<font size="5"><center>Segregated schools 'breeding extremism'</font size></center>
Trevor Phillips: 'We are
reaching US levels of
segregation'
The Telegraph (London)
By Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor
(Filed: 23/09/2005)
School catchment areas should be drawn up to avoid the segregation of races and counter the increasing "ghettoisation" of Britain's cities, Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, said last night.
He said he feared that a generation of pupils of different races was growing up who were "strangers to each other" because they attended separate schools and rarely came into contact. Such divisions provided "fertile breeding ground" for extremists, he warned.
Mr Phillips said that far from leading the way in integrating minorities into mainstream society, schools were even more segregated than their wider neighbourhoods. In one borough where about one third of the population was from ethnic minorities, some schools were almost entirely made up of pupils from such backgrounds.
"That cannot be right," Mr Phillips said. He added that he believed the problem extended to universities and colleges.
"In our best universities, people who come from ethnic minority backgrounds walk on to the campus, they look around, don't see anyone who looks like themselves. What do you expect them to do? They're not going to choose to go to those places," he said on the BBC.
While Mr Phillips rejected positive discrimination or quotas in education to enforce diversity, he called for "creative solutions, maybe look at the way we draw catchment areas, maybe combining sixth forms at some point".
Mr Phillips was speaking ahead of a well-trailed speech to the Manchester Council for Community Relations last night in which he voiced concern that the country was drifting towards "New Orleans-style" racial divides.
"As a country, we are not talking across the ethnic, religious and colour lines," he said. "There is more residential segregation, we are reaching US levels. We are not making friends across the colour line. When we leave work, we leave multi-ethnic Britain behind. We are going in the wrong direction. Our worry is that this is fertile breeding ground for extremists."
Mr Phillips, who has blamed years of "multiculturalism" for driving communities apart, was accused of "headline grabbing" by Lord Ahmed, a Labour peer.
He said: "I think that Trevor Phillips has been insensitive to start a debate when the Muslim community is facing one of its biggest challenges in 50 years. I don't think Trevor Phillips visits much of Britain outside the M25.
"I travel around the country and I see many, many very good examples of communities living together very happily and they're very successful."
Mohammed Shafiq, of the Liberal Democrats' Muslim Forum, maintained that multiculturalism had been a success and he called Mr Phillips's comments "inflammatory and offensive".
His speech last night had echoes of an official report into the race riots in northern England in 2001, which said different races were living "parallel lives". Mr Phillips said some communities had become "marooned outside the mainstream" and were on their way to becoming "literal black holes into which nobody goes without fear and from which nobody escapes undamaged".
Although there has been some integration, notably in London and the South-East, in many parts of the country ethnic minorities largely live in separate areas, and are typically segregated at school and socially. CRE research shows that most Britons cannot name a "single good friend" from a different race and that many young people from ethnic minorities have no friends beyond their own community.
Mr Phillips argued that the multiculturalist tolerance of diversity had hardened into the effective isolation of communities in which some people thought special separate values ought to apply, allowing traditional British tenets of free speech and family to be eroded.
A recent analysis of census data by experts at Sheffield University found that in five areas of London more than 45 per cent of the population had been born abroad. Outside London, areas such as Sparkbrook in Birmingham and Belgrave in Leicester had populations with more than 30 per cent of people not born in the UK.
When British born ethnic minorities are taken into account, the ethnic "ghettos" become even starker. Between 1991 and 2001, the number of Pakistani heritage people in ghetto communities, defined as districts with over two -thirds concentration of any one ethnicity, trebled.
However, some experts contest Mr Phillips's analysis. Prof Ceri Peach, of St Catherine's College, Oxford, and author of a study of ethnic geography based on the 1991 census, believes segregation has lessened over the past 40 years, though some Asian-dominated enclaves remain, particularly in northern cities.
So-called "white flight" from the cities is also having an impact by leaving predominantly minority communities behind - though recent research suggests this a middle-class, rather than racial, phenomenon.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/mai...23.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/09/23/ixnewstop.html
Trevor Phillips: 'We are
reaching US levels of
segregation'
The Telegraph (London)
By Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor
(Filed: 23/09/2005)
School catchment areas should be drawn up to avoid the segregation of races and counter the increasing "ghettoisation" of Britain's cities, Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, said last night.
He said he feared that a generation of pupils of different races was growing up who were "strangers to each other" because they attended separate schools and rarely came into contact. Such divisions provided "fertile breeding ground" for extremists, he warned.
Mr Phillips said that far from leading the way in integrating minorities into mainstream society, schools were even more segregated than their wider neighbourhoods. In one borough where about one third of the population was from ethnic minorities, some schools were almost entirely made up of pupils from such backgrounds.
"That cannot be right," Mr Phillips said. He added that he believed the problem extended to universities and colleges.
"In our best universities, people who come from ethnic minority backgrounds walk on to the campus, they look around, don't see anyone who looks like themselves. What do you expect them to do? They're not going to choose to go to those places," he said on the BBC.
While Mr Phillips rejected positive discrimination or quotas in education to enforce diversity, he called for "creative solutions, maybe look at the way we draw catchment areas, maybe combining sixth forms at some point".
Mr Phillips was speaking ahead of a well-trailed speech to the Manchester Council for Community Relations last night in which he voiced concern that the country was drifting towards "New Orleans-style" racial divides.
"As a country, we are not talking across the ethnic, religious and colour lines," he said. "There is more residential segregation, we are reaching US levels. We are not making friends across the colour line. When we leave work, we leave multi-ethnic Britain behind. We are going in the wrong direction. Our worry is that this is fertile breeding ground for extremists."
Mr Phillips, who has blamed years of "multiculturalism" for driving communities apart, was accused of "headline grabbing" by Lord Ahmed, a Labour peer.
He said: "I think that Trevor Phillips has been insensitive to start a debate when the Muslim community is facing one of its biggest challenges in 50 years. I don't think Trevor Phillips visits much of Britain outside the M25.
"I travel around the country and I see many, many very good examples of communities living together very happily and they're very successful."
Mohammed Shafiq, of the Liberal Democrats' Muslim Forum, maintained that multiculturalism had been a success and he called Mr Phillips's comments "inflammatory and offensive".
His speech last night had echoes of an official report into the race riots in northern England in 2001, which said different races were living "parallel lives". Mr Phillips said some communities had become "marooned outside the mainstream" and were on their way to becoming "literal black holes into which nobody goes without fear and from which nobody escapes undamaged".
Although there has been some integration, notably in London and the South-East, in many parts of the country ethnic minorities largely live in separate areas, and are typically segregated at school and socially. CRE research shows that most Britons cannot name a "single good friend" from a different race and that many young people from ethnic minorities have no friends beyond their own community.
Mr Phillips argued that the multiculturalist tolerance of diversity had hardened into the effective isolation of communities in which some people thought special separate values ought to apply, allowing traditional British tenets of free speech and family to be eroded.
A recent analysis of census data by experts at Sheffield University found that in five areas of London more than 45 per cent of the population had been born abroad. Outside London, areas such as Sparkbrook in Birmingham and Belgrave in Leicester had populations with more than 30 per cent of people not born in the UK.
When British born ethnic minorities are taken into account, the ethnic "ghettos" become even starker. Between 1991 and 2001, the number of Pakistani heritage people in ghetto communities, defined as districts with over two -thirds concentration of any one ethnicity, trebled.
However, some experts contest Mr Phillips's analysis. Prof Ceri Peach, of St Catherine's College, Oxford, and author of a study of ethnic geography based on the 1991 census, believes segregation has lessened over the past 40 years, though some Asian-dominated enclaves remain, particularly in northern cities.
So-called "white flight" from the cities is also having an impact by leaving predominantly minority communities behind - though recent research suggests this a middle-class, rather than racial, phenomenon.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/mai...23.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/09/23/ixnewstop.html
