Call to tackle 'segregated' schools

Last updated at 15:41 22 January 2007


Schools which are dominated by children from Muslim families should be closed and replaced with "multi-faith" academies, a senior Government adviser has said.

Sir Cyril Taylor, chairman of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, said police faced problems in areas where different communities were concentrated in separate schools.

He suggested that such "segregated" schools should be replaced with privately sponsored academies, where the schools and communities concerned supported the change.

Sir Cyril told the Press Association: "We have a huge number of children in this country in schools which are, in effect, segregated.

"Hopefully, most people agree that that is not a good thing.

"How do you then resolve it? Obviously we have to do so by agreement. You can't enforce quotas on people or change catchment areas arbitrarily.

"But if you set up an academy programme it can be done on a multi-faith basis and if you have got agreement there is a good chance it will work."

One project is already planned in Oldham while it is hoped that the approach could spread to other "areas where ethnic minorities, especially Muslims, are concentrated".

These could include Bradford, Tower Hamlets in east London, Blackburn and Leeds.

Sir Cyril said police tackled IRA terrorism because members of the local Catholic and Protestant communities wanted an end to the violence.

"If you have segregated communities, even if they are British citizens, if they don't have normal relationships with the other members of the community, then I don't think you are going to get the sort of relationship with the community services, including the police, which you should have."

Sir Cyril told the Financial Times that the police faced "a real strategic security problem" in some parts of the country where, for example, children only speak Bangla at home and do not mix with other communities.

"They would be much more likely to collaborate with the police and tell them people within their own community are doing things they shouldn't be doing if they were better integrated," he told the paper.

He said that where an area has two schools, one dominated by children from Pakistani backgrounds and the other mainly white, for example, they should both be shut down and put together in a new academy.

The Department for Education and Skills distanced itself from Sir Cyril's proposal.

A DfES spokesman said: "Any suggestions of closing schools are wide of the mark.

"However, all schools can and should play a leading role in creating greater community cohesion.

"We are already supporting this through the Education and Inspections Act and Ofsted inspecting all schools on how they promote community cohesion."

The suggestion emerged ahead of a major Government report on citizenship education, to be published on Thursday.

The report from former headteacher Sir Keith Ajegbo will recommend reforms to citizenship lessons so all pupils study core "British values".

He will conclude that the citizenship curriculum does not place enough emphasis on British identity.

Lessons should be refocused to look at what constitutes "Britishness" and what brings British people together as a nation, his report will say.

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