School race row 20 years on

Twenty years ago this month 26 families in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, launched a very public protest over the choice of primary school for their children.

The families were white. So too were most of the pupils at the school they had chosen. The intake at the school where their children were allotted places at the start of term was nearly 90% Asian.

So began one of the most controversial education race rows of recent decades - and one which uncovered issues that remain unresolved today. Both sides - parents and local education authority - were convinced they had right on their side.

Each accused the other of racial discrimination. Neither was prepared to give in. The case divided the local community - and national opinion.

Admissions

For the best part of a year, the 26 children caught up in the row had their lessons in an "schoolroom" set up by their parents in a public house.

They were taught by two sympathetic retired teachers while the parents, the local authority and their respective supporters slogged it out, initially through the media and later - when the parents sought a judicial review - through the courts.

The background to all this lay in the routine (though never so for parents) annual round of school admissions. That year, the local authority, Kirklees, was reorganising primary education in the Dewsbury area, and also managing falling school rolls.

Was it also trying to manipulate admissions to lessen the growing racial imbalance between some of its schools? Some suspected it was. The council denied it.

Either way, a larger than usual number of parents found themselves thwarted in their choice of schools in 1987.

If education locally was in flux, so too was the education mood in the country. The row counterpoised two big themes of the 1980s: multiculturalism and parental choice.

In 1985 the Swann Report recommended that education should reflect the growing range of cultures and races in Britain. But in 1987 Conservative education reforms about to go through parliament promised parents more choice.

Expectations were raised: local education authorities were about to have their wings clipped. But the changes were not yet law and the then education secretary, Kenneth Baker, was powerless to intervene.

Segregation

Visiting Dewsbury 20 years on, one is struck by how much - and how little - things have changed.

The pub which housed the protestors' schoolroom is now a madrassa where local Muslim children come each afternoon after regular school to study Islam. It is one of 50 in Kirklees, hugely popular with Muslim parents and apparently with their children too.

The two communities still live largely separate lives, in some ways more separate than ever.

Kirklees' minority ethnic - and largely Muslim - population has increased, but school integration has not. Two thirds of Kirklees primary schools have very little ethnic mix (that is, they are more than 90% white or, in some cases, 90% Asian).

This only partly reflects where families live. It is also a result of parental choice.

To anyone familiar with the variegated and cosmopolitan make-up of many schools in metropolitan areas like London or Birmingham, the separatism may seem shocking.

School twinning

Yet there is more awareness these days of the potential downsides of this pattern of schooling and greater willingness among the main political parties and community groups to find practical solutions.

Well before community sensitivities in Dewsbury were heightened by the revelation of the town's links to one of the 7 July bombers, the local authority had embarked on a school twinning programme, whereby white and Asian schools arrange regular exchange visits.

The children share lessons, play together, learn about the others' customs and religions. Even if they only learn to pronounce each others' names, something has been achieved.

But - as with the introduction of education for mutual understanding into the curriculum in Northern Ireland - the ambitions are bolder.

Segregated schooling in Northern Ireland is often cited as the example to beware of by those critical of successive governments' espousal of parental choice and school diversity.

The growth of faith schools and increasing opportunities for parents who wish to educate their children in line with religious and, by extension, cultural (but not ethnic) preferences has pleased some but alarmed others.

In the past couple of years especially, there has been a growing concern that choice and diversity may come at the price of community cohesion and integration.

Other reasons

The Dewsbury parents have always maintained that their argument was about choice, not racism, and indeed they shunned offers of support from the far right political parties. But the issues at stake were delicate and the boundary between where sense of identity ends and racial prejudice starts is hard to define.

Two of those on different sides of the fence in 1987 still believe the issue is fudged.

The secretary of the Kirklees branch of the National Union of Teachers, Howard Roberts, says "white flight" is increasingly a phenomenon, backed by the largely unchallenged laws on parental choice.

"Parents come out with all sorts of reasons why they don't want a particular school with a large Asian intake," he said.

"They may say they don't want a single-sex secondary school. Very few people will overtly state their real reasons."

Roger Peach of the Parental Alliance for Choice in Education, and solicitor to the parents, says that in 1987 the white parents had the support of many in the Asian community who sympathised with their stand on cultural identity.

"No-one wants hostility between communities, but a state can only go so far in getting citizens to abandon their idea of culture, above all where the education of their children is concerned."

Twenty years ago, the Dewsbury parents finally won their case in the High Court - not on the disputed matters of race and religion on which they had challenged the council but on a legal technicality relating to the admissions procedure.

Both sides declared moral vindication although in truth it was something of an anti-climax to a case which had encapsulated so many issues.

Those issues may still exist, but it is inconceivable that they would be fought over in the same way today.

Radio 4's Defiance in Dewsbury was broadcast on 17 September and is available at Radio 4's Listen again page.

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