The core of this issue is that accent bias is just this smokescreen for other biases, and we don't want to say that it’s a permissible or acceptable thing that only people from certain backgrounds can progress to certain positions or hold certain roles.
These words from Dr Amanda Cole at the University of Cambridge outline the broader issue of accent bias in society but also have a particular resonance when it comes to teachers.A September 2025 Teacher Tapp survey of over 1500 teachers and educators found that those with stronger accents than their colleagues were far more likely to receive negative reactions from students. And not just students: in many cases, the worst comments and reactions came from colleagues and parents. And when you look at some of the detail provided by teachers about the reactions, we are not just talking about casual, good-natured joking (which in itself can be a problem, depending on the individuals) but deeply personal judgements about intelligence, suitability to work in schools and even extreme racism and xenophobia.
For many teachers, accent bias is not an abstract or theoretical ‘-ism’: it’s a lived, uncomfortable and often troubling reality. Take for example, a colleague teaching in the North of England who had his own (non-local) accent repeated back to him and ‘corrected’ in front of his own A level English class and visiting parents, the trainee teachers told they’ll never get jobs in certain areas if they don’t speak ‘properly’, or – perhaps most shockingly - the British Asian primary school teachers whose colleague says of them,
I find it difficult to understand how someone with a strong Asian accent, who can barely string a sentence together can teach phonics.
It’s fairly clear from these examples, and so many others from this survey and others, that for teachers to be able to teach effectively – and treat others with respect and understanding – teachers themselves need a good grounding in language education.
The headlines
The headline figures reported by Teacher Tapp were that teachers with much stronger accents than their colleagues were far more likely to report negative reactions from students compared to those with accents similar to their colleagues (47% vs 17%). And they reported that 57% of teachers with much stronger accents said they’ve received negative comments from colleagues. Only 5% of teachers with accents similar to their colleagues reported the same.
Among the more worrying comments collected in the survey were reports of racist mockery and abuse. One teacher commented,
I'm from the Caribbean and teaching in the southwest. Students have mimicked my accent before as well as pretending they don't understand me. Racist comments have been made and I was told to go back to my country. African teachers with strong accents also face some backlash from students. Irish and Scottish teachers also.
Another teacher noted that,
Teachers with certain accents are more likely to be negatively affected by students and have more behavioural issues with students and, sometimes, from parents and I think this is an area of racism and prejudice that is not being addressed by the profession.
One teacher added that
Parents are incredibly racist to anyone without an English accent.
Alongside these are complaints from students, including one teacher who reported that
…a group of sixth formers went to the leadership and questioned my qualifications, as somebody so northern could not be trusted to teach A level
Parents are some of the worst offenders though, some claiming that certain accents were ‘incomprehensible’ or that they ‘didn’t want their child taught by someone with an accent’.
What linguists tell us
Of course, everyone has an accent: we just don’t tend to remark upon others’ accents if they are perceived to be the standard or we see them as ‘normal’ for the area we are in. The way some accents are described as ‘regional’ alerts us to the fact that Received Pronunciation, though originating in the Southeast, has transcended place and is held in higher esteem as a consequence. Its association with being middle class accentuates the negative connotations given to regional accents and, by extension, social class. And that’s before you factor in issues around nationality and ethnicity and an increasingly poisonous discourse around immigration.
Linguists have been interested in accents since before linguistics was even a thing, and have carried out regular studies of how people respond to different accents. The Accent Bias Britain project, based at QMUL looked at 50 years of accent studies in 2020 and noted that while certain shifts had taken place in accent attitudes – slightly more positive ratings for some accents that had been perceived negatively in the past, such as Brummie and Scouse, for example – the historical accent hierarchy remained firmly in place, with Received Pronunciation (RP) at the top and accents associated with urban areas and working class occupations at the bottom.
More recently, research from Dr Amanda Cole has shown that accents associated with higher social classes were judged more favourably on measures such as intelligence and trustworthiness, while those whose accents were perceived to be working class, or from an ethnic minority were judged unfavourably for both of these characteristics along with friendliness. Research published in early 2025 by linguists from Nottingham Trent and Cambridge universities also suggested that people with ‘low status’ accents were perceived as being much more likely to commit crimes than their posher counterparts. Accent prejudice goes beyond individual preferences, often having an impact on people’s career chances and quality of life.
Class dimensions
Accent prejudice can cut both ways and there are examples in the survey that show how teachers with apparently ‘posh’ accents (often southern accents in northern settings and English accents in Scottish schools) feel unfairly judged or uncomfortable. One teacher stated
I have been described as posh when working in a state school and less so when working in the private sector. Some staff who were from the area (Stevenage) assumed I saw myself as too good for the school because of my accent/education. More prejudice ultimately from staff than students.
Another saw an upside to this:
When I used to teach in a deprived area in Yorkshire (I’m from the South West), a lot of students considered my accent to be ‘posh’ and somehow that translated into them showing a lot of respect.
However, many of the most unpleasant and upsetting accounts of accent discrimination in schools came from teachers with working class and/or minority ethnic backgrounds. One teacher said that they had
observed pupils treat people with strong accents, particularly those with Asian or African accents in a derogatory fashion even imitating them, quite often refusing to follow instructions as they see them as inferior.
Another said
I'm from the Caribbean and teaching in the southwest. Students have mimicked my accent before as well as pretend they don't understand me. Racist comments have been made and I was told to go back to my country.
Our accents are very much part of who we are and how we perceive ourselves, so it is not a great surprise that in a profession where our voices are often heard (if not always listened to as much as we’d like), issues of accent prejudice can cut to the core. It is also clear that teaching is one of those occupations in which many people assume a persona and perform a different ‘teacher identity’, separate from what might be seen as their more usual personal identity.
One linguist who has worked in this field is Dr Alex Baratta, whose 2018 book Accent and Teacher Identity in Britain drew on work he conducted with teachers in several schools. Baratta talks about ‘identity dissonance’ for some teachers, ‘when aspects of one’s personal identity outside the classroom clash with the teacher identity inside the classroom’. It might be argued that as professionals, there are aspects of our personal identities – how we like to dress, our tattoos and/or piercings, as well as other aspects of our language, such as swearing – that we need to accommodate to maintain a suitable person for the workplace, but accent feels like a different issue.
Accents bridging the gap
Accent can be very much part of this teacher identity, manipulated and controlled for different effects. And just as each and every language user can accommodate their vocabulary and grammar – converging or diverging language styles such as formality and ‘correctness’ to or from those around them – accent can be manipulated too.
In some cases, teachers might consciously use their accent to bridge gaps between themselves and students, or to signal distance and authority when a gap is needed. Baratta mentions this in an interview with the Lexis podcast in November 2023:
There’s a lot of evidence too that students, if they hear that Miss or Sir sounds like me, they can warm up to them more.
Referencing a teacher in Croydon, South London and her use of glottal stops (as in wa’er rather than water), he argues that she was
seen as more approachable because she wasn’t putting on linguistic airs and graces.
Even so, her mentor was critical of her ‘unprofessional’ accent'. Crucial to this is the linguistic concept of the ‘social meaning’ being conveyed by language. We all know that language conveys literal meaning, but the social meaning is what language tells us about someone and their social identity. And that is a key component of how teachers use language.
Some treat the discussions about their accents as all part of the fun, one Northern Irish teacher commenting:
Always had positive experiences - people say it’s warm and friendly. Interesting teaching phonics in Cambridge and in West Oxfordshire! Fun to have pupils and colleagues trying to imitate my accent and adopt phrases like ‘catch yerself on’ or ‘don’t be a right eejit’. Proud of my heritage. Lots of staff room banter.
Again, accents are deeply personal, so one person’s banter might be another person’s unacceptable abuse. In fact, another teacher with an Irish accent commented that
I do get a lot of jovial stick for it, but I think most staff don’t realise that it is genuine racism. If it was an Indian or Pakistani person, it would be a different story.
One of the more positive trends in many of the Teacher Tapp survey responses was an understanding that accents can be used as talking points to kick off discussions about identity, diversity and tolerance. As one teacher commented,
Students are naturally curious and we shouldn't ignore that curiosity,
while another added,
I hate the fact that some students say they hate their accent. I try to encourage them to celebrate regional differences, but what they hate (I suspect) is the judgement that goes with having an accent. It's hard to persuade them that it doesn't matter.
Teachers as targets
Of course, even as some teachers see variation in accents as a springboard into learning, others are judging and criticising. Perhaps one of the more depressing trends in the survey results was teachers being told to adjust their accents or being dismissed out of hand for having a certain accent. As one teacher said,
When I had a strong Suffolk accent, people made fun of me, calling me farmer girl so I worked hard to change my accent so I didn’t sound so Suffolk anymore.
Another reflected on their mother’s experiences:
Mum had a strong Norfolk accent. When she went to teacher training college in Essex, she had to attend extra sessions to get rid of the accent as it was deemed improper! (Even in Essex and Norfolk!) Now, she doesn’t have an accent, but puts one on!.
One drama teacher talks about how they were
constantly berated by my HoD for having too thick of an accent (‘It's not CORRECT, STANDARD English’). This was despite me still using Standard English dialect. Hated that school and eventually left and I love my more rural school with accents and dialects galore!.
Some teachers did not even get a foot in the door before being judged.
As an NQT, I went for an interview at a school in Winchester. The feedback when I didn't get it was that I pronounced 'butter' incorrectly (I'm from Birmingham) and he said if I was to teach English and Drama I had to enunciate properly too,
one teacher wrote, and another reported on a trainee teacher from Liverpool who was asked to leave the school she was in (in Bradford, West Yorkshire)
due to the children not understanding her accent.
The same teacher reported that despite finishing her teacher training, this teacher never went into the profession.
Teacher, teach thyself!
Communicating clearly is something that is naturally important in teaching – it’s what we have to do every day – but some of the Teacher Tapp comments suggest that even teachers – perhaps, especially teachers – could do with some lessons in language from the world of linguistics. One teacher commented that
As much as people should be ‘proud of where they are from’ I think we have a duty as teachers to model correct English when we speak. It might be wrong but people will judge you because of your accent; if you have an overly strong regional dialect then you are not teaching correctly. Near me it’s common to replace ‘those’ with ‘them’. (‘Them pens’). It makes me cringe and quite frankly sounds stupid.
Another observed that,
Sometimes people’s accents help perpetuate incorrect grammar which doesn’t always get picked up e.g. we was going.
Both these responses tend to conflate accent (variations in pronunciation) with dialect (vocabulary, grammar and sounds) and treat English as ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’. Most linguists would take issue with such a binary distinction and point to communication being along a cline, and often dependent on the context of communication. While teachers undoubtedly need to communicate clearly, communication is about much more than the ‘right’ grammar and the ‘right’ accent: it’s about showing the range and scope of language in all its dimensions. Yes, it’s also about intelligibility but the onus on this is not just for the speaker to consider but the listener too. And there’s plenty of research that suggests that the more people are exposed to linguistic variation, the better they understand and appreciate it. Perhaps a lesson to those – including teachers - telling other teachers to change the way they speak, is to instead start thinking more about the way in which we all listen.
Wider lessons
One of the wider lessons apparent from the Teacher Tapp survey is that everyone – teachers, parents, students and the general public - needs better language education if we are to break free of this cycle. We have had various iterations of Knowledge About Language (KAL) over the last 50 years dating back to the Bullock and Kingman reports (1975 & 1988 respectively), the Language in the National Curriculum project (1989) and now what’s being proposed in the 2025 Curriculum and Assessment Review. To a greater or lesser extent (and I won’t include Michael Gove’s 2014 curriculum reforms here because they fail to reach the threshold of even a ‘lesser extent’), all these reviews or reports acknowledge the existence of spoken language and the value in studying it.
Putting spoken language back on the table, not just in terms of oracy or speaking and listening, but as an object of enquiry and analysis, and looking at its relationship to identity and culture but also to other modes of communication – formal written texts, online digital media, among them – ought to be central to the GCSE in English Language and before that at Key Stage 3 and earlier too. Exploring what accents and dialects are, how they relate to standardised English and how all of it relates to our wider understanding of language in the world can be a stepping stone on our path to a healthier society, but it requires an upskilling (or at least a reskilling) for many secondary English teachers who have either been brought up and trained in a period where language study has been virtually non-existent or who have been left to let their language muscles waste away.
And then on top of that, there’s an equality issue that needs to be acknowledged by senior leaders in schools. While accentism can be the ‘smokescreen’ (as Amanda Cole described it earlier), it can also just be plain wrong. We don’t expect all teachers to be linguists (it would be nice if we all were, given how central language is to everything we do!) but we can all learn something about it and apply that understanding to our everyday practice.
Suggested reading
Tim Marr and Steve Collins, Language Awareness at School: A Practical Guide for Teachers and School Leaders
Rob Drummond, You’re All Talk: why we are what we speak
