In this talk, I explore how the idea of reparation can help address the injustices of education systems. The idea of reparation requires us to understand the interconnections between past, present and future in both the formation of injustice and its repair. It implies that until injustices are actively addressed they can endure in social institutions – such as education – which also shape lives-to-come. How might reparative frameworks create different futures of education? What are the implications of such frameworks for institutional efforts to address matters of equality, diversity and belonging? Injustice is not an inevitability in reparative futures of education: these are new, if challenging, horizons of educational theory and practice.

Arathi Sriprakash is Professor of Education at the University of Bristol. She is co-author of Learning Whiteness: Education and the Settler Colonial State and co-Director of the Centre for Comparative and International Research in Education. Arathi’s work on Reparative Futures fed into Unesco’s Futures of Education initiative and she is soon to commence a large empirical study on this theme.