A new piece of research into diversity in education, from the Economic and Social Research Council, has found that the Government’s insistence on “parental choice” in schooling may lead to a rapid breakdown in social cohesion. The idea of twinning schools is also dismissed as counterproductive. The research, carried out by Irene Bruegel and Susie Weller of London South Bank University, found that:
* Primary school children had difficulty recognising different
ethnicity and rarely referred to it.
* In primary classes where at least a third of the children were
from minority backgrounds there was far greater evidence of mixed
ethnicity friendships carrying over to secondary school friendships.
Where eighty per cent of the children were white they were significantly
less likely to make friends at secondary school across racial divides.
Children from the less mixed primary schools were described as ‘distinctly
different’. None felt that Muslim or Asian children were ‘picked
on’ in their local neighbourhood.
* Ethnic minority children are also far more likely to make and
retain inter-ethnic relationships where they are not in a majority
in their primary schools.
* Children who went to Catholic primary schools were more likely
to be in ethnically homogenous classes, compared with other children
living in the immediate locality, but that this was not the case
for those at CofE primary schools in the areas that were studied.
* Less than half the Muslim children (49%) said that their parents
knew those of their friends compared with 74% of non-Muslims. This
seemed to be because they took their friends home less, whether
or not they were Muslim
* Special sessions mixing children from different primary schools
did not have anything like the same effect as day to day contact.
White children in the former case still referred to the children
they met as ‘coming from the brown school’ and could not
remember their names, as ‘too difficult’.
* The study also found that aspirant parents use their contacts
and spending power in an effort to influence the child’s future
social milieu.
Professor Irene Bruegel of the Families and Social capital Research Group at South Bank said today, “Proposals in the Education Act reinforcing parental choice could undermine rather than improve social cohesion.”
Keith Porteous Wood of the NSS commented: “Surely if the Minister for Communities won’t listen to what we have been saying for years, she’ll have to take notice now that it has been confirmed by this independent and thorough research. The Government is going to have some hard thinking to do, and it must put its damaging religious biases aside.”