Pupils win campaign for racial representation at Specsavers

Teachers, parents, and children at a primary school have won a campaign asking Specsavers to include more culturally or ethnically representative characters in their children’s range.

Yesterday, students from Rathfern Primary School in Rathfern Road, Catford visited Specsavers stores across Lewisham to raise public awareness around the importance of representation and to celebrate the successes of their campaign so far.

The campaign started through a school listening programme about race equality.

Parents began to focus on their children’s experience getting Specsavers glasses in Lewisham and the children were passionate about the need to address this issue of race inequality.  

Rasheedat Adele, 40, a parent of a Rathfern pupil who lives in Lewisham said: “I am the mother of a very precocious 5 year old girl.

“My daughter is visibly black of African heritage, we are both very proud of our cultural identity and heritage. 

“She wears glasses and on our first visit to Specsavers I noticed that there were no kids glasses with black cartoon characters. 

“This I couldn’t believe in the heart of Lewisham which is very ethnically diverse.

“I’d like my daughter to know she is represented in all aspects of life and is worthy enough to have that representation.”

As well as writing persuasive letters to Specsavers, children designed glasses that represented them, drew self-portraits, created comic strips and wrote poems about the things that make them beautiful. 

They handed this in to Specsavers management and asked for a meeting.

Specsavers agreed to a meeting, which took place in June, between the Rathfern head teacher and and Matt Stewart, Specsavers’ Frames Development Director.

Following this meeting, Specsavers committed to changing their children’s range to help ensure that there are suitable glasses available to all. 

Headteacher at Rathfern School, Naheeda Maharasingam, 45, said: “At Rathfern Primary School we believe that all our children should be seen and represented in the world around them.

“Having approached Specsavers with our concerns about their lack of diversity in their children’s range of glasses, we are delighted that they are now working to address this and are including Rathfern pupils in this social action.

“We are proud of the Rathfern community’s unrelenting pursuit of social justice and anti-racism.”

Matt Stewart, Specsavers’ Global Frames Director, said: “We were very pleased to hear from Rathfern Primary School with their thoughts about our children’s glasses.

“The school’s clear passion for this is very much to be applauded.

“Their approach to us was very timely as we had already instigated a significant overhaul of our children’s range to ensure that we have great glasses choices for all, and we have been pleased to be able to reassure the school with the work that is already underway.

“Changes in our children’s range will be visible within the next six months. We are keen to give Rathfern Primary School more of an insight into this work and have invited a group to attend a workshop in at one of our support offices.

“We are delighted that they wish to take up this opportunity.”

 Pictured top: Rathfern students outside a Specsavers in Lewisham on Tuesday (Picture:Nick Jeyarajah)