New laws needed to ensure ethnic mix in schools, says headteacher

LEGISLATION is needed to stop one ethnicity taking over schools, a Bradford headteacher has said.

Sir Nick Weller, the executive principal at Dixons Academies, which runs a chain of schools in the West Yorkshire city, said that introducing a new law is the “only answer” to prevent children being segregated along ethnic lines. He said that it is “unhealthy” for a city like Bradford to have two communities living “separate lives” and for children to be educated at different schools.

“I think it’s unhealthy in a city like Bradford for two communities to live separate lives, which by and large they do,” he told Today on BBC Radio 4.

“You could say Bradford is almost two communities: the Muslim community and the white community.”

Sir Nick said that rather than sending children to the closest school, parents prefer to send them further away to where the majority of children are from the same ethnic background.

“Families will ignore the school that is nearest them because it is predominantly of one – the wrong ethnic group – and they will send them a little bit further down the road to a school where they feel more comfortable,” said Sir Nick, who was knighted in 2015 for his services to education.

Asked if there was a “tipping point” where the proportion of one community becomes so high in a school that others are deterred from sending their children there, he said: “I think once you get to sort of 70 to 80 per cent, once you get that, then yes.”

He said bringing in new legislation to prevent the dominance of one ethnic group would be the “only answer”, but added that the legal implications of doing so would be “very high”.

The Equality Act prohibits discrimination in employment or in the provision of training and education on the grounds on race and religion. Discrimination based on age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, sex and sexual orientation are also barred.