Geoff Palmer arrived in London from Jamaica in 1955. It was a month before his 15th birthday and, by law, he had a few weeks of compulsory education left. His mother took him to the local school, where he was given a routine IQ test. "I'd just travelled 5,000 miles from Jamaica. The test asked me 'How does Big Ben indicate the time?'" he chuckles. "The questions meant nothing to me. Absolutely nothing."
He was told he was "educationally subnormal" (ESN) and packaged off to a secondary modern, where students were trained to be road cleaners and not much else, he says. Palmer's saving grace was his cricketing prowess. He was spotted by the local grammar school head and awarded a place. Today he is Professor Geoff Palmer, OBE, of Heriot Watt University, one of only a handful of black chemistry professors in Britain.
Children arriving in the UK throughout the 1960s and 1970s were presented with the same test. By the 1970s, pupils labelled ESN were being put into special schools. Unlike Palmer, very few would return to mainstream schools. Their parents, who had come to England expecting a better education for their children, grew angry.
In 1970, Bernard Coard, a Grenadian academic and teacher living in the UK, came upon the first study of immigrant children in London ESN schools, conducted by the now defunct Inner London Education Authority. It revealed a shocking picture. In "normal" London schools, 17% of pupils were from ethnic minorities. In ESN schools, that figure was 34% - and four out of five were from the West Indies.
But the figures didn't shock Coard. He had been working in London ESN schools and running youth groups for West Indian pupils. The schools were, he now says, a "convenient dumping ground" for black children.
The following year Coard wrote and published a pamphlet entitled: How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System. He identified three factors that were causing black boys, in particular, to fail: "Low expectations on his part about his likely performance in a white-controlled system of education; low motivation to succeed academically because he feels the cards are stacked against him; and low teacher expectations, which affect the amount of effort expended on his behalf by the teacher and also affect his own image of himself and his abilities."
The Guardian published a chapter from the pamphlet on its Comment pages, and a row over the education of black children, and the failures of the system, has raged ever since. Wally Brown, principal of Liverpool Community College, remembers its impact. "That book is a seminal piece. What it says is: if the person who is supposed to be teaching you has no confidence in you, how can you learn? Parents who were fresh from the Caribbean had expectations for their children that were at the opposite end of the spectrum from the teachers'."
"He was the first person to raise this issue," says Diane Abbott, Labour MP for Hackney North. "Sadly, if the education authorities and schools had listened to him then, we wouldn't have the crisis we have now."
Coard, now in his 60s, is still passionate about the debate. But he follows it remotely from a prison cell in Grenada. In the late 1970s, Coard returned to Grenada, became active in politics and formed the New Jewel Movement, a Marxist group, with his childhood friend Maurice Bishop. When Bishop became prime minister in 1979, Coard became his deputy and together they reformed the education, health and housing systems in what became known as the Grenadan revolution. But the pair fell out ideologically and, in 1983, there was a coup. Bishop was killed, allegedly by Coard's supporters acting on his orders. Coard took power briefly before Ronald Reagan's administration invaded the island and toppled his government.
It was a Reagan-backed jury that sentenced Coard and 13 others to death. Another three were given lengthy sentences, and together they became known as the Grenadan 17. The death penalties were later commuted to life imprisonment. An Amnesty International report last year condemned the torture they had suffered and claimed that their trial had violated international law. The verdict of an appeal hearing for their release, heard in November last year, is imminent.
But Coard's story doesn't end there. Through reading the Guardian Weekly, the Economist and education journals sent by supporters, Coard has kept up his interest in the British education system. Towards the end of last year, moved by reports of research commissioned by the mayor of London into the education of black boys that strongly echoed the arguments he had made 30 years earlier, he decided to update his 1971 work. Education Guardian has seen a copy of that article, which addresses the persistence of the problem. Its analysis is strikingly accurate.
Over the course of the past month, Education Guardian has corresponded with Coard. His style of writing has not changed over 30 years: a balance between anger and reasoned argument.
He describes how he has passed the past 20 years teaching fellow inmates. For the first seven years, while on death row, he would conduct lessons from his cell by writing homework assignments on scraps of paper and tying them to a weight that was passed from cell to cell. Now the education programme has funding, a computer and some textbooks - mostly written by him - and inmates have achieved degrees validated by the University of London and Oxford Brookes.
But what he's really keen to talk about is what happened to the debate in Britain when he returned to Grenada. His view is that the problems became entrenched. "The lesson to be learned for today's problems in the school system is that they were hatched decades ago, in the previous two generations. When society fails one generation of children, it lays the foundations for similar, even worse, failures in the generations to follow."
The figures back it up. Over the past 30 years, standards across schools have undoubtedly got better, but achievement among black children has remained comparatively low. In 2002, 30% of black Caribbean children got five A* to Cs at GCSE, compared with a national average of 51%. Black boys are more likely to be excluded than any other group.
The mayor's report concluded that black schoolboys had been let down by local authorities' and teachers' prejudices for 50 years. Black boys still complained of racism and stereotyping, and their parents said teachers did not want to involve them.
Coard describes a multitude of factors that combine to depress achievement among black boys. They include teacher expectations, their own self-esteem, and the problems of communication between home and school. There's a biased curriculum, poverty and differential access to the best schools.
Thirty years ago, he was urging black parents to set up "supplementary schools" for their children, which they did; some still exist. Now he believes the playing field must be levelled. It's an unashamed argument for a comprehensive system.
He writes: "What is needed is a system of quality education for all; and therefore, by definition, one that is not dependent on the parental income/wealth or social status and connections of schoolchildren, does not have schools providing vastly different standards of education and does not have a two-tiered, or multi-tiered system of education, providing differential education for the children of different classes, genders and ethnicities."
Asked what the government should do to reverse the trend, Coard says: "Governments acting from above to solve or correct any systemic or structural or deep-rooted problem, even with the best of intentions and the political will to effect radical change, will fail if they fail to act in tandem with 'from below'."
Coard's is an old-fashioned argument for equality. Fellow Grenadian Professor Gus John, a former director of education in the London Borough of Hackney and now visiting professor of education at the University of Strathclyde, says Coard's socialism is rooted in their origins: "The education that Bernard Coard and myself received in Grenada before coming to this country was in a culture where success was not pre-determined by socio-economic background.
"We were quite used to children of poor parents going on to become lawyers and doctors, judges and prime ministers. The idea of high achievement of working-class and peasant children is something that was familiar to us."
But, instead of rescuing the comprehensive system, as Coard argues it should, the government is diversifying, says John, by introducing specialist, foundation and academy schools.
Meanwhile, a new fear is emerging: some believe Sir Mike Tomlinson's proposals to reform the 14-19 curriculum could worsen the stereotyping of children. The lecturers' union Natfhe has backed a TUC motion warning that the Tomlinson proposals for a new diploma, on which the government's response is expected in the next few weeks, risks further "educational segregation". The motion says: "By asking students to make choices about their future curriculum at age 14, we run the risk of placing students in stereotyped boxes according to what others think black students and white young men and women 'ought' to find interesting."
Tomlinson is frank about this when questioned. "One can't deny the risk. Making choices at 14 is not new. But the risk is real and I see the effects in Hackney. There is a need to tackle it."
Coard could arrive back in the UK as the row over Tomlinson rumbles on. It is very possible he will be released this year, perhaps even in the next few weeks. He wants to settle in Jamaica, with his family and wife, Phyllis, another member of the Grenadan 17, who has also spent much of the past 20 years in prison.
He aims to return to England on a research trip. "You see, I have a plethora of hypotheses about the complex causes and possible ... solutions to the grave problems of the education of black children that I'd like to test in the real world," he writes.
Expertise is sorely needed. And the timing might be perfect.