The doublespeak discourse of the race disparity audit: an example of the White racial frame in institutional operation

ABSTRACT The Race Disparity Audit (RDA) was published in 2017 by the then Conservative government of the UK. The proclaimed aims were to ‘reveal racial disparities and to help end the injustices that many people experience’. This paper adopts a critical discourse analysis approach to analysing the RDA and associated webpages, to critically examine the government’s purported aims. The linguistic analysis reveals a pernicious form of political doublespeak which effects a maintenance of the status quo. In excluding racism as a cause of disparities, the audit acts to de-legitimise anti-racism as part of the solution, thereby preventing actions with the potential to end racial injustices. The analysis is explained by reference to Feagin’s (2013. The White racial frame. Centuries of racial framing and counter-framing (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge) White racial frame in institutional operation. The paper concludes by exposing the ramifications of this for future policy development by reference to an education policy development borne from the RDA.

Politicians across the globe have been forced to respond to both viruses: Covid and racism. In the UK, the Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a 'Race Inequality Commission', with a spokesperson revealing it will consider wider inequalities including 'working class white boys in schools'. The Commission was tasked with investigating inequalities building on the work of the Race Disparity Audit (henceforth RDA). Lord Wooley, Chairmen of the Race Disparity Unit's advisory group who lead the RDA, acknowledged that there is entrenched structural racism in the UK and that this was understood by Theresa May (Prime Minister at the time of the RDA release) who, he claimed had looked him in the eye and said, 'Look, there are deep seated inequalities, these are uncomfortable truths and unless we acknowledge them and have a plan to close them, things will only get worse'. 1 In short, a plan to act against racial disparities was an aim of the RDA from the outset to counter an intensification of racism.
So, where does this leave us in terms of public policy development, which is cognisant of and responsive to racism, in this case in the UK? This paper seeks to answer this question in relation to education policy. A critical discourse analysis approach is taken in analysing the RDA and its education-relevant associated webpage documents as they existed before the Covid pandemic. The analysis reveals a particular political doublespeak which, on the surface, recognises differential educational (and other) outcomes in terms of race, whilst simultaneously obfuscating the causes of and hence actions to overcome racism. In light of this analysis of the RDA, the paper frames this de-racialised doublespeak in terms of the institutional operation of Feagin's (2013) White racial frame, thereby predicting likely consequences for the future of education policy development.
An important aspect of critical discourse studies approaches to analyses is a historicisation and contextualisation of the text. Hence, alongside the developments already considered, the paper continues with a brief account of the social and educational context into which publication of the RDA emerged.

Introducing the RDA: a brief historical context
When the Conservative Party won the general election in 2016, Theresa May stood on the steps of 10 Downing Street and declared the widely cited objective to 'make Britain a country that works not for a privileged few, but for every one of us'. By August 2016, in line with this objective, she announced the launch of an 'audit of public services to reveal racial disparities and to help end the injustices that many people experience'. 2 The RDA and an accompanying website was first published in October 2017 by The Cabinet Office. The announcement and subsequent publication of the RDA seemed out of kilter with public policy and certainly education policy developments, which, as we shall see, eschewed a focus on race or racism. Hence the announcement was a welcome apparent change of emphasis, especially considering that at the time, the crudest form of overt racism was alive and well within the UK. This was not just the vile rhetoric of Katie Hopkins comparing immigrants to norovirus (The Sun newspaper, 6 October 2015 3 ), or the Daily Mail's image of immigrants stepping over the border to Europe with rats (17 November 2015 4 ), uncomfortably reminiscent of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda images. It was the vile and threatening tweets SNP MP Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh received every day 5 ; the Tory counsellor suspended following anti-Irish, antigypsy tweets made during Eurovision 2017 6 ; the eugenic tweets bemoaning the marriage of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle, who was seen as tainting the royal 'seed', sent by Jo Marney, girlfriend of Henry Bolton the leader of UKIP (a nationalist political party) 7 ; and the painting bright red of the front doors of people claiming asylum in Middlesborough, resulting in racist attacks on their homes. 8 It was also a time, however, in which Theresa May as Home Secretary before she became Prime Minister, called for a 'really hostile environment for illegal migration', 9 resulting in policies such as the, albeit short-lived, campaign in which mobile billboards travelled around London calling for illegal immigrants to go home or face arrest. Many have argued this hostile environment policy is to blame for the Windrush scandal in which British subjects from predominantly Caribbean countries were denied legal rights, illegally detained, threatened with deportation (and in some cases actually deported), or wrongly denied access back into the UK. Of course, it was also a time when the UK voted to leave Europe, following, what Grosvenor (2018) called, the 'inflammatory rhetoric and the shameless xenophobia of the Leave campaign' paving the way for 'a new permission to hate immigrants accompanied by a resurgence of 'ignorantand-proud-of-it nationalism' (p. 150).
These examples do not wholly define the historical, social and political context, but they do indicate somewhat contradictory socio-political messages in the social milieu into which the RDA emerged, including by the very person who called for the RDA, Theresa May.
In terms of an educational context, publication of the RDA came against a backdrop of policy developments which have witnessed the sometimes gradual and, more recently, swift removal of a concern for racism. In a report for the Society for Educational Studies, which marked the twentieth anniversary of the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence, interviews with policy makers, race equality advocacy groups and minoritized communities revealed overwhelming agreement that there has been a de-racialization of education policy, particularly in since the election of the coalition government in 2010 (Gillborn, Rollock, Warmington, & Demack, 2016). To be clear, the term de-racialisation is used here in the UK context as 'a contemporary meaning which emphasizes how race as an issue can be occluded in distinct ways' (Barot & Bird, 2001, p. 615), and was over 30 year ago by Troyna and Williams (1986) to present a shrewd analysis of education policy from the 1960s to 1980s. They argued that the inexplicitness of race within education policies resulted in a failure to undermine the perpetuation of racial inequality in schools. This pattern of de-racialisation in the literal removal of reference to race and ipso facto a concern for racism is what Apple (1999) has called the absent presence of race in public policy. One could argue in fact, that at the same time as being de-racialised, education policy has over the last ten years been simultaneously re-racialised in the replacement of concerns around race and racism with resurrected discourses of Britishness as a means of countering national security issues and that this too is unlikely to result in action against racial inequality (Smith, 2016).
Returning to the present date, a good example of this continued pattern of de-racialisation can be found in the most recently published Government document for ITT (Initial Teacher Training). The ITT Core Content Framework (2019) details the 'minimal entitlement for all trainee teachers' (p. 3), the implementation of which by ITT providers is to be regulated by Ofsted (the schools and ITT providers inspectorate). The introduction explains the rationale for the framework: The quality of teaching is the single most important in-school factor in improving outcomes for pupilsand it is particularly important for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. No one is born a great teacher. Great teachers continuously improve over time, benefitting from the mentoring of expert colleagues and a structured introduction to the core body of knowledge, skills and behaviours that define great teaching. (DfE, 2019, p. 3) A quick search reveals absolutely no reference to any of the terms: race, racism, discrimination, prejudice, English as an additional language, bilingual, or multilingual.
Given the essentially paradoxical positions of the RDA and concurrent education policy developments in the continuation of a de-and-re-racialisation of education, this paper investigates the claim that the audit both reveals and 'helps end injustices' relating to racial educational disparities. It is true that the RDA does not reveal anything not already in the public domain, and one could rightly critique it (and the new Commission) on this basis, but this analysis is interested in undertaking a close linguistic analysis of the RDA (and associated documents) to test the claims made for its existence and hence the veracity of those claims in transforming institutional and systemic racism.

A critical discourse analysis approach
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) was borne of an interdisciplinary effort to integrate critical social theories with linguistic analyses to move beyond description and interpretation towards analysis and explanation. Fairclough (2010) describes CDA as: … discourse analysis which aims to systematically explore often opaque relationships of causality and determination between (a) discursive practices, events and texts, and (b) wider social and cultural structures, relations and processes; to investigate how such practices, events and texts arise out of and are ideologically shaped by relations of power and struggles over power; and to explore how the opacity of these relationships between discourse and society is itself a factor securing power and hegemony. (p. 93) CDA is problem, rather than discipline oriented. In this case, the analysis functions to test the rhetorical claims of the function of the RDA and associated webpages in terms of its stated aim in ending injustices, presumably as the cause of said disparities, and the paradoxical positioning of these aims against a contextual background of a hostile immigration environment, Brexit, and a de-racialisation of education (and other social) policy.
The theories and methodologies in undertaking CDA are eclectic but must be appropriate for understanding and explaining the subject under consideration in the analysis (Wodak, 2004). I have previously argued that CDA and critical race theory (CRT) (including critical understandings of Whiteness) are compatible and complementary analytic tools in revealing and explaining the operation of racism, particularly in policy making (Smith, 2013). A central tenet of CRT is an understanding that racism is real, normalised and pervasive within society, operating beyond the individual to systems and structures. Hence, an assumption in analysing the RDA texts here is that in order to act against racial disparities to help end injustices as an aim of the RDA, institutional racism must be acknowledged as the most likely (or at the very minimum, one of the) cause(s) of racial disparities in societal systems such as education, and that anti-racism must therefore also feature as a crucial consideration in ending said racial disparities.
In terms of the systematic CDA process adopted here, the analysis draws upon the general framework for critical discourse analysis for educational research proposed by Mullet (2018), in loosely following the seven suggested stages: (1) Select the discourseproblem identified in terms of the paradox between the stated aims of the RDA and the movement in social policy towards de-racialisation.
(2) Locate and prepare data sourcesall texts associated with the RDA were identified in two separate 'forays into the data'. (3) Explore the background of each textthe type of document and the rationale for their inclusion was considered; for example, links with minimal text were excluded from analysis. (4) Initial thematic analysis in identification of overarching themesthis was inductive in the sense that it started with a basic search for lexical items such as race or ethnicity, the analysis of which led to further investigation. (5) Analyse the external relations in the text (interdiscursivity), AND (6) Analyse the internal relations in the textthese were undertaken simultaneously given the focus of the analysis; in other words, linguistic analysis of the texts was examined in light of the purpose of producing the texts and the reciprocal relations between the texts' intended meaning and its very production in the form it appeared. (7) Interpret the data (and explanation in this case)here the stated aims of the RDA were considered in light of the analysis and the theoretical frame for interpreting the analysis; in this case in terms of critical race theory and more specifically the practice of doublespeak. In other words, examining the text to uncover aims of the RDA would support an interpretation of how the government's presentation of race and racism in the RDA are indicative of their ideological positioning and hence their intentions for future social practice and policy development. An explanation of doublespeak in this institutional practice is considered in light of Feagin's (2013) concept of the white racial frame.
This analysis involved not only an inductive analysis leading from the initial thematic analysis, but also an abductive analysis in 'a constant movement back and forth between theory and empirical data' (Wodak, 2004, p. 188). In this study, a CRT understanding of the historical moment in which the RDA sits, in paradoxical relationship to media representations, political discourse and actions, informed the linguistic analysis undertaken particularly in stage six. In other words, the deliberate search for potentially 'disconfirming evidence' (Mullet, 2018, p. 121) lead to a focus on linguistic items and forms prevalent in CDA analyses of political texts (e.g. Fairclough, 2001Fairclough, , 2004 and those focused on racism (e.g. van Dijk, 2003van Dijk, , 2016, including: lexical choice (important in stage four of analysis); collocations; cause and effect; agency; generalisations; pronouns; characteristics associated with labels; implications; tensetime and modality, and the presentation of 'unmodalized truths' (Fairclough, 2001).
The analysis also relied on an understanding of Fairclough's (1996) employment of 'frames' within interpretation (stage seven): 'frames represent the entities that populate the (natural and social) world' (p. 159). Every institutional frame also 'includes formulations and symbolisations of a particular set of ideological representations: particular ways of talking are based upon particular 'ways of seeing'' (Fairclough, 2010, p. 41).
Interpretation of the frames for racial disparities and (in)equality therefore reveal ideological motivations which in turn provide 'a frame for action, without which they [the Government] could not act, but it thereby constrains them to act within that frame' (Fairclough, 2010, p. 41). Understanding the relationship between the representations of disparities and equality in the RDA and the institutional and societal practices in which the RDA sits is therefore crucial to investigating claims of action resulting from the RDA as a means of overcoming the disparities and as an outcome of having done so.

Identifying the associated documents
A search of www.gov.uk was carried out initially in 2018 and then again in October 2019 to capture updates to the RDA in October 2018 (the last updated version available online) before undertaking this analysis. The search revealed 19 results overall for the term 'race disparity audit'. Six of these documents were directly relevant to this study as they were either generic documents relating to the RDA or were directly related to education. The rest of the webpages were not analysed here as they were specific to other social domains such as (un)employment. On inspection of the six relevant results, two further relevant webpages were also revealed (listed last in the below Table), which did not come to light in the first search. Two of the eight relevant sources identified were then excluded from the analysis as they were predominantly just links to other pages with little accompanying text. Consequently, six webpage results were analysed as listed in Table 1, alongside the actual audit itself. Note these are webpages released directly by the Government, as opposed to speeches made by any member of the Government about the RDA in any other forum.

Initial and detailed analyses
The presentation of the analyses is split into two main sections. The RDA's associated webpages will be analysed first, as these provide a solid foundation from which to explore the lengthy RDA document itself.

The RDA's associated webpages
The first and perhaps most startling finding is that in all of the text in these webpages (5225 words in total), there is only one reference to 'racism'. The press release of the audit states: 'Over many years the Prime Minister has shown a real desire to grapple with the scourge of racism including confronting high levels of BAME Stop and Search, BAME deaths in police custody and now this'. The word 'including' here implies that high levels of BAME Stop and Search and deaths in custody constitutes racism, which in turn, implies, as opposed to actually naming, institutional racism. The phrase, 'and now this' implies that the RDA too is associated with grappling with the scourge of racism. The verb grapple implies action, in this case by the Prime Minister at the time.
In terms of references to the word race, there are fourteen, eleven of which are in the phrase 'race disparity audit'. The remaining three (a-c below emanating from two of the six webpages) are phrased as: (a) 'The findings from the Race Disparity Audit presents us with a real opportunity to make transformative change in tackling persistent race inequality' (press release). (b) 'open and transparent data on race and ethnicity' (about us). (c) 'supporting departments to 'explain or change' race disparities … ' (about us).
In (a) above, the term persistent race inequality is phrased as something which needs tackling for change to occur, but the cause of race inequality is not explicitly named. The agent of such change appears to be 'us' though it is unclear if this refers to the government or the population at large, given that these are publicly available documents. The second (b) is a factual statement, naming the purpose of the website and the unit in terms of the exposure of data. Finally, in (c), the word race is attached to disparities as in the audit title as an outcome; action for which is aligned to government departments who are required to explain or change the race disparities.
In contrast there are 48 references to the root word 'ethnic', of which 25 are the word ethnicity. Five of these refer to the website 'ethnicity facts and figures' (the website which contains the statistics referred to in the audit). Table 2 shows how the majority of the rest of the references occurred across the documents.
The difference in the number of times the term ethnicity is used in favour of race is worth noting, particularly as all of these webpages emanate from the 'Race Disparities Audit'. It suggests perhaps that the term ethnicity is a more palatable term, where ethnicity, although never defined in any of the government's RDA documentation online, is generally understood to relate to nationality, family history, language, culture and religion. The government's website ethnicity facts and figures page refers to the 2011 UK census, and hence it is also assumed that one's ethnicity is self-defined. There is a long history of disparities in educational outcomes being organised around ethnicity, as reported by Troyna (1988), who noted: Because ethnicity is chosen as the fulcrum around which explanations revolve, discrepancies between groupsdifferentiated on the basis of (presumed) shared ethnic identitymust be accounted for in terms of the cultural properties unique to those groups. (p. 279) Troyna shows how an emphasis on ethnicity leads to assumptions of cultural deficit overtly expressed or covertly understood; that which Mullard (1986;in Troyna, 1988) referred to as ethnicism, 'the cultural representation of the ideological form of racism' (p. 280). van Dijk (2016) argues that ethnicism is seen as less morally reprehensible than racism.
Also clear is that ethnicity as an abstract noun (as in Table 2) often refers in these documents to everyone, without distinction between disparities experienced by particular ethnic group(s). There are however, a few such references: Theresa May referred to 'far more young men from black and minority ethnic backgrounds being stopped and searched' in her speech, which she explicitly named as a disparity; whilst the press release referred to 'improving the recruitment, retention and progress of ethnic minority staff' in the prison service. There are three further similar references to the term 'ethnic minorities'.
There are references to named ethnicities, such as Black (appearing six times overall, once in relation to Operation Black Vote) or White (appearing four times overall), particularly in referencing some of the actual findings of the audit, as in the press release, for example: education attainment data shows there are disparities in primary school which increase in secondary school, with Chinese and Asian pupils tending to perform well and White and Black pupils doing less well, particularly those eligible for free school meals. Named ethnicities also appear as questions to exemplify the meaning of the term 'disparities', as in this example from the digitising blog: By ethnic disparities, we mean differences in treatment or outcome affecting people of different ethnicities. Are black people more or less likely to do well at school or university? Are Asian people more or less likely to be unemployed? Are white people more or less likely to experience poor health?
Hence, even when ethnic groups are overtly named as experiencing racial disparities, they often appear in loose reference to other ethnic groups (comparison is of course predictable given that the focus is on disparities between groups, but the comparisons appear random), or, as in the above questions, in an uninformed and obfuscating manner.
There are six instances not included in Table 2 which are worthy of further investigation, as five employ the word ethnicity in a phrase to imply causality and one in which causality is overtly signalled: Crucially, these phrases either place ethnicity as the subject of the phrase in relation to experiences, outcomes or lives, thereby framing it as the focus or theme, as opposed to say racism, or the focus is placed on understanding the 'complex subject matter of ethnicity' as opposed to racism or discrimination or unlawful acts against people. The collocation 'complex subject matter' (matter is often phrased as complex matter, or subject matter (online Oxford collocation dictionary) and both are employed here in one extended phrase) acts to describe ethnicity. The final phrase, found on the webpage 'about us', makes this pattern clear; here the verb 'explain' points overtly to cause, the factors of which are related to ethnicity as opposed to factors which act to cause racial disparities. The nouns employed such as: 'subject' 'factors' and 'matter' also act to depersonalise and problematise ethnicity. There is a notable lack of agency here too. Even in Theresa May's speech, where outcomes are placed as the subject, the cause (i.e. racism) and responsibility as an agent of change (such as the government) are removed.
There are six instances (appearing in the press release and about us) where those responsible for change are actually named, four of which refer to government departments, with the Ministry of Justice explicitly named, and these other two: 'The Prime Minister will challenge society to 'explain or change' disparities.' (press release) ' … learning how communities, organisations and individuals are using the service and tackling ethnic disparities.' (about us) Here society in general as well as communities, organisations and individuals are placed as responsible change agents, suggestive of an expectation that some of the action will come from those experiencing racial disparities.
We can see from this first analysis a pattern of de-racialisation emerging in which: . race is replaced by ethnicity (making racism as a cause less visible); . ethnicity acts either as an indiscriminate descriptor, sometimes acting to depersonalise and problematise ethnicity, or, alarmingly, is linguistically phrased to suggest causality; . there is a lack of consistency and in cases an inexplicitness in naming those groups experiencing unequal disparities; . there are no references to acts of discrimination, prejudice, violence (symbolic or real), or racism (individual or structural/institutional) referred to (apart from the one mention of racism) as the cause of racial disparities; . there are very few references to who is or ought to be responsible as agents of change for racial disparities, and in two cases there is a suggestion that this should be beyond the preserve of the Government; . there are no references at all to what actions (anti-racism) are required to overcome racial disparities.

The Race Disparity Audit report
Although the RDA report is 55 pages long, it is worth noting that its primary function is to present a summary of the statistical evidence contained within the audit found on the 'ethnicity facts and figures website'. It is defined as an analysis which 'helps to understand and assess differences between ethnic groups, and to identify those public services where disparities are diminishing and those where work is needed to develop effective strategies to reduce disparities between ethnic groups' (RDA, p. 6). In short, this suggests the report is looking for explanations and ways forward in effectively reducing the racial disparities which are revealed. However, immediately preceding this subsection, comes a section called 'data analysis', which, as we shall see, makes claims contrary to these stated aims of the report. After seven pages dedicated to introducing the audit and the report, the rest of the document summarises the audit findings under themes 'adapted from the Equality Measurement Framework, developed by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission' (p. 5) including, for example, community, education, and public sector workforce. As with the associated documents analysed above, the RDA itself makes no reference at all to the word racism. There are eight references to the word 'race': six of which refer to the term 'race disparity audit'; one of which appears in the term race disparity unit; and one appearing as part of the website address. As with the associated webpages, race is replaced by the terms ethnic and ethnicity. There are 36 references to the word 'ethnicity' (not including the website as each page header). Ten of these refer to the phrase 'ethnicity facts and figures'.
The rest of the references to the term ethnicity are: . Used to describe datasets.
. Concerned with standards for classifying ethnicity. . As a descriptive qualifier either ascribed a title, e.g. 'Households of Indian, Pakistani, and Mixed White and Asian ethnicity', 'mixed ethnicity offenders', or to question this, e.g. 'where ethnicity is known'.
The word ethnic however, appears 231 times, the vast majority of which refer to the term ethnic group(s), or a named ethnicity; for example, 'white minority ethnic group' (although groups are also named frequently without the referent 'ethnicity' or 'ethnic group' as below). There are also some references to the expressions 'minority ethnic' or 'ethnic minority', and 'ethnic disparities'. At the beginning of the document there are also instances which replicate the webpage documents' tendency to inexplicitness in naming those groups experiencing unequal disparities; for example on page 1 it reads: 'Meeting this challenge requires taking a hard look at how people of all ethnic groups are treated across our public services'.
'Although there are many areas where the gaps between groups have narrowed significantly, there is still a way to go before we have a country that works for everyone regardless of their ethnicity.' In this sense, although the audit itself included many more references to the word 'ethnic', its usage largely reflected patterns found in the associated webpages.
However, the audit also differed from the associated webpages in two important ways. Here named ethnicities appear far more frequently. These references overwhelmingly feature in relation to the statistical evidence provided on the website and which are summarised in the RDA document: for example, the term Black appears 126 times, whilst the term White appears 227 times, and Bangladeshi appears 49 times (an interesting finding in itself!).
More importantly however, is the explicit discussion of cause, discussed under the heading 'data analysis', recalling of course that the word racism is entirely absent from this document. The audit is said to be about 'observing differences between ethnic groups' but, crucially, 'it would require further research to establish the full context in which any disparities should be interpreted' (italics in the original), as it is not 'possible from the Audit data alone to determine the causes of any differences observed between ethnic groups' (italics in original). Indeed, it permits that, 'For the sake of objectivity' (my italics), the statistical differences presented do not 'refer to any wider research done by Government Departments or others to identify disparities, their main drivers or causes'. Further, in terms of intersectional effects 'with other relevant factors such [as] age, sex or socio-economic status', the audit states 'it is not possible to say whether those factors are the cause or the effect of differences between ethnic groups'.
In other words, cause is not ignored or obfuscated here, it is simply circumvented by the need for further objective research, suggesting also that other factors may be the cause rather than, say, racism. One can only wonder, therefore, whether racism as an explanatory factor would fit into such further objective research. Calls for objectivity in relation to racism were becoming more prominent at the time of the RDA. For example, the BBC journalist Naga Munchetty faced a disciplinary row, when a public complaint about the journalist was upheld by the BBC after she was accused of a lack of impartiality in commenting live on air about Donald Trump's insistence that four Black female politicians should 'go back' to 'places from which they came', saying 'you know what certain phrases mean'. In trying to justify the decision, the BBC's editorial standards director, David Jordan explained, 'What is really important is that we look at the things people say, we analyse them, we describe them objectively.' 10 Recourse to the present tense in presenting objectivity as an unmodalized truth (Fairclough, 2004, p. 131) in this context effectively means that describing or analysing what someone says objectively excludes racism.
In terms of the RDA, this appeal for objectivity is concerning, particularly as the stated purpose of the audit and data collection is change; the 'explain or change' refrain. If racism is not readily available or prioritised as an explanation and if this is normalised by the absent presence of racism across associated documents, then what chance does any subsequent changes have of actual transformation?
Interpreting the doublespeak of the RDA and explaining it as an operation of the White racial frame Understanding whether the RDA is fit for purpose is perhaps becoming clearer through this textual analysis as the government's ideological framing comes more sharply into focus. So, it is fair to say that the RDA itself in its synthesised presentation of existing data, does act to publicly reveal racial disparities in an accessible format. This can be and is being used by institutions and academics in evidencing the current situation; albeit with an explicit recognition that 'knowing misrepresentations of quantitative data' act to reproduce racism within education as revealed by QuantCrit studies (Crawford, 2019). However, in evaluating the RDA's claim to 'help end the injustices that many people experience', one could argue it is an example of a pernicious form of political doublespeak. Doublespeak, a term most commonly associated with George Orwell's notion of doublethink, was later defined by the linguist Lutz (1990) as: a blanket term for language that pretends to communicate but doesn't, language which makes the bad seem good, the negative appear positive, the unpleasant attractive or at least tolerable. It is language which avoids, shifts or denies responsibility, language which is at variance with its purported meaning. It is language which conceals or prevents thought. Basic to doublespeak is incongruity, the incongruity between what is said, or left unsaid, and what really is … . What doublespeak doesmislead, distort, deceive, inflate, circumvent, obfuscate. (p. 255) It is also not without precedence for illuminating political failures to address institutional and structural racism, as doublethink was referenced by Gillborn (2008) in a critical analysis of education policy in Tony Blair's New Labour government.
In this analysis of the RDA itself and associated documents, doublespeak is revealed in the simultaneous framing of the RDA as a mechanism for actively countering racism (recall the press release's insistence that the RDA would 'grapple with the scourge of racism'), or at least helping to 'end injustices', whilst employing discourse which de-racialises to effect a maintenance of the status quo. For example, we can see how the unpleasant is made tolerable in an absence of reference to racism and in the lexical replacement of race with ethnicity. We can see an avoidance of responsibility in the calls for objectivity in research to identify the main drivers and causes of racial disparities. There is also a shifting of responsibility in the linguistic choices which inexplicitly link causality for the disparities to the abstract and depersonalized framing of ethnicity itself, and in slippages of those responsible as agents of change (where named) from the government to society at large including those in society therefore who experience racism. And there is a denial of responsibility in the removal of all but one reference to racism (and hence also institutional racism) as the cause of racial disparities. In so doing, the RDA acts to de-legitimise and conceal anti-racism as part of the solution, thereby preventing the naming of actions which would be transformative. It is not difficult therefore to imagine the true aim of the RDA, in variance with its purported aim of enacting change, is to appear active whilst effectively obfuscating the real issues (racism as the cause of inequities) thereby also effectively circumventing actions which would bring about real change to the race disparities revealed by the statistics (anti-racism). The RDA is therefore an example of, as Liz Fekete (2020) put it, racism being held in situ by 'the very institutions meant to protect us by fighting discrimination and upholding equality' (p. 91).
It is interesting, in light of the use here of Fairclough's concept of 'frame' to describe the representation of entities, including ideological representations of the causes of inequalities, framed here as disparities, to draw upon Feagin's (2013) notion of the White racial frame in explaining the doublespeak revealed. For Feagin, a frame 'structures the thinking process and shapes what people see, or do not see, in important societal settings' (p. 10). The White racial frame involves a combination of factors including: a belief aspect (stereotypes and ideologies); cognitive elements (including narratives); and an inclination to action (to discriminate), which we may rephrase to include a disinclination to act against racism. The white racial frame is hegemonic in its domination and efforts at reproduction, providing 'the language and interpretations that help structure, normalize and make sense out of society' (p. 11). Feagin argues that the White racial frame operates through institutions to provide social 'shrouding' from or sanitization of a systematically racist reality in order to reproduce White privilege and power (p. 146). In this analysis, we see how de-racialisation, or a frame of disinclination to act against racism, is maintained through the doublespeak discourse of the RDA. It does so by shrouding reality, whilst simultaneously appearing virtuous; in other words, it is entirely consistent with and not paradoxical to the socio-political context into which the RDA emerged. The doublespeak discourse can therefore be understood as an example of the White racial frame in institutional operation. Not only are we privy to the ideological representations of the Government as producers of the RDA, but also how the parameters (and constraints) for action are also delineated and justified in order to maintain and reproduce the White racial frame.

Conclusion: the frame for future action against racism
The framing of future action suggested by this analysis of the RDA does not bode well for social policy. Indeed, a lucid example of the RDA's lack of potential for transformative action against racism in education specifically, is visible in the RDA documentation itself in the press release (as in Table 1) of the proposed new plans to look at 'the experience and outcomes for children who face the most challenges in mainstream schoolincluding those at greatest risk of exclusion'. This is said to include a review into school exclusions, 'which will look at why some children are more likely to be excluded than others'. Examples of those who will benefit are given as 'those with special educational needs (SEN), children with autism or children in need of help and protection, including those in care'. There is a complete absence of reference to race, ethnicity or racism, including in the calls for evidence as part of the plan, until much later in the piece when Edward Timpson, leader of the exclusions review, states his intention to build on the race disparity audit to 'look to tackle some of the inconsistencies highlighted including exploring why Black Caribbean boys are more than three times as likely to be excluded from school'. Whilst this single reference to an actual racial disparity and ways of addressing it is clearly important, it is concerning to see how the significant differences in school exclusion figures across axes of race and gender (as well as class) are sidelined in the prioritised focus of this review. It is also worrying how the lack of distinction between disparities experienced by particular racial groups revealed in the RDA analysis above, is mirrored here in the homogenisation of the very different needs of the pupils described in the title as 'pupils with additional needs'. Pathologising individuals as 'pupils with additional needs' also assumes the cause for exclusion lies within the pupils themselves, in their 'additional needs', rather than in education structures, systems and practices. In terms of solutions therefore, practices are sought to transform pupils, rather than the education system. As Feagin (2013) explains, a rationale for the concept of the White racial frame, a focus on individualised prejudice and bias, often phrased as 'disparities' instead of inequalities, is insufficient in assessing and explaining foundational and systemic racism. Racism as a cause of racial disparities in school exclusions and hence antiracism as a focus for potential solutions to this disparity are excluded in discussions of school exclusions, at the very moment when its inclusion is essential.
The obfuscation, inexplicitness and circumvention leading to a de-racialisation of the doublespeak discourse of the RDA (and associated documents) means the RDA is not only at variance with its purported aims, but it is also an example of the concealed embodiment and enactment of the White racial frame, with the potential for intensifying the very racial disparities it purports to aim to expose and expel. If this is the vehicle for subsequent action, it is difficultif not impossibleto envisage how the RDA can act as an espoused vehicle to end racial injustices.