Summary

The Casey Review cites a study by the think-tank Demos that shows the majority of ethnic minority students attend schools where ‘minority’ groups are in the majority. That statistic is correct but too easily misinterpreted. Only White British students typically are in a school where their own ethnic group forms a majority; for most ethnic minority pupils the largest group they will encounter at school is also the White British. The exceptions to this are the Bangladeshi and Pakistani groups, and more so in primary than in secondary schools. Nevertheless, the overwhelming trend is that schools are becoming more ethnically diverse with an increased potential for pupils to be educated alongside pupils of other ethnic groups.

Introduction

Nearly every LEA has become more ethnically diverse in terms of the overall characteristics of the pupils who attend its schools. However, until recently there has been a national decline in the number of White British of school age in the population and this has occurred during a period when the number of most other ethnic groups has increased. The result of these demographic changes is that whereas the White British now have more potential to be schooled with pupils from other ethnic groups (because the groups have spread out across England), those other ethnic groups are, relatively speaking, less exposed to the White British than before (because the White British have either not grown at the same rate or have had a numeric decline in some places). On face value those findings support what is written in The Casey Review and its claim that ‘as the diversity of the nation has increased […] people from minority groups have become both more dispersed and in some cases more concentrated and segregated’ (Casey, 2016: Executive Summary, para 29). In that claim, the association of segregation is with concentration – the idea the segregation is evidenced when people live in areas or are educated in schools where their own ethnic group forms a sizable percentage of the total number of residents or pupils. But where the quote says ‘some’, our initial findings suggest it would better be written as few, if a decrease in segregation is associated with increasing diversification.