and I felt it. It took me a time to adjust. I still felt very insecure about my intellectual capacity: whether I was clever enough to be at university, that self-doubt. I struggled to get through the first year but I passed, and by my third year, I was doing extremely well and had aspirations to go to study to become a clinical psychologist. 

My tutor at the time advised I should be thinking of becoming an educational psychologist – there weren't many people of my colour in that profession, and that was an area where it was felt that was needed. But working in education was the last thing I ever wanted to do. Even though I had positive experiences towards the end, the trauma was still there from my primary school experiences, and they were advising me to train to become a primary school teacher. I had to really think about that. I decided, yes, that was an appropriate way forward. 

Going on to the Institute, the child development team was a small group of graduates, I think about 14. I was very conscious I was the only black male, and I became very interested in education for those Afro Caribbean children. That led me to do some research on children's perception of racial stereotypes. 

I also started to realise the work that had been done by the Afro Caribbean families about setting up supplementary schools, and in particular the work of Bernard Coard. He wrote a small book, How the West Indian child is made educationally subnormal. I remember thinking that resonates with me, that seems to be my lived experiences. Looking back on it now, it has had a major impact. 

I qualified as a teacher and started my post in Newham in 1983. I remember these moments – I was placed in the school very near to where I was educated, and I was being supervised by this teacher who thought I was very good. His wife came to the Christmas production, she was my teacher from the last year at primary school. I'll never forget this. I introduced myself, said 'Mrs P, you don't remember me, I was in your class'. And she just looked at me and said, 'Oh my god, I never thought you'd come this far'. I remember thinking, interesting, you know, stereotypes, whatever. But I took it as a compliment. It was a recognition of how far I had come.

What was it like teaching at that time? What was the environment like for you, as a teacher, and the for the students?

Well, I wanted to work in a culturally enriched environment. I was offered a place in Newham, and I remember the local authority contacted the head of the school to ask if a black teacher would be appropriate. So there was still this stuff that was about my colour. The head teacher said yes. 

I remember visiting the school and it reminded me of the film To Sir with love, with Sidney Poitier. The children were running up to me, and one black child is saying 'are you going to be our new teacher? It's about time we had a black teacher.' I remember thinking this might be a journey for me – am I okay to take this on? And, indeed, when I started to teach, some parents withdrew their children from my class, because of the colour of my skin. I also remember having a difficult time with the teachers themselves, who had negative perceptions of my capacity. But I remember winning them over in time, because my philosophy of working with the children was that we were a team. We respected each other, and I nurtured their competence and their self-esteem.

I decided I wanted to progress my specialisms. I'd always wanted to train to be an educational psychologist, and in 1985 I was appointed to the speech and language unit attached to that school, which enabled me to diversify my teaching skills and work very closely with the speech and language therapist.

You mentioned before about clinical, so why educational psychology?

Once I started teaching in primary, I loved it. I realised you could change your experience. I saw the value of being an educator, who is open minded, who challenges their own identities and how they work with different cultures. That was something that I really embraced. When I worked in the speech and language unit, I was very much developing my skills to train up to be considered for a place on a training programme for educational psychologists. I also trained to become a youth worker during that period, and also a health and fitness instructor. So, I was working with children and young people as a youth worker, and adults within my health and fitness work.

So really varied experience! It's fair to say that now, you are an expert in the field of autism. What are your thoughts about the experiences of children and their families who are neurodivergent from minority ethnic backgrounds?

Professional psychologists need to check themselves with regards to values they're bringing towards understanding culturally diverse families who have a neurodivergent child. There have been issues around assessment processes, whether they are culturally fair. The other side is that the families and the communities themselves have been very fearful of the terminology. In some of the countries that they've come from, the word autism doesn't exist. There are lots of stigmas attached to that type of work, and how it connects to certain types of behaviours. 

So there's that issue about how you work with the community in order to understand their perceptions. And in my professional role I've come across children, young people, indeed adults, who've been placed in environments that are totally inappropriate, like schools for pupils with emotional behavioural difficulties, or social emotional mental health issues, where upon on closer inspection, there are neurodivergencies there. They've gone through a system where they are medicalised and that's led to serious psychiatric disorders, which have not been treated, and very disturbed individuals that have entered back into society, unfortunately.

Those are aspects that have had a really adverse impact on minority ethnic communities, but you yourself have made a significant contribution to reducing some of that. You've worked really closely with the National Autistic Society. Tell me a little bit about your role, and how you have tried to reduce that marginalisation for those communities.

I started off being very interested in speech and language issues, but I started to realise there were individuals who were not fitting the profile of a child with speech and language difficulties or disorders. There was a group that had what's known as a semantic pragmatic disorder, but upon close inspection it was akin to what was known as autism. And when I was appointed to be an ed psych in a local East London borough, in 1991, I was interested in developing the initiative to help understand children with speech and language difficulties, but that led to work on understanding their behaviours. Eventually, I became very involved in autism. 

I was promoted to a senior specialist educational psychologist post for autism. Alongside that, I was asked to become a clinician at the Lorna Wing Centre, renowned as one of the best diagnostic centres for autism. I trained under Lorna Wing and Judith Gould. That really developed my skills and knowledge base, and I also became much more aware of other neurodivergent conditions, but also working in a multidisciplinary way with occupational therapists, speech and language therapists and social workers in order to ensure that we had a much more holistic assessment with the medics.

Recently you've been involved in a book, Educational Psychology Perspectives on Supporting Young Autistic People. Tell us about that. 

In 2007, I set up the Educational Psychologists' Autism Special Interest Group with another colleague of mine, Dr Laura Cockburn, as a result of the work I was doing at the Lorna Wing Centre. I was very much of the persuasion that if a diagnosis is made, it has to be leading to something, there needs to be a pathway which enables the young person to have an opportunity to progress in whatever capacity that needs to occur. So, moving away from what I consider to be a deficit medical model, more akin to the social model of disability, looking at the context and providing the resources to help everyone. 

We had many annual study days, around autism, ethnicity and culture, for instance, or behaviour, criminal law and autism, IT and autism. When we decided we wanted to write a book, we drew on those study days. The voice of neurodivergent people is a theme throughout. The book is edited by Judith Gainsborough, but there are many editors, and my main chapter was on autism, ethnicity and culture.

You left that organisation, and retired early from local authority work, to focus on EDI issues. Why was that important to you?

I have to reflect back on why I ended up working in a local authority that, when I first started, was very similar to my childhood experiences. It was very much a white racist environment. I felt I wanted to give something back, to challenge and change perceptions. It took me a while, but I stayed there for I think 29 years. 

So when it became right for me, I felt very passionate about my skill base progressing into working with minority ethnic communities, women and girls, that were under the radar from the point of view of being perceived as having another neurological condition, not necessarily autism. And adults, because I was witnessing the children we were supporting as a local authority, going into adult settings, and not having the support they previously had. 

I also felt I'd done enough of the local authority work. This was the next stage for me to progress. It has led to publications like the book, and this kind of opportunity today to talk to you.

When you look back on your career and your life, what advice would you have for the new generation of educational psychologists working with children and their families with neurodivergent conditions? What would you hope to see for them in terms of their career, and in terms of leadership?

Psychologists need to look at themselves, to really try and understand what their intersectionality is all about. Where do they come from? What's their class? What's their social status, what's their gender? How do they perceive themselves as an individual? They need to be quite mindful of what their potential biases are, and when they are working with someone who's different to who they are, to check themselves as part of that. 

Secondly, they need a real understanding of the culture they're working with, and to understand the intersections of the individuals or their families and the community in order to provide an assessment that is fair and just – culturally fair is a word that's used. The use of IQ tests or other standardised assessments may not be appropriate for an Afro-Caribbean family or an African family, because of their Eurocentric development and nature. But as we know, standardised cognitive assessments are prevalent within our profession. That needs to be looked at in a lot more depth, and I'm pleased to hear that the EDI department of the British Psychological Society are looking at this. 

It's also about working as a team. As a psychologist of colour, throughout my progression, I've always felt that I was supported, but not in the way that I felt I could have been. And I think that's probably to do with an assumption that I was a fairly competent psychologist so people assumed there wouldn't be any emotional or internal issues that I would be experiencing as a black psychologist working in environments where there are subtle aggressions that I experienced that others may not see. Microaggressions that we, as people of colour, can experience all the way through, but others may not see it. It's about being supported through that. 

With regards to neurodivergency, I think there has to be a development of knowledge and expertise in that area, and how it applies to different cultures in different settings.

You mentioned micro aggressions, and we can think about the macro aggressions that psychologists face in their work. What has helped you overcome some of that?

I wouldn't say I've overcome it, I think I've had strategies to deal with it. You become very vigilant. And when you're vigilant, you need to be very mindful as to how you deal with those situations. I've tried to be very positive, polite, calm, respectful of whoever I'm working with, despite their biases. I've always prided myself on giving the best to whoever I'm working with, be it a family who've seen me on their doorstep and there's this stream of abuse, to those who are 'wow, we've got a black psychologist, we don't normally see people of colour in this profession, this is amazing'. It's being mindful of that. 

I've also been fortunate to have some very good allies who are white. They've worked hard to understand themselves and what it's like, from my perspective, and that's enabled me to be very open about my journey. That's around how we support each other, and how we challenge each other, and how we train each other. Training organisations need to be mindful of the stuff that the BPS do on promoting the lived experiences of those that are of colour. That has not been out there up until recent times. When I first started going to these conferences, I was looking around and thinking 'it's just me', or 'there's a few of us, but how different we are and what can we contribute to this? How are we going to be able to challenge and change it, particularly with regards to anti racist practice in assessment practices?'

You mentioned some of the work that the BPS is doing, and you've been a member for a while. Tell me about your experiences of the BPS and EDI generally.

Well, I've been a member since my inception as a psychologist, and have been interested in the work that the Division of Educational Child psychology have been involved in. I've been an active member of that in the past, and I've done workshops on, for instance, what we can provide and support within further and higher education contexts. But apart from that, I've not really had anything direct to do with the BPS until recently, when there were some concerns that I had about a review of a chapter that I had edited. When I, with my allies, expressed our concerns about this, I did not feel that the actions that were agreed or the process was helpful. And indeed I suffered a lot of distress as a consequence of that, and with a lot of thinking and support, decided to raise the issues with the BPS. That's when I got to meet with the EDI department where I met with some very supportive people who understood my journey, understood what the issues were, and were very supportive in driving towards some changes. When they asked me to become involved in this oral history, I was more than willing to do so. 

My proviso was that this has to be a part of the continued work of the EDI team. So it's been a positive experience to date. I'm very impressed with what EDI is doing from the point of view of changing the face of what psychology is, in order to give a realistic perspective as to what psychology is really about… that there are psychologists from different backgrounds, different intersections, that can contribute to this diverse society that we live in. That can only be good, from my perspective. I'm quite humble, very unassuming, but I've been perceived as a trailblazer, when sometimes I've actually felt like an imposter. I hope others will gain something from us sitting here and chatting about my lived experiences. Hopefully it will help them to consider their pathway, because mine's not been a traditional one. I've had to really look for opportunities where they presented themselves and gone with them. But it has always been about promoting awareness of equality, diversity and inclusivity. That's been at the forefront of all my practices.

Any final key learning points to close?

This profession is a very powerful profession; people are affected by what psychologists say, and how they behave towards others. It's important there's that recognition of oneself and how one is in this profession, but also it's important, to support each other, to have open, constructive dialogues about issues that relate to the profession of Applied Psychology, to be a leader in research and to embrace different approaches. So for instance, I'm very passionate about looking at neuroaffirmative ways to describe people who are neurodivergent. Let's move away from the medical diagnostic model, or let's look at positive ways of assessment. If a diagnosis has to be made, it has to be made along the basis of neuro affirmative ways of thinking, to embrace us all as an inclusive society. 

• With thanks to BPS Archive Manager Sophie O'Reilly: she comments on the recording here.