Introduction

Access to education, once confined to a small privileged section of the population, is now a right for all. Indeed, children in most countries are required to attend school until a determined age. Consequently, schools have to cater for a child population coming from a wide variety of social backgrounds and experiences. As a result, the educational system is constantly subject to pressures, internal and external, arising from the diversity of often competing demands that society makes upon it. Solutions to these pressures take many forms, embracing a spectrum from specific operations in classrooms to blind faith at policy levels. Policy statements express these beliefs: in education as a process that maximises individual potential; and, at the other end of the scale, faith in the power of education to change society for the better.

One of the many elements in the debate about priorities in such a heterogeneous system of beliefs is the adequacy of existing provision to a particular type of child. One such type is the “ethnic minority child”; others include the “gifted child” and the “educationally subnormal child.” Although such labels tend to reduce children to ciphers and to discount the uniqueness of the individual's experience, categorisation is perhaps an inevitable consequence of seeking to emphasise the need for one particular aspect of educational provision. That type of concern is nevertheless consistent with the terms of the British 1944 Education Act, which marked the beginning of the operationalisation of the ideal of providing education for each child according to age, aptitude, and ability.

The explicit objectives of formal education vary in emphasis from society to society. Broadly speaking, they serve two interrelated functions.