Because of their wide and deep influence on children’s worldviews, including conceptions of national identities, racial groups and the relations between them, school curricula can play a central role in driving or countering racism. Despite the introduction of some diversity requirements in statutory subject contents and school inspections, the curriculum taught in primary and secondary schools remains racially, culturally and religiously biased in law and especially in practice. Since 2014, the inexorable expansion of counter-extremism policies in the educational sphere has restricted opportunities to foreground people of colour’s perspectives in the classroom. Legal standards developed by the European Court of Human Rights and universal human rights bodies provide some well-honed tools to resist educational counter-extremism, as well as more general principles supporting curricular pluralism.