Sir Peter Hall,
Regeneration & Renewal,
20 July 2009
Let's get one thing straight: we're all in favour of increasing diversity wherever we can.
So, when the Royal Town Planning Institute circulated a message a few weeks ago, asking all of us in university planning schools to declare our ethnic origins, I opted for Irish Traveller. Apart from its romantic-sounding quality, it's at least part-accurate: one quarter of my ancestry hails from the O'Keefes of County Cork, and I hold a British Airways frequent traveller gold card, the one you get when you spend more time in the air than on the ground. In any case, it should spice up the statistics.
But the point this week is rather more serious: a report from think-tank the Institute of Community Cohesion looked at schools in places ranging from Hounslow and Bristol in the South to Bolton and Oldham in the North, and found that they're becoming more racially segregated. The underlying reason is the same that a group of us found in researching one of those areas, Hounslow, which we reported in the 2007 book London Voices London Lives: many parents want their children to be educated in diverse schools, but get alarmed if there's a sudden surge in the numbers of one particular group. Their reaction could be crudely caricatured as "white flight" - and, almost inevitably, that was the headline to the newspaper stories on the report. But, ironically, their motivation is almost the reverse of the popular connotation of that term: rather than leaving for a white monoculture, they are seeking a school with greater diversity.
The study's main author is Professor Ted Cantle, best known for a report for the Government eight years ago after the riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford. Then, he recommended that faith schools should open at least a quarter of their places to pupils from different backgrounds. But, after lobbying from religious organisations, the Government replaced his recommendation with a vague duty on schools to promote community cohesion.
Now, he suggests a variant: allocating inner-city school places by lottery. But some faith schools in Blackburn, where the council commissioned the new report, have already said they won't change their policies. Cantle remains adamant that faith schools in places such as Blackburn, with their large Muslim populations, remain "a source of division which have to be overcome".
This is a heavily politicised debate. And a Labour government, fighting for its political life less than a year before a general election and highly dependent on Muslim voters in northern towns, may now be even less inclined to grasp this particular nettle. But David Cameron, less sensitive to such considerations, might not be so inhibited.
- Sir Peter Hall is (Bartlett) Professor of Planning and Regeneration, University College London. Email: sir.peter.hall@haymarket.com
