Promoting community cohesion through schools 

26 November 2007

Good morning. I'm delighted to be here this morning, and delighted that the Runnymede Trust and the Department for Children, Schools and Families has chosen to hold this conference on promoting community cohesion through schools.

I guess you could use "promoting community cohesion" as a partial summary of  one aspect  of what the new Equality and Human Rights Commission, the organisation I chair, is here to do - our so-called good relations mandate which sits next to our responsibility for equality and human rights. We take our responsibilities very seriously.

I don't intend to say anything further about the speakers at the Oxford Union debate tonight, but I do want to say something about the defence offered by the Union Society.

I agree with the Conservative MP Julian Lewis that it is not a matter of free speech. I have had the privilege of speaking at the Union myself, but the fact is that most people have not and will never be invited. It is not a human right, which is why it is absurd to pretend that this is anything more than a wilful stunt. What is shabby about this is that it is trivialising a profoundly important value. Free speech debates should be about things that matter.

If the Oxford Union really wanted to address the issue of seriously I wonder why they have had absolutely nothing to say about the most egregious suppression of free speech in a democracy in recent times, and one to which they should be especially sensitive. A former President of the Oxford Union, Benazir Bhutto, just days ago was held under house arrest and prevented from expressing her views as the leader of a legitimate political party. That is a serious matter, and that is what we might expect people who are serious about free speech to be worried about.

Or if they wanted to give a voice to the voiceless why not do something truly radical? Have your debate - but not in the warm oak panelled surroundings of the Oxford Union, preceded by a glass of sherry and fine wine. Instead, take the Union Society on a day trip to Barking, or to Burnley or to Oldham and debate it with people who know what it means to be menaced by the BNP. Surely, it is not Nick Griffin who needs the platform - it is the hundreds of thousands of voiceless citizens on whose anxiety he is cynically trading.

The Commission, as you know, is tasked with promoting equality and human rights, and tackling discrimination, for everyone. We take on responsibility - and experience, expertise and authority - from our predecessors, the Commission for Racial Equality, the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Disability Rights Commission.

And we also take on new responsibilities for age, sexual orientation and religion and belief.

In just one week, we at the Commission – our Helpline, our staff and our Commissioners - can be asked to offer our views, clarify the law or give guidance on subjects as various as:

• how to tackle gang culture amongst young people
• how better to ensure dignity and respect for people in care, both old and young
• what constitutes discrimination against women, pregnant or otherwise   
• whether an employer can refuse to employ a hairdresser who wears the veil
• whether a black man who was stopped outside his own flat by police who believed him to be a burglar was a victim of discrimination
• what legal rights should be afforded to carers
• whether a town in England should be allowed to display 'No Popery' banners on Bonfire Night
• whether a public authority should prioritise English translations or more English classes
• what are the implications of the law on abortion for the way in which we discharge our duties to disabled people under statute
• and looking forward, if insurance companies should be allowed to read your DNA and see whether you have a predisposition to some disabling condition, and if so whether they should be permitted to load your premiums for the risk that you might one day develop the condition that you don't currently have - or would this be yet a new dimension of inequality that should be outlawed?

In this new world, we confront novel questions every day. And if we are to become the society we all want - one built on fairness, dignity and respect, confident in all aspects of its diversity, we have work to do. Above all, we must not allow difference to become an explanation for inequality.

This a common, and increasingly difficult theme in public life today. The reason is that questions of how we live together at a time when human difference in Western societies are becoming more significant - both objectively and subjectively are inescapable. In this age of difference, community cohesion becomes more complicated - but even more vital.

And I would like to explain in a little more detail what I mean by when I say we are living in a world of increasing diversity and difference.

Its most obviously unsettling manifestation today arises from differences based on ethnic, racial and religious diversity. But these changes are here for good - that is why our response to them is so important.

In today’s era of globalization, the speed, scale and impact of the movement of capital is now paralleled by the movement of people across the planet. 227 people million pass through our airports, 30 million of them staying to visit, study or work. Globally, the UN reckons that some 200 million people live and work outside the country of their birth.

Immigration has become today's litmus test political issue, because it so clearly reflects the rapidity of change in our world. Until about two decades ago, we used to worry about single groups of immigrants, usually from the old empire, distinguished by the fact that they were mostly dark-skinned, spoke English and thought of themselves as British people moving to their mother country. They arrived in discrete waves, one after the other. The signature wave would be the Windrush migrants like my own parents - Caribbean nurses and later Indian corner shop owners.

In today's post-imperial, post Cold War world, we face migration that comes from all corners, in all colours and speaks many languages. And they are all arriving at the same time. The signature migrants now are the Polish plumber and the Filipino nanny.

You could say we have moved from serial and imperial immigration to parallel and polyglot migration.

And it all happens much faster than before. Half of all current migrants arrived in the UK in the last generation and a third in the last decade. Today, one in four babies born in Britain has a foreign parent. Latest figures from the ONS tell us that our population will increase to 65m by 2015 and to 71m by 2030, largely driven by immigration. There are even larger figures being floated daily in the media. It's worth saying that we have never before hit the estimates - but the trend is clear.

It is not only the volume but also the diversity of immigration that is significant. That is why even the 17 ethnic Census categories used in 2001 now look pretty crude, when we consider that a single category - African -  covers Birmingham born sons of Somali herdsmen and Ghanaian barristers, another Polish electricians and South African doctors - unless of course the doctors are not white in which case they belong to yet another category.

And there is one further factor that means that cultural differences which might have, in the past, disappeared within a generation may not now do so. Modern communications mean that migrants will never again have to lose touch with the land of their heritage. The average length of stay - which used to be over 20 years is falling rapidly as Polish and other migrants commute from Wolverhampton to Warsaw.

And indeed it is the very ease of with which people and funds move that makes this new type of migration so much part of our new world.

 In 2006, migrants worldwide sent home an estimated $269 billion in remittances - more than twice the official aid received by developing countries. Money transfers have turned Western Union - the company we know from cowboy movies because they used to send the telegrams to the next town saying "bad guys about to ride into Dodge City" - into one of the most profitable companies on the planet, with revenues rising from $2.7 billion to over $4.5 billion last year.

In the USA the level of remittances to Mexico alone has, according tot he Financial Times, reached $US23bn each year. And these figures only represent official, recorded amounts of money. They don't even begin to account for the money sent back through informal channels in internet cafes and grocery stores, which some studies estimate could raise the figure by a further fifty per cent.

Immigration has changed the colour and culture of our society and is changing it faster every year.

All that said, we are no longer a country which instinctively reacts against diversity.

To use a gardening metaphor, we no longer insist on the old-style formal garden, with dull, monochrome displays, divided by rigid paved paths. We now see the aesthetic value of the mixed bed, both variety and colour; and we’ve long understood that hybrid vigour – in human terms, diversity of species – is the essence of the robust, adaptable, garden. This is increasingly true of most successful modern societies.

However as every gardener accepts, we can’t go from here to there in one season, unless we rip up the garden and start all over again by importing completely new stock – an option not open to us in most human communities.

But stretching metaphor unacceptably for the moment, educational institutions give us the chance perhaps to start breaking down the rigid lines of the formal, rigidly plotted, segregated garden.

In 2003, early in my time at the Commission for Racial Equality, I paid a series of visits to some of the Northern English towns which had experienced disturbances in 2001. Most of these towns were deeply segregated by race, and remain so.

Yet meeting young people in a sixth form college in Oldham, I was struck by the fact that there was a certain ease of interaction across the lines of colour and faith amongst these teenagers.

When I talked to both Asian and white students about this, they all said the same thing of the other group: “We get on fine at college, but between Friday afternoon and Monday morning we never see them”. The fact is when there wasn’t a transcending reason to come together, they stuck to their own side of town. But in the safe and neutral environment of college they found a common identity as students. 

There were direct parallels when I visited an integrated school in Northern Ireland last week where school was the only opportunity for these young people to interact. What was striking by the way was the degree to which the students' positive experience contrasted with the continuing divisions in their communities.

One primary school head teacher told me that that very week, a so-called peace wall was being built between the two communities locally, and that it ran right alongside the school itself.

Yet despite the difficulties, there is no question in my mind - or it seems in theirs, by the way - that the 62 integrated schools represent a good future for Northern Ireland.

I was listening to the young people here from Leicester today and the point here is that the demands of education may be for many the only lever that offers any of us the opportunity to step outside our essentialist communities, and to develop our full potential. In short education can give us the opportunity to remember that we have more in common than divides us.

And this lesson isn’t just one for the young.

A few years ago I visited a local day centre for the elderly on an estate which had previously been largely white. Asian families had recently moved in and the local council had made strenuous efforts to integrate the day centre. Their success was limited at first; the Asian elders showed up but sat and ate separately. But by the time I visited all that had changed. I asked a group of older ladies what had made the difference.

They offered several somewhat unconvincing reasons. And then one rather brave lady turned to me and said, “Look it’s like this. We eventually started to talk about our families, and naturally we talked about our sons. And we discovered that we had one great thing in common."

“What was that” I asked. She leant forward and said "We all knew that our sons had married the wrong woman”.

Sometimes we can find our common ground in surprising places.

But education institutions are the living embodiment of the fundamental proposition that we can find more to share than to quarrel about, given the chance. Even schools, colleges and universities where people study exclusively with people from the same backgrounds as themselves can still provide spaces where we can learn about people who are different from us.

That of course is one reason why the Commission for Racial Equality  in 2006 made the suggestion of a duty on community cohesion as part of the Education and Inspection Bill. I am pleased to say that this was accepted by Ministers and introduced.

We do have some reservations however. Guidance so far has been somewhat sketchy and weak. In the context where CRE surveys have shown that schools are far from able to develop effective Race Equality Policies, we will be looking to some extra attention from our friends at OFSTED in this area.

For example a school that puts this new duty central should be working not only on external relations ( with parents, voluntary organisations, local community groups) but applying it systematically in terms of its access policy, trying to attract pupils from all communities.

So what advice can schools and others expect from the new Commission?

Let me return to the gardening metaphor I used earlier.

I would suggest that in our educational garden there are three features that would characterise a successful approach to building an integrated education system.

First, we avoid making things worse by planting new dividing lines.

In England and Wales, we know from work carried out at Bristol University that schools are typically more segregated than the area in which they are located. This arises from the operation of parental choice. There is nothing wrong with offering parents more choice; but there should be levers in the system that prevent the aggregate effect of many choices leading to a spiral of separation.

In some towns in England, for example Oldham, consideration is now being given to location of new city academies with a specific aim of ensuring that the schools are shared by districts with very different ethnic compositions. This can be done through relatively simple adjustments to the planning regime, and though it may cause some doubts to start with I believe that in the long term it will lead to better schools overall – which is what all families want.

Second, we don’t have to dig up the whole garden at once. We can do this step by step.

The government has now announced a £3 million school twinning project in an effort to break down barriers. Last week I was in Bristol, talking to Council leaders concerned about ethnic divisions between schools and the gang culture that often goes with them. Some schools are almost 100 per cent white. Others, for example in the inner city, have high ethnic minority populations. Last year they acknowledged that disaffected young people – especially young white men – perpetrate the majority of the reported racist incidents in the city.

So what have they done about it? 

The Council has developed a school twinning project in which children from different schools had sessions in school time to discuss issues around diversity, difference and culture. They believe that in time this will bridge some of the gaps.

Kirklees provides another example. It has over 90 primary schools which are effectively mono-cultural. Through a school twinning project that brought together pupils from different backgrounds together to share and experience different cultures, children made new friends with people who were different to them.

What they say, and I’ve seen this happen elsewhere, is that this prevents the establishment of stereotypes that many of us think are ridiculous, but which are widely believed - for example, the idea that skin colour determines religious affiliation.

The Scottish Government, as part of a programme in schools to tackle sectarianism has recently published a guide to twinning between denominational and non-denominational schools.

 In Northern Ireland, the Department of Education has under the Education for Mutual Understanding programme promoted in all kinds of schools the development of educational programmes to encourage better community relations, including a statutory requirement to include within school curricula themes such as fostering respect and dealing creatively with conflict .

All of these initiatives are based on the fundamental hypothesis that what we have in common is greater and more powerful than our differences.

Finally, (and my gardening metaphor is about to break down irretrievably here) we shouldn’t think about integration by colour, or species, but by class.

We will never be a society confident with our own diversity as long as some are disproportionately disadvantaged. Diversity coupled with unity enriches our society; but difference allowed to fuel inequality is capable of destroying it. And socio-economic division, or as we used to call it, class, still throws up the greatest inequalities.

 Addressing class difference is critical to our ambition to challenge the iron law that an infant's start in life would be conditioned by who his or her parents were; that children’s achievements and talents should be constrained by the circumstances of the households in which they grew up; and that young men and women should have no larger ambition or opportunity than that afforded to their parents.

And here we could get really radical.

In 2000, the local education authority in Wake County, North Carolina took the decision to abandon its policy of trying to mix students by race, and instead opted to mix them by economic background.  Some 40 districts across the USA have followed suit, using free school meals as a proxy for poverty.

The system doesn’t single out individual students. The districts are divided into hundreds of small units, each classified by the number of children who qualify for free school meals. The goal is to ensure that no school has more than a certain percentage on free school meals; or more than a quarter underperforming on regular tests. The balancing of numbers is achieved by moving a whole unit of children rather than an individual.

In Wake County something exceptional has happened. Despite overcrowding, and a 45% non-white mix, the county’s schools are performing so well that white families are now returning from the suburbs.

There's more than one way to grow a garden, and over the rest of today's conference you'll hear a range of ideas about what works and what doesn't, and I'm sure there will be plenty of opportunities to ask the experts, Gardener's Question Time-style. But the prospect of a diverse garden, with flowers and plants all blooming in their own way, each setting off the beauty of the other, is one we can all work towards. I hope I've planted a few seeds.

Thank you.