The answer to David Edmonds’ question is no: ethnic conflict cannot be solved by enforced interaction (The school teaching a divided town to live together, 5 November). Learning to live together in a shared school is only possible if parents really want it to work. It is for them as much as for their children. This is the lesson learned by those of us who supported integrated education in Northern Ireland. Integrated schools must have planned, shared structures, where different communities’ teachers, pupils and parents are balanced. It needs real conviction – and the support of the wider community. Ethnicity, religion and class are woven from the same cloth. Are churches in Oldham – and beyond –supporting Waterhead academy? Olivia and Radiyah’s student friendship is a sign of hope. But can individual psychology scores truly reflect religious and ethnic relations in a town already divided by selective grammar and faith schools?
Chris Moffat
Canterbury
I read with interest David Edmonds’ detailed and well-researched article. During the period covered by the article, I was a school improvement adviser for Oldham council with a specific brief re ethnic minority achievement and community cohesion. In relation to contact theory, and the research carried out into attitudes to the “invisible German”, it is significant that the group that had worked with the stereotypical Heinrich developed more positive attitudes to Germans in general than those who had worked with the atypical and anglicised Anthony. Cultural identity needs to be well determined and not watered down for a true meeting to take place.
What is equally – if not more – significant is that the participants in this experiment carried out cooperative tasks and had constructive contact with the invisible German. So, it is clearly not enough simply to bring people together for attitudinal change to take place. It is what they do together, when they are together, that is crucial. In the school context, this relates to the curriculum content and the approaches to teaching and learning they are exposed to.
In Oldham we had a very successful project linking primary schools with very different ethnic group makeups. One of the most effective links focused on shared philosophy for children sessions, in which children explored together concepts and themes significant to their lives, developing critical as well as caring and collaborative thinking. Philosophy for children was also used successfully at both Breeze Hill and Counthill, the two parent schools to Waterhead.
In 2010–12, when Waterhead academy was nominally in place, but on still “segregated” campuses, a working group of advisory colleagues and teachers from Oldham secondary schools, including Waterhead, developed a new curriculum resource for secondary schools entitled “The Oldham story: lessons in history, identity and conflict”. This challenges students to explore together the similar stories of migration and settlement into Oldham of Irish immigrants in the 1840s and immigrants from Pakistan in the 1960s and 70s. Similar in that both groups departed their native land to escape rural poverty as a reality, or legacy, of British colonial rule. Similar, in that both groups, on arrival in Oldham, experienced poor and segregated housing, low wages and hostility (sometimes violent) to their linguistic, cultural and religious identities.
The resource also invites students to share some personal information and their own – and their families’ – experiences of moves and migrations big and small. One section explores our common history of the one human race in the first migrations “out of Africa”.
While it is touching that the two girls in the article share a love of purple, this “commonality” remains at a bland and superficial level. If we are to maximise the potential for attitudinal change, children and young people need to have opportunities to explore their histories and experiences that may on the surface seem different but which more profoundly are common. They also need to be exposed to methodologies (like philosophy for children) that provide a safe space for collaborative dialogue and inquiry and a real meeting of hearts and minds.
It is encouraging that there have been positive developments at Waterhead in terms of attitudinal change. It would be useful to know if the school is using the kinds of curriculum content and teaching and learning methods outlined in this letter, and whether the positive developments could be accelerated further by using them.
Richard Gore
Manchester
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