Pertinent: Government's obsession with faith and free schools 'breeds social and racial segregation'
With another massacre, this time in Parisian France, and the issues with religious extremism, this is as pertinent as ever. This is from The Independent:
Exclusive: Chair of Social Integration Commission says Government has ignored impact of education policies, and calls for schools to monitor how well children from different backgrounds and ethnicities are mixing
Segregation between different classes and ethnicities in Britain is worsening due to increasing numbers of faith schools and the opening of free schools, a leading campaigner on social equality has warned.
Matthew Taylor, the respected chair of the Social Integration Commission, called on governors to issue regular reports on how their pupils are mixing to prevent serious divisions in society – saying that Muslim schools were of particular concern as their intakes tend to be less diverse.
Arguing that schools were largely failing to bring different communities together in contrast to higher education, the former adviser to Tony Blair told The Independent that the Government must take responsibility.
There had been “a certain amount of carelessness” in schools policy, he said, amid a “sense that the really important thing is that we have more schools and more faith schools and more free schools”.
“If you were in the Department for Education [DfE] and said, ‘A lot of these schools are not terribly integrated places’, you’d have been brushed aside and told, ‘Well that’s not actually a priority and that’s not the important thing, the important thing is that we have got more of these institutions’,” he said.
“It’s more by negligence than anything, I don’t think that the Government has deliberately promoted segregation but I think sometimes it pursues policies which are anti-integration and it isn’t sufficiently aware of that.”
Social segregation is already costing the British economy £6bn a year, recent research from the Commission has found. The study showed Britons increasingly seek the company only of those most like themselves, with profound consequences.
The resulting drop in social mobility and increased isolation between groups means that problems are emerging in areas from employment to health, costing the UK the equivalent of 0.5 per cent of GDP.
The Social Integration Commission, whose panel members also include the Wellington College headmaster Anthony Seldon, former Equalities and Human Rights Commission chair Trevor Phillips, and Oxford University psychologist Professor Miles Hewstone, was set up by The Challenge charity to report on how the UK can improve its record for social mobility and inter-community contact.
Experts cite schools as one of the best places to foster social integration, but Mr Taylor believes this opportunity is often being missed.
Matthew Taylor, chair of the Social Integration Commission (Teri Pengilley)
“Colleges and universities are pretty good at mixing people but schools aren’t very good at mixing people,” he said. “That’s for two reasons, firstly because schools are too divided in their intake and not enough is being done to overcome that.
“Secondly, even when the kids do arrive in the school, very often the schools don’t pay sufficient attention to the fact that there are very, very different groups in the playground and they don’t attend to the need to bring them together.”
He added: “One of the ways in which we should be preparing young people for the world in which they’re going to live is getting them used to and relaxed about mixing with people from different classes, different ages and different ethnicities.”
He cautioned that without action on integration, Britain’s society would be characterised by “ugly” divisions.
“Britain’s becoming more diverse and if we don’t think about this and we’re not willing to act on it, the danger is that we’ll become more separate…. There’ll be far too many places which feel like they’re just for the well-off and far too many places which feel like they’re just for the poor; there’ll be far too many schools which feel like they’re just for one minority group or just for one social class.”
Muslim faith schools were singled out by Mr Taylor as having a particular problem. “We have to recognise that Muslim faith schools seem to be much more monocultural than Catholic faith schools or Church of England faith schools.
“It’s a very difficult policy because if you have Catholic and Church of England faith schools you can’t really deny the need for Muslim faith schools, but there is a different character, they tend to be much less diverse.”
He said he does not advocate banning faith schools, but believes they should be more carefully checked for their integration efforts.
Continue reading The Independent...