An influential government education adviser said today that schools dominated by Muslim children should be closed and replaced with 'multi-faith' academies to integrate pupils.
Sir Cyril Taylor, chairman of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, said the concentration of ethnic minorities and religious groups in certain schools had created a 'strategic security problem'.
He said that allowing significant numbers of ethnic minority children to lead virtually separate lives was fuelling extremism and harming academic standards.
The call for forced integration came as a Government commissioned report is this week set to recommend that values such as justice and tolerance should be at the centre of citizenship classes for secondary pupils.
The citizenship curriculum review by former headmaster and Home Office adviser Sir Keith Ajegbo is expected to conclude that more emphasis should be placed on British identity and more must be done to proved the 'essential glue' that holds society together.
The SSAT has identified 20 urban areas it says could benefit from the closure of comprehensives dominated by a particular ethnic group.
Sir Cyril said: "In some parts of the country, for example, where children only speak Bangla at home and do not mix with other communities at school, it has become a real strategic security problem.
"They would be much more likely to collaborate with the police and tell them [whether] people within their own community are doing things they shouldn't be doing if they were better integrated.
"Where you have two schools, one that is predominantly white and the other that is majority Bangladeshi or Pakistani, the answer is to close them both and put them together in a new academy operating on a multifaith basis."
Source: Daily Mail (English), h/t Islam Info (Czech)
1 comment:
This is interesting.
Two issues that have faced us in the United States are racial segregation and language barriers.
Racial segregation was dealt with (with questionable effectiveness) by "bussing", sending kids from an area inhabited by one "ethinic" or "racial" group to schools where another group was the majority.
Language barriers are not being effectively dealt with. The education industry wants "bilingual education", which essentially means instruction in the student's native language, plus language training to learn English. The effectiveness of this approach has been widely questioned; many students never really learn English, and this is a tremendous disadvantage for them economically and socially.
Here, the concern is similar, but different: there is a long-term security issue based on the radical ideologies and political beliefs being taught in "religious" establishments.
Regardless, if the children aren't learning English, that is leaving them very disadvantaged for their future education, economic status, and so on. That alone is an argument powerful enough to trump many others, and swing the balance in favor of some kind of desegregation.
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