The political and policy responses to migration related diversity in Britain's education system - German Education Server

The political and policy responses to migration related diversity in Britain's education system

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This report examines the ways in which migration related diversity in Britain has given rise to educational challenges; how these have been addressed in the past and how the responses to present challenges maybe indicative of a broader approach to minority cultural differences. One way of exploring the impact of migration related diversity in education is to focus upon examples of ‘difference’ specific education as inclusion - not separatism - that have assumed the greatest prominence in each respective national frame. In particular, these should focus upon those cases or mobilisations that have been/are concerned with the promotion or recognition of minority differences with a view to pluralizing or ‘broadening’ the national culture. With this in mind section two contextualises the current educational challenges of the schooling of ethnic minority children in the debates between advocates of anti-racist education and multicultural education, their specific political imperatives and their policy implications. It notes how this praxis was effected by a centralising government that introduced a compulsory national school curriculum which accounted for the majority of what would be taught in schools; embedding the use of national school league tables as a measure of a school’s success and strengthening the role of ‘parental choice’. Section three then considers the recent policy shift toward Citizenship Education, specifically its provenance, imperatives and to what extent it is a rejection or incorporation of what has preceded it. In section four we move to the issue of religiously or culturally specific schools within the publicly funded sector. We particularly focus upon the motivation for these mobilisations; the debates they have been party to, along with the extent of state accommodation or non-accommodation of this claims-making. Section five concludes on whether the earlier findings are supported in the current public policy discourse and praxis responding to the challenges of migration related diversity in education.