A multi-cultural approach to changing education
A NEW policy aimed at helping Staffordshire schoolchildren of all cultures and backgrounds to grow up in the cosmopolitan society of 1986 was drawn up by county education experts.
Its main aims were to eliminate racial discrimination, promote good relations between people from different racial groups and encourage equality of opportunity.
The policy, which was revealed in December 1986, amounted to a major rethink of how pupils from different cultures should be taught in local schools.
County schools sub-committee chairman councillor Roger White, said: “In Staffordshire, the changing ethnic composition of society has been most clearly marked in those urban areas where workers from the Commonwealth settled with their families in the decades following the Second World War.
“In those days the education service sought to respond to the presence of pupils and parents with little or no fluency in English by providing intensive language courses.
“The intentions behind this were admirable – to advance opportunities for educational, social and economic achievement – but for a number of reasons, those measures turned out to be grossly inadequate.
“The fundamental change that is necessary is the recognition that the problem facing the education system is not how to educate children of ethnic minorities but how to educate all children.
“Britain is a multicultural society and our new policy is aimed at helping youngsters to grow up in an atmosphere of tolerance and understanding.
“It is only by cultivating a climate in which all children can feel secure and achieve the highest standards of which they are capable that schools can begin to offer anything approaching the equality of opportunity to which they are all entitled.
“We believe our policy will help schools, colleges and individual teachers to prepare students for life in a multicultural society and we are asking everyone involved to give it their full support.”