There was momentum to introduce Black-focused schooling in Toronto in the early 1990s, assisted by the election of the social democratic New Democratic Party at the time. In 1991, a Black Secretariat was formed by the provincial government, and ideas about Black-focused schooling were proposed in 1992 by a multilevel Ontario government working group, the Four-level Government/African Canadian Community Working Group. As part of recommendations in their report Towards a new beginning, the working group proposed a targeted programme called ‘Focussed School’ to be implemented in schools that had high percentages of Black/African Canadian students in each of the cities making up Greater Toronto (Ontario Government/African Canadian Community Working Group, 1992).

The arguments for Black-focused schools in Toronto emphasised the need for a Black-oriented curriculum as an intervention into ongoing educational and social disadvantage for Black students. This meant arguing for curriculum change in existing public schools in addition to proposing separate ‘Black-focused’ schools (Dei, 1995; James, 2011). However, by the mid-1990s and early 2000s the idea of Black-focused schooling had entered a hiatus, with a decline in focus on racial issues brought about by a combination of a change in provincial government in 1995, with a Conservative government in power until 2003, and the dismantling of the Ontario Anti-Racism Secretariat by the incoming government, and the reorganisation of the Greater Toronto School District.