Augustine John
He is a Grenadian-born award winning writer, education campaigner, consultant, lecturer and researcher, who moved to the UK in 1964. He has done notable work in the fields of education policy, management and international development.
1945
Grenada
Grenadian heritage
In October 1999, Gus John was asked by Tony Blair to accept a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the New Year Honours List, 2000. Declining, John said that he believed such honours to be anachronistic and indeed an insult to the struggles of African people like himself who have spent their life trying to humanise British society and combating racism, which is a core part of the legacy of Empire and which the society and its institutions are perennially failing to confront.
In 2015 Gus John’s 70th birthday was marked by events honouring his five decades of activism in Britain. These included an event 11 March at Conway Hall, on 14 March at the British Film Institute, in conversation with Gary Younge, and on 19 April at the Phoenix Cinema, in conversation with Margaret Busby.
A 1979 portrait of John, by the photographer Brian Shuel, is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.
Professor Gus John was voted one of the `100 Great Black Britons’ in the 2020 poll and book initiated by Patrick Vernon.
In October 2020 John was named by FutureLearn on a list of `12 Black history pioneers with careers that will inspire you’,
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. When he was aged 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).
Having been a Dominican friar from 1964 to 1967, John left the order because of the Catholic church’s links with apartheid in South Africa. In the late 1960s he took employment as a gravedigger by day while working by night in an inner city youth club.
Since leaving Hackney in 1996 Gus John has worked as an education consultant in Europe, the Caribbean and Africa, and is Director of Gus John Consultancy Limited. He has been Chair of the Communities Empowerment Network (CEN), an advocacy and campaigning service working for equality and justice in education[17] founded in 1999,[4][18] and is Chair of Parents and Students Empowerment (PaSE), an organisation devoted to empowering students and parents in schooling and education.
He chaired the Round Table for the National Union of Teachers (NUT) in October 2006/March 2007 and produced Born to be Great, the NUT’s Charter on Promoting the Achievement of Black Caribbean Boys (2007). In 2010 he produced The Case for a Learners’ Charter for Schools, a charter that articulates the educational entitlement of all school students and the rights and responsibilities of everybody engaged in the schooling process – local authorities, school governors, teachers, pupils and parents.
He was a member of Channel 4’s Street Weapons Commission and later adviser to London Mayor Boris Johnson on serious youth violence in the capital.
Since 2006 Gus John has been a member of the African Union’s Technical Committee of Experts working on modalities for reunifying Africa and its global diaspora. He has advised member states in Africa and the Caribbean (Cameroon, Somaliland, Lagos State Government, Jamaica) in meeting the Sustainable Development Goals related to education and youth. Between 2004 and 2012 John worked on Niger Delta affairs and in 2012 collaborated with Kingsley Kuku, the then special adviser to President Goodluck Jonathan, and David Keighe on a development manual entitled Remaking the Niger Delta: Challenges and Opportunities. In 2008 he co-authored with Samina Zahir Speaking Truth to Power, which resulted from research for Arts Council England on identity, aesthetics and ethnicity in theatre and the arts.
Among other recent undertakings he has since 2011 been a consultant to the Methodist Church, UK, on implementing Equality and Human Rights legislation, and in 2012 was appointed to chair the Expert Advisory Group on Equality, Diversity and Social Mobility as part of the Legal Education and Training Review (LETR). He was commissioned by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) to undertake a comparative review of how the SRA has dealt with disciplinary cases and especially the over-representative number of Black and ethnic minority solicitors that are sanctioned by that regulator. John’s report was published in 2014.
John made a submission to the United Kingdom Parliament’s 2017 Youth Violence Commission, which he subsequently published in digest form.
In 2019 John resigned from an advisory body to the Church of England, after Archbishop Justin Welby endorsed the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis’ allegations of antisemitism against Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. ,. John said: “What gives the archbishop of Canterbury the right to endorse the chief rabbi’s scaremongering about Corbyn and adopt such a lofty moral position in defence of the Jewish population?”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gus_John accessed 23/06/2022
https://mobile.twitter.com/gus_john accessed 23/06/2022
https://trec1972.wordpress.com/2014/11/28/professor-gus-john-has-been-a-committed-educationalist-and-learning-facilitator-since-1965/ accessed 23/06/2022
https://www.ihrc.org.uk/professor-gus-johns-resignation-from-c-of-e-full-documents/ accessed 23/06/2022
