Chilwell Shows Racism The Red Card

- Ben Chilwell spoke to schoolchildren on Thursday as part of the Show Racism The Red Card initiative 

- Over 200 children from across Leicestershire were told of the importance of promoting equality

- LCFC Community Trust Director Mick King hailed the experience as an important part of education

The Leicester City full-back fielded questions from children from Queniborough Church of England Primary School, Stokes Wood, Spinney Hill, Abbey Community and Broom Leys Primary School in a frank and open discussion on the effects racism and other forms of discrimination can have.

The children left the Banks Lounge on Thursday afternoon having experienced a workshop into the history of racism and how it can be stamped out of day-to-day life with Chilwell being joined by LCFC Community Trust Director Mick King in getting their message across. 

Speaking afterwards, Chilwell told LCFC TV: “We had a panel made up of myself and two other people and we got asked questions by the students. We had some challenging questions, and some interesting ones, but it’s great that the children know how important and crucial clamping racism out of sport and life in general is. 

“That’s why we do these things. It opens it up and shows them how racism won’t be tolerated. For them to come in and see someone like myself talking about the topic, hopefully they’ll see that things are changing for the better.” 

LCFC Community Trust Director King added: “We’ve been doing an education workshop on how to avoid a racism outlook on life and how to oppose such ignorance. 

“Using football as a vehicle to engage the young person, it’s proven to be massively important. We bring people from disadvantaged and multicultural backgrounds and try to use football to put everyone on a level platform. 

“We look at things like today whereby people learn together from different backgrounds. With this age group that’s more than enough. When we look at older age groups we perhaps need to go deeper into challenging that ignorance and helping them to be more sensible and moral in their choices.”