Summary

The idea that ethnic segregation is growing in England is sometimes implied in Government-backed policy documents and reinforced by the media, notwithstanding empirical evidence to the contrary. This chapter introduces how debates about segregation have been framed, reproduced and applied to what is happening within schools. It notes a tendency to present segregation as something due to minority groups despite those groups becoming more spread out and living in more mixed neighbourhoods.

Introduction

This book provides a new study of segregation between ethnic groups across English state schools in the period from 2011 to 2017. It examines whether patterns of school-level segregation decreased or increased over the period, how those compare with patterns of residential segregation, their association with particular types of schools, and how geographies of ethnic segregation reflect geographies of social segregation. The study is important given the limited information about what is happening in terms of the patterns of ethnic segregation since 2011 (the data of the last national census) and – more especially – the enduring belief among some that segregation is both worsening and undermining social cohesion in the country.

Concerns about segregation rarely disappear, but on occasion they gain more prominence. Of recent note is the government-sponsored Casey Review: A Review into Opportunity and Integration. It reignited debate about whether Britain is becoming more socially and ethnically divided in ways that might undermine social integration and community cohesion (Casey, 2016). The review pays attention to schools, arguing that the school-age population is more ethnically segregated than its residential patterns of living.

Its findings have been influential. Drawing upon them, the Government's Integrated Communities Strategy Green Paper states that ‘in some areas, there is a relatively high degree of separation of pupils of different ethnicities across schools’ (HM Government, 2018: 11). Taking the suggestion that school segregation should be understood as the extent to which schools are representative of local populations, the social integration charity, The Challenge, undertook its own study of school segregation in England for the period from 2011 to 2016, reaching the conclusion that a quarter of primary and four in ten secondary schools were ‘ethnically segregated or potentially contributing to segregation’ (The Challenge, 2017: 13; but see Burgess and Harris, 2017 for a response to this claim).