Thirteen years ago I coined the phrase “parallel lives” to describe the segregation of Asian and white communities in the riot-torn towns of northern England. People from different communities did not live in the same areas, work in the same places, or share social and cultural activities. More importantly, they did not go to school together. My worry is that, as the criticism of schools in the Muslim communities of Birmingham has demonstrated, nothing has changed since my report in 2001.
Often schools are the only way to break this pattern of segregation. They should be safe places, in which pupils learn about different faiths and backgrounds, share experiences and develop common bonds. In mixed schools, this may happen naturally as children grow up alongside each other, visiting each other’s houses and taking part in shared activities. But it is far more difficult in segregated schools. Young people will be entirely dependent on imaginative learning experiences provided by open-minded teaching staff and a respectful and tolerant ethos within the school. Without this, the students will emerge into a diverse world ill-equipped “to live and work in a multicultural, multi-faith and democratic Britain” – to use a phrase from the recent “Trojan Horse” Ofsted Reports.
The Labour government attempted to tackle intolerance by imposing a duty on schools “to promote community cohesion”. This was imposed on all state schools – faith and non-faith. Unfortunately, the Education Act of 2011 removed the requirement for Ofsted to apply this criterion when inspecting schools. This is a decision that the Coalition must certainly rue now: would the earlier positive assessments of the Trojan Horse schools have been the same had their contribution to “community cohesion” been considered? Ofsted now wants to make “graded judgments” over a broad and balanced curriculum, effectively seeking to reverse the 2011 decision.
However, it is not just the removal of inspection of “community cohesion” that has taken us backwards. Schools have been encouraged to become autonomous, responsible for their own admissions and severing links with the local authority. The advent of free schools, the extension of Labour’s academies and increasing numbers of faith schools has created a culture of isolation in which there is less cooperation between schools and a disregard of wider community responsibilities. As happened in Birmingham, schools retreat into separate enclaves, competing, rather than cooperating, with each other.
Another mistake has been to downgrade citizenship education, with the Secretary of State giving it less priority in the curriculum. Now, a further welcome volte-face is about to take place, with Michael Gove promising a new requirement to “teach British values”, which will presumably emerge in a rebranded form of citizenship education. This comes less than a year after the education department refused a new school citizenship initiative put forward by an all-party group of eminent peers, which I was privileged to advise.
Psychologists tell us that if we put a group of like-minded people in a room they become more like-minded. Their views become entrenched and even hostile to others. In a school environment, the best insurance against this is to make sure teachers are recruited openly, without reference to faith or background; that governors represent the whole community, not a small section of it; and that the pupils come from the widest set of backgrounds. Where local demography limits this, strenuous efforts must be made to expose them to other experiences.
As I said, the situation has hardly improved since my report. Many monocultural schools remain. With faith schools established for majority faiths, the growing number of applications emerging from minority and less established faiths cannot be denied. There are now Sikh and Hindu faith schools alongside Muslim and Jewish schools. This can only mean an increasing Balkanisation of our system. And Islam is not the only religion with extreme adherents who hold views about women and individual rights that are inimical to our Western, liberal society.
David Cameron said that the doctrine of “state multiculturalism” had failed. But I would argue that it’s alive and well in our school system. These schools are almost entirely state-funded and controlled from a desk in Whitehall, yet we permit them to provide just “for their own kind” with culturally distinct rules and separate teaching. Faith schools also prop up a system of community and faith leaders, giving them real power over their communities – what could be more important to a parent than their gaining admission for their children? Some faith leaders use this power wisely; others use it to build a bigger stronghold.
Muslim communities in Birmingham will no doubt feel that they have been singled out and demonised, and that the judgments are politically motivated and unjustified. Whether or not this is the case (and some schools may mount legal challenges), let us hope that out of this mess we can build a new commitment to more inclusive schools and to ensuring that all our children are provided with a broader view of the world. This should be an objective shared by all political parties.