Sylvia Ikomi

Sylvia Ikomi is a recipient of a 2022 University of Leeds Stuart Hall Foundation/Economic and Social Research Council MA Social Research and PhD in Education studentship. She is an early career researcher, Higher Education lecturer and qualified teacher.

Sylvia won the University of Greenwich’s 2017 Social Enterprise Challenge competition for her social enterprise idea of her education consultancy No Child Left Behind Consultants which is aimed at supporting teachers in teaching children in local authority care. Her research focus is on the adultification of Black Girls in local authority care. She was the winner of the 2019 NASUWT and English-Speaking Union sponsored Walter Hines USA education research for her research on effective literacy strategies for children in care. She has presented her research as part of Continuous Professional Development workshops for teachers, at the annual Independent Academic Forum’s annual European Education conference and the British Education Research Association’s conference.

Sylvia: ‘‘It is an honour and a privilege to receive a Stuart Hall foundation studentship. Unfortunately, Black girls in local authority care often experience adultification prior to entering local authority care, during their time in local authority care and as they transition from local authority care. They are often regarded and treated without the level of dignity and compassion that we should all afford each other as human beings. Prof. Stuart Hall said that We must ‘mobilize everything we can find in terms of intellectual resources in order to understand what keeps making the lives we live in, profoundly and deeply inhumane’. I hope to answer Prof. Hall’s call for us to do by using the financial resources that this studentship offers me to utilise all my available and relevant intellectual resources to understand what is making the lives that Black girls in local authority live in profoundly and deeply inhumane from the perspective of Black women care leavers and the teachers and social workers that work with these girls.