School desegregation and the politics of ‘forced integration’

Introduction

The institutionalising of racism within the British educational context began in 1965, when, because of concerns expressed by white parents in Southall (west London) that their children were being held back educationally because of the ‘influx’ of Asian children, a regulation was brought in to cap the number of ethnic minority pupils to one-third in any one school, so as to facilitate assimilation. Asian pupils who could not get into their local schools were then bussed out of their locality to schools in other areas. This policy was to be adopted by eleven local authorities with significant black and minority ethnic (BME) communities. ³ The fact that only BME pupils were being bussed out was not deemed to be discriminatory (despite a series of protests organised by Asian and black parents’ groups) until an official review of the policy in 1975. ⁴ The irony is that, today, two generations later, Asian children are again being blamed, but this time for the dangers of their self-segregation. So now, after decades of discrimination in housing and education, which effectively kept Asians away from better ‘white’ facilities, they are to be forcibly ‘bussed in’, as it were, through policies that force integration upon them by amalgamating schools and relocating education in predominantly white areas of cities.

To what extent does the thesis of ethnic segregation constituting a problem actually stand up? Some commentators and academics, such as Ludi Simpson, have argued that the ‘problem’ of self-segregation is a politically constructed myth that lacks detailed empirical evidence. ⁵ Social geographers looking at mobility in Leeds and Bradford have also picked holes in the popular, slick view that Asians were forever stuck in their ghettos. ⁶ Despite these academic findings, the overwhelming consensus, from 2001 onwards, has been that segregation is an emerging threat that requires urgent and radical public policy intervention. ⁷

For, from April to July 2001, the northern English towns of Oldham, Burnley and Bradford witnessed violent confrontations between young Asians and the police, culminating in clashes in Bradford in which 200 police officers were injured. In terms of the damage caused and the shock they delivered to the nation, these were the worst ‘riots’ in Britain since the uprisings of 1985. ⁸ And what was to surprise the powers that be the most was the fact that so many of the young rioters were from Asian backgrounds, traditionally stereotyped on the state’s cultural yardstick as more peaceful and law abiding than those of Caribbean descent. A whole series of inquiries was instigated and a range of policy reports was published that racialised the public ‘concerns’ over segregated communities, in general, and of non-white monocultural schools, in particular.

The first report to appear was Community Pride, Not Prejudice: making diversity work in Bradford, the belated findings of an inquiry under Lord Ouseley that had been set up long before the riots. Although this report did note the disquieting level of segregation in parts of Bradford, it also criticised the police, schools and other agencies for fostering divisions and fears between communities. ⁹ National and local government did not want to hear about their own failings – in terms of unemployment, bad schooling, lack of social provision, experience of racial violence – as causes for the youth rioting. The answer was to be sought, therefore, within the community itself and was specifically located in its capacity to self-segregate. The most important intervention came via the inquiry led by Ted Cantle, which came out with a report stressing the need for a programme of community cohesion to counteract the way that Asians were being allowed to lead ‘parallel lives’. ¹⁰ ‘Community cohesion’ was, in the words of a key critic, ‘politically identified as the prime component in building an effective response to the violence in the summer of 2001 … the uprisings were recognised as a cultural problem to be dealt with by focusing on issues of citizenship, nationality and belonging.’ ¹¹ The theme of ‘segregated’ schooling developed with the publication of the Cantle report and the Ritchie report of 2001, which encouraged Oldham to adopt policies that would lead to better ethnic integration and the desegregation of schools. ¹²

The political rhetoric surrounding segregation, Muslim pupils and schooling reached its peak following the publication of two studies that warned of the pervasive nature of ethnic segregation in some UK schools. Simon Burgess and Deborah Wilson recognised, in 2004, residential segregation as one of the principal causes of ‘substantial segregation on ethnic criteria in some schools’, ¹³ while Ron Johnston et al., in 2006, demonstrated significant levels of ethnic segregation within primary and secondary schools, but also ominously suggested that ‘school segregation is very substantially (and significantly) greater than is the case with residential segregation’. ¹⁴

Popular discourses on ethnic segregation further expressed fears of ‘Muslim ghettos’ ¹⁵ and ‘no-go areas’ ¹⁶ for white people in some northern towns. ‘Segregated communities’, ‘parallel lives’, ‘Asian ghettos’ and insular communities have subsequently become part of a received wisdom that continues to influence both political agendas in the UK and other EU countries with sizeable Muslim populations. An implicit assumption within the debate on ethnic segregation, in general, and school segregation, in particular, is that it is the Muslim community that maintains an illiberal ghettoised and highly traditional enclave within western societies.

Preventing extremism in schools

Of course, this disquiet about a community that was seen to be cutting itself adrift from the mainstream was underscored by concerns about the potential radicalisation of its Muslim youth in the light of 9/11 and 7/7. Part of this logic extended the community cohesion thesis, that ethnic segregation leads to racial conflict, to argue that ethnic segregation would lead to radicalisation and extremism. ¹⁷ The concern about segregation affecting the nation’s psyche morphed into a concern about segregation affecting the nation’s safety. That ‘Muslim = segregated = potential bomber’ was clear from the way in which the government’s Preventing Violent Extremism Pathfinder fund of £5 million, established in 2007, was allocated to local authorities simply on the basis of the size of their Muslim population. ¹⁸ The extension of community cohesion to national security can be identified in the Department for Children, Schools and Families’ prevention of violent extremism toolkit, entitled Learning Together to Be Safe, ¹⁹ launched in response to the conviction of 16-year-old Hamand Munshi, the youngest British person to be convicted under the UK Terrorism Act. Munshi was arrested in West Yorkshire on his way home from a GCSE chemistry exam in 2006 and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for ‘downloading information about bomb making material from the internet and hidden notes about martyrdom under his bed’. ²⁰ The toolkit provides ‘advice’ and ‘guidance’ to schools through a three-tiered approach aimed at countering the extremist narrative carried out in the name of Islam. The first tier is defined as ‘universal actions’, which include schools ‘promoting community cohesion and promoting equality and wellbeing’; the second tier strengthens the targeted work, which includes schools using the ‘curriculum to challenge extremist narratives’; and, finally (and perhaps most controversially), is the specialist tier, which encourages schools to ‘form good links with police and other partners to share information’. The Coalition government’s revised Prevent Strategy of June 2011 also reinforced the partnership work between the Department for Education and the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism (OSCT) with support of £4.7 million to work with local authorities and schools. A further £950,000 of regional funding was also allocated to embed the above toolkit within schools. ²¹ The revised Prevent Strategy also gave the Channel project (‘to support individuals vulnerable to recruitment by violent extremists’) a strategic and central role in the fight against terror. The Channel project is the government’s multi-agency risk management initiative, but, in expecting teachers to ‘become the eyes and ears of counter-terrorism policing’, it undermines the integrity of the teaching profession. ²² The implication of this project is to blur the boundaries between security, counter-terrorism and education.

One of the leading government figures to champion this combining of national security and educational policy was Sir Cyril Taylor, who has influenced both Conservative and New Labour educational thinking. He served as an adviser to ten successive secretaries of education, starting in the Thatcher era and ending in 2007, and was chairman, until his retirement, of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, from 1987–2007. Taylor’s policy drive, expressed in his 2009 book A Good School for Every Child, makes the link between schooling, integration, de-radicalisation and the Muslim problematic. He argues that, unlike other migrant communities, the Muslim one has yet to be assimilated. Taylor believes that the failure to ‘assimilate’ (which he uses interchangeably with ‘integrate’) can allow:

Extremist views and ideologies to be propagated resulting in radicalisation of individuals and leading to increased racial and religious tensions, criminal and anti-social behaviour, and ultimately a breakdown of cohesion within the community. What, therefore, can be done to better integrate our ethnic minorities into their communities and to resolve these problems? The most important way is to avoid racial and religious discrimination of all kinds, but a particularly effective way is to better integrate children at school age. ²³

It was Taylor who was to argue most overtly that Muslims should be integrated into mainstream society through publicly funded, ethnically integrated schools, predicated upon a de-radicalisation imperative, which extended the right to free education to counter-terrorism agendas and security policies: ‘[O]ur Muslim communities are much more likely to help the police over atrocities such as the July 7 tube bombings if they are better integrated. It is a radical step but I believe a multi-faith community academy initiative can create new schools in socially deprived areas with a far more balanced intake of pupils.’ ²⁴

School mergers and the politics of ‘forced integration’

This model of forced integration, which has been aptly described by progressive educationalists as ‘aggressive majoritarianism’ ²⁵ or the way ‘majority dislike and prejudice towards Muslims are enforced in the name of commonsense, integration and even security’, is assessed below in four local authority wards in the north of England, where the school academies programme and the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme were used to tackle the issue of school segregation by merging schools with different ethnic cohorts. In local authorities, such as Oldham, the school academies and the BSF programmes were administered together as one overarching programme. The BSF programme was a New Labour capital investment initiative introduced in 2007 and abandoned by the secretary of state for education, Michael Gove, in 2010. ²⁶

School academies were introduced by the New Labour government in 2000 and later extended by the Conservative-led Coalition government through the Academies Act 2010. It allows schools to become independent of local authority control by opening the sector to the free market and allowing businesses, charities and faith groups to run schools, while retaining public funding, thus privatising provision. This particular model of schooling has been seen as replacing a ‘stakeholder approach’, consisting of community groups, schools, parents and local authorities as key partners, with ‘corporate governance’, which includes businesses and charities as key partners. ²⁷ The introduction of school academies, with their concomitant connection to the private sector, is now used by some local authorities to tackle the question of ethnic school segregation, although there is no proof that such institutions either raise educational standards or promote social integration. ²⁸ This particular approach to school desegregation typically involves a school with a mainly Muslim cohort merging with a school with a predominantly white intake. Table 1 provides examples of four local authorities in the north of England that have adopted such an approach.

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Table 1.

Details of schools surrounding the controversy of ‘forced integration’

Local authority	Predominantly Muslim school cohort	School merger with mainly white school cohort	New school created from merger	Status (as of March 2012)
Blackburn with Darwen	Beardwood High School	Pupils dispersed throughout borough	–	School closure August 2012
Burnley	Ivy Bank School	Habergham School	Hameldon Community College (Academy)	Operational
Leeds	Mathew Murray High School	Merlyn Rees Community High	South Leeds Academy	Operational
Oldham	Grange School	–	EACT Academy Oldham	New Build 2013
Oldham	Kaskenmoor Secondary School	South Chadderton School	Oasis Academy	New Build 2013
Oldham	Breeze Hill School	Counthill School	Waterhead Academy	New Build 2013

While the schools highlighted in this study are not in the only local authorities to have adopted such a policy, the four local authorities identified nevertheless provide an excellent insight into the impact of this approach. All four areas have witnessed extensive media coverage of their Muslim communities: Oldham and Burnley were faced with the 2001 summer riots, as we have seen, and Blackburn was thrust into the media spotlight following former home and foreign secretary Jack Straw’s 2006 column for the local Lancashire Telegraph, in which he said that he felt uneasy talking to someone he could not see (because she was a woman in a niqab) and that he urged those constituents who came to his surgery fully covered to unveil, so as to facilitate conversation. ²⁹ Leeds attracted international media attention after it was identified that three of the four 7/7 bombers were from that city; in fact, two of these bombers, Hasib Hussain and Mohammad Siddique Khan, were ex-pupils of Mathew Murray High School in Holbeck, Leeds, which was one of the schools involved in the school merger (see Table 1).

An evaluation of the school mergers adopted by local authorities under the school academies programme highlights the following key trends. First, schools with a predominant or growing Muslim cohort are either closed down and merged with schools with mainly white intakes, or are closed down, so that the pupils are dispersed throughout the borough. Second, the school merger changes the school boundaries and therefore limits the problem previously caused by the existence of monocultural primary feeder schools, opening up the new school to a broader geographical boundary. Third, the physical location of the new buildings that arise from the school merger is most often in mainly white residential areas. Finally, all of the newly created schools highlighted below have been strongly opposed by local communities and, in the case of two of the schools, there has been an increase in racial conflict.

Schools, proximity and racial conflict

The academies, following school mergers in Leeds and Burnley (both currently operational – see Table 1), generated intense racial tensions and what could be described as riots on both of the new campuses. This, for many, was clear evidence of a very blunt instrument being applied to the complex racialised concept of ‘segregation’. Pupils attending the Leeds Academy, which was formed from the merger of two ethnically diverse schools in south Leeds, were described in the local paper as ‘guinea pigs of poorly thought-out ideas’. ³⁰ Leeds was one of the first authorities to adopt the school merger approach to desegregation by closing down a secondary school in the predominantly Muslim area of Holbeck and merging it with a school whose makeup was from the mainly white working-class estate in Belle Isle, south Leeds, which reopened in September 2004. In order to attend school in Belle Isle, the Muslim students had to travel regularly from Holbeck ward, thus making them potential targets for racial violence. Their vulnerability intensified, with ‘bitter warfare’ ³¹ and ‘rising levels of racial tensions’, ³² which culminated in ‘full-scale riots’ on a number of occasions, ³³ within and outside the school premises. The intense racial conflict in 2005 followed a police response, which included the use of a police helicopter, after youths from the local community pelted the classrooms and broke into the school grounds to provoke and verbally abuse the Asian students. Fears of racialised turf war accelerated in an intense altercation involving dozens of school pupils, with injuries to both teachers and students. ³⁴

A similar pattern of racial violence occurred in Burnley, following the school merger in September 2006. Racial violence, principally directed against the ‘outsiders’, was orchestrated both by school pupils and ex-pupils living near the school neighbourhood. ³⁵ The school merger was also capitalised upon by the British National Party (BNP), through a BNP television documentary entitled Forced Integration Comes to Burnley. ³⁶ The increase in racist incidents, together with declining student numbers, have added to the fear, insecurity and animosity towards the Hameldon Community College (Academy) in Burnley. The increase in racial tension in December 2007 revolved around a group of intruders entering the school premises and attacking two Muslim pupils. The first pupil received hospital treatment for head injuries while the second pupil suffered a seizure after being punched. ³⁷ The Burnley ward was a particular electoral stronghold for the BNP, which became the official opposition party on Burnley Council during the run-up to the May 2003 local elections. The BNP also won its first ever county council seat in 2009 by ending twenty years of Labour control. Currently, the BNP has just one council seat, but this does not reflect the extent of far-right activity, given the rise of the popular street activism of the English Defence League (EDL), as seen through a number of high-profile public demonstrations by the EDL Burnley division.

One of the only studies of the impact of such school mergers, conducted by PeaceMaker ³⁸ in Oldham, found that fears over proximity and racist attacks were major themes. PeaceMaker, a voluntary organisation established to tackle racism following the riots of 2001, interviewed over 1,000 young people in Years 7, 8 and 9 across the seven secondary schools involved in the merger. The study confirmed how ethnic and religious prejudices were dominant discursive narratives used by pupils to make sense of the pending changes. Pupils expressed concerns over racism and clashes over religion leading to ‘riots’ and ‘wars’ between the dominant ethnic groups in Oldham. Perhaps the most striking revelation was that some students felt that segregation between schools should be replaced by segregation within schools. PeaceMaker noted that a number of students argued that parts of the new academies should be segregated by a ‘wall down the playground’ or ‘different lunch and break times’ for the safety of different ethnic groups. ³⁹

Such fear of racial violence and harassment in schools is not new. The prevalence of racial and religious intolerance in and around schools was highlighted in the Macdonald Inquiry into racial violence in Manchester schools, following the murder of Ahmed Iqbal Ullah in a Burnage school playground, but harassment and attacks were, in fact, being reported at Dormers Wells Secondary School in Southall as far back as the 1960s. ⁴⁰ Then, it was the children of the first generation of postwar Punjabi Sikh workers who were at risk of attack. But, as recent empirical research has confirmed, today, with the climate created by the ‘war on terror’, it is Muslim pupils, the children and grandchildren of Pakistani and Bangladeshi mill-workers, who now routinely experience racism and racist abuse as part of their schooling. ⁴¹ These incidents are not only perpetrated by fellow school pupils, but also by staff members within a school.

Racial violence against Muslim pupils was just the starkest reaction to this forced integration. An analysis of letters published in the local press reveals how the policy of school mergers managed to engender a generalised white backlash against what was quickly seen as ‘integration by stealth’ and ‘social engineering’. An excerpt from a letter to the local paper encapsulates the way school desegregation, an idea believed to be imposed by political elites on to white working-class neighbourhoods, was seen as a belligerent force with the potential to foster racial divisions:

Forcing integration (which is exactly what is happening) will only deepen divisions within those areas affected. It’s a splendid moot point that all the people who tell us how to mix all seem to live in splendid isolation among their own kind. ⁴²

Policies aimed at racial integration were seen to compromise the principle of parental choice. The ‘social engineering’ feature of these policies undermined individual rights and the autonomy of in-group solidarity based upon racial and ethnic difference. The collective discourse was based upon a political awareness of the role of government in shaping local policy. As another disgruntled letter-writer put it:

I have voiced and written objections to Schools for the Future on a number of occasions, ever since the idiotic idea was mooted. The entire concept was nothing but an effort in social engineering, aimed at racial integration in secondary education. This was engineered by the report on racial disturbances in Burnley. ⁴³

This backlash reveals a multifaceted resistance and counter-narrative by the mainly white community to the policy of integration and school academies. ⁴⁴ White communities tended to view these programmes as weakening white working-class identity and marginalising its residents. The presence of Muslim pupils in ‘their’ schools was seen as rupturing ‘whiteness’. ⁴⁵ The above views also demonstrate how schools play a crucial role in the ways in which communities are imagined. The compromising of whiteness in schools via an influx of Muslim pupils was associated with the decline of community and nation.

The politics of white flight

The letters published in local papers expressed fears and anxiety about the increased ethnic minority populations in areas considered to be ‘white’. The notion of racially segregated communities as expressed in these letters demonstrated how segregated schools served a social-political objective of whiteness. The counter-intuitive nature of merging schools, so that more Muslim pupils are taught within mixed school environments, is deeply problematic because of white flight. The following letter excerpt highlights how relocating Grange School (Oldham), with an over 95 per cent Bangladeshi Muslim cohort, to the neighbouring white neighbourhood of Royton could eventually lead to white communities relocating. The letter implies that, within the context of schooling, some white parents, faced with the prospect of increasing numbers of ethnic minority children, would either send their children to white or whiter schools within the borough, or the entire family (or even the community) might uproot itself over time: ⁴⁶

Moving students from Grange to a new school on Our Lady’s site [Royton] is part of a plan for ‘integration via the back door’. If this goes ahead a time will come when future generations of the ethnic minority families will move to Royton … in time the indigenous population could well move out. ⁴⁷

Despite the government’s intention of creating mixed schools, the Muslim presence was considered deeply problematic in the local public discourse of school mergers. Muslim communities are essentialised, not just as culturally inferior, but also as holding fundamentally different views from western enlightened mores. The sentiments expressed in the letter below highlight the importance of placing anti-Muslim prejudice in the West within a broader historical context in order to understand contemporary prejudice: ⁴⁸

You can’t integrate people whose cultural difference is too great, and who don’t want to integrate anyway. It’s that simple, and it’s that obvious. Islam is a religion of domination and separatism, based upon the falsehood of superiority. No amount of education or indoctrination will bridge the divide. In fact, if schools taught about REAL Islam, instead of the sanitised Western-friendly version concocted for our kids, the gap would get even wider. Integration of Islam with Western democracy is not possible. It REALLY IS that simple, and if these idiots in education think that by attempting to ‘social engineer’ the schools they can solve it, they are very wrong. ⁴⁹

School location and white backlash

Localised discussion of cultural difference is often mediated through an interpretative racial categorisation, where religious difference substitutes for ‘race’. Within local debates, such differences become important signifiers of power and privilege which determine choice and location of school. Thus, externally manufactured integration of pupils is seen as undermining the status quo and the privilege of a particular group. Any attempt to rupture the sense of prerogative is rigorously challenged. A highly controversial scheme involving the amalgamation of two secondary Catholic schools, one of which was located within a predominantly Muslim community with a significant number of Muslim pupils, within a Muslim neighbourhood of Oldham, provides interesting insights into the ways that racial integration is conceptualised. The following letter highlights how the prospect of non-Catholic children attending the £30 million, newly built and refurbished ‘Catholic super school’, funded through the BSF programme, is seen as undermining the educational privileges of Catholic pupils:

It is a distinct possibility that places in our schools will be awarded to non-Catholic children at the expense of Catholic children. Catholic schools have a duty and responsibility to bring up the children in the Catholic faith. This will become increasingly difficult when Catholic schools become multi-faith schools. ⁵⁰

The backlash against the proposed location of a Catholic super school was championed by the pressure group Oldham Catholic Schools Parents’ Association (OCSPA). OCSPA campaigned vigorously to have the proposed location changed, based upon the fear of some parents that the ‘area had a reputation for drug abuse, crime and young girls being groomed for prostitution’. ⁵¹ Its activities culminated in a protest march, on 30 March 2008, which attracted over 600 parents campaigning against locating the proposed Catholic school in a mainly Muslim area. OCSPA did finally manage to change the council policy, albeit under the heavy cloud of accusations of racism from the Catholic diocese of Salford and the local paper. ⁵² The school is currently being built in a mainly white area of Oldham.

OCSPA’s story is not an isolated campaign of preserving and maintaining ‘whiteness’ of schools; after all, the introduction of bussing by minister Edward Boyle in 1965 followed two years of agitation and protest by the Southall Residents’ Association, egged on by the BNP, complaining that local schools were being ‘swamped’ by immigrant children. A generation on, and closer to home, a landmark case in Yorkshire in the mid-1980s involved the Parental Alliance for Choice in Education (PACE) successfully stopping Kirklees Metropolitan Council from sending children from the white neighbourhood of Thornhill to a school in the predominantly Muslim area of Savile Town, Dewsbury. In this case, protesting white parents actually started their own makeshift school above a pub in Thornhill while awaiting a judicial review. Interestingly, in all of the above cases, the politics of parental choice is substituted for race and ethnicity, and the practice of white flight entails the desire to maintain and sustain educational privilege.

Conclusion

In recent years, we have witnessed a fundamental paradigm shift in education, from concerns about ethnic minority educational underachievement and anti-racism to a deeply politicised discourse on integration and counter-terrorism, both of which demonise Muslims. This analysis of school mergers shows how the Muslim community is pathologised at policy level and victimised at the grassroots level of lived experience. It also shows how attempts to merge two ethnically distinct and monocultural schools, in the name of cohering communities, can lead to yet more distrust between communities.

Contemporary attempts to govern Muslim communities are often associated with the ‘community relations’ ⁵³ approach to de-radicalisation, which views Muslims as a suspect community or ‘the enemy within’. Integration is often portrayed as a means through which Muslims can be better citizens or become depoliticised, ‘moderate’ Muslims. Furthermore, the educational policy framing of Muslim communities is predicated upon the assumption that it’s the Muslims who are unwilling to integrate into mainstream society. But the idea of integration has to be contextualised within the racialised contemporary public discourse, which is not only reluctant to accept Muslims as fellow citizens, but deems them antithetical to the West.