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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 581-vi House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE
CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION
Wednesday 11 October 2006 MR TREVOR PHILLIPS OBE Evidence heard in Public Questions 438 - 489
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Education and Skills Committee on Wednesday 11 October 2006 Members present Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair Mr Douglas Carswell Jeff Ennis Paul Holmes Helen Jones Mr Gordon Marsden Fiona Mactaggart Stephen Williams Mr Rob Wilson ________________
Memorandum submitted by Commission for Racial Equality
Examination of Witnesses
Witness: Mr Trevor Phillips, Chair, Commission for Racial Equality, gave evidence. Q438 Chairman: Whilst people are settling down, can I warmly welcome Trevor Phillips to our proceedings. Trevor and I have known each other for a long time. As I always say to someone I have been friends with for a very long time, it does not mean to say I am going to be any nicer in the questioning! It is good to have you here. As I was saying a moment ago when I greeted you to the Committee, this is a very important inquiry for this Committee and it is a difficult inquiry, both in terms of shape and focus, but we are getting about halfway through the inquiry and we very much hope that, at the beginning of this new session, your evidence today will give us a chance to really put some shape on it, so welcome indeed. If you would like to take two or three minutes for opening remarks, you would be very welcome to do so. Mr Phillips: Chairman, thank you very much for that welcome. It is a privilege to be here before you, and I would say that this is an important question, not just for the Department for Education and Skills but, as I will say in my few remarks now, for the whole of government and the whole of civil society. I would also like to say thank you for the second bite of the cherry, if I can put it that way, since my colleagues, Mick Johnson and Mark Fellow, have already appeared before you in what, when I read the transcript, looked like quite a lively session. I look forward to the same today! It might help if I set out a few words on our over-arching view, because you put some questions to my colleagues which they as officers were not able to answer fully which I think I may be able to answer a little bit more. There are three questions which occur to me reading the transcript: first, why does citizenship education matter at all at present, second, to use the war reporter's terminology, you spent some time discussing the question of "embedded" or "unilateral" and, third, the relationship with identity. On the first question, we have taken to saying at the CRE that there are two great challenges for humanity, how we live with the planet and how we live with each other, and this is really about how we live with each other. Living together is made more difficult today by two new historic features, if you like. First, there are more of us who are more different encountering each other in greater numbers than ever before, migration numbers. The UN tells us 191 million people live and work outside their country of birth. For every two emigrants in this country today only one returns. For every two immigrants, only one leaves, and that means the composition of our population, if not its actual size, is changing quite rapidly, and we can that see that today there are 42 communities of more than 10,000 people of foreign heritage in this city alone. The second point is a wider point. We think that there is a new assertion of identity, not just ethnic, by the way, but also, for example, gender, in relation to sexual orientation by different groups of people in our society, and this is very important in relation to this issue of citizenship: because what this diversity, coupled with a new assertion of identity, means is that we need new codes of stability, new kinds of manners, new ways of understanding each other, and that is especially difficult in this country where the codes that enable us to live at ease with our neighbours tend to be unwritten, tend to be communicated through traditional means - close communities, families, church, the accepted authorities. Much of that has gone and that is why we need new ways, and that to me is one of the critical issues when we are thinking about citizenship. This is not old style civics; this is about how we live together. The second brief point I want to make is about the "embedded" verses "unilateral" question of how you deal with citizenship. The way that I look at this is as follows. Citizenship is best learned in action - community and volunteering, democracy within schools themselves, participation of political parties, and so on. In the past working class people found their voices in this country, for example, through trade unions, and so forth; but the reason for a formal setting of teaching is that, just as in other arenas, you cannot always take advantage of the practical unless you have got some grasp of the theory. Once upon a time I was a chemist and I could very easily follow the laboratory instructions, but without the knowledge of what a benzine molecule actually looks like, it is pretty hard to understand why it behaves in the way it does. Similarly, you could say anybody can survive in France for a year, but it transforms the experience if you can actually speak the language. So, the point here, I think, about teaching it separately, and so on, is very simply that, unless you have some of the basics of understanding of the way the society works, it is very hard, even if you do it in practice, to understand why things work the way they do. I was going to say something about the relationship of identity and Britishness, and so on, which you raised last time. That may not be appropriate today, but if you do want to ask me, I have got some words to say about that. Q439 Chairman: Thank you for that. There seems to be emerging (and I was thinking of this listening to Sir Bernard Crick when he was interviewed when Ofsted's recent report on citizenship came out) a difference of approach between what Bernard Crick sees as the citizenship agenda and yourself, Trevor. Do you see there is a difference in approach between yourself and Crick, or are we misunderstanding the way you approach citizenship compared to him? Mr Phillips: It is not entirely easy for me to tell whether there is a difference. I have to confess, I do not fully understand all of what Bernard wants to do. In some areas I think we coincide, in some areas I think we do not, but my slight problem with Bernard's approach is that, of course, his committee was very product-oriented, they wanted to create something - a booklet, and so on - and it is not entirely clear to me where some of what he wants to do stems from. However, if there is a difference, I think it probably is this. I think Crick puts quite a lot of faith in teaching and directiveness, and though I think - and I have said it in other places - that we need a core of Britishness, we need a shared set of ways of expressing our values, I do not think those can be handed down. I think the historic way in which we deal with this is through a kind of negotiation that takes place within a civic society. I guess, if I have a difference with Bernard, I think his approach tends to be, as the French would say, à long bras, it is handed down, there it is, that is how you are supposed live, and so on. I do not think, in this world of greater diversity and rapidly changing composition in society, it is any longer possible to do that. It used to be possible. You would go to church and the vicar would tell you how behave. I do not think that works any longer. If I have, not a criticism, but a question about Bernard's approach, I think that there is a missing bit about this, which is how and through what mechanisms and what means do we actually negotiate the codes of behaviour which mark citizenship. Q440 Chairman: Is that because Crick emphasises elements of the curriculum, courses, bits of particular history of our country, and you are much more interested the in ethos in a school? Mr Phillips: That is an interesting way of putting it. Let me be clear. I am not of the view that, for example, dates do not matter. I think dates do matter. I think we do need a common account. However, to misquote Alan Bennett, I do not think history is just one adjectival thing after another. The importance of history is what it tells us, how it interpret why we have got to be what we are today. So, my view about Bernard's idea, as it were, about capsules of knowledge, is that it is fine but it is not enough. Going back to what I said at the beginning, just as I think you cannot do the practical without the theory, I think the theory is pretty pointless without the practicality; so I think doing it is extremely important, which is why, for example, we talk quite a lot in more broad terms about democracy within schools but in our own specific sphere activities like summer camps for young people which bring together people of different backgrounds. Q441 Chairman: That is a more an ethos view, is it not? If you go into a school, Trevor, you have got a good head, a good principal, who actually knows what they want to deliver in terms of citizenship. I have been in schools where it is not necessary to have everything on the curriculum, it is imbued in the leadership and the ethos that the leadership of the school allows to suffuse that culture, but when I read your remarks, it sounds as though you are very much of that view. You prefer that, rather than having a certain number of hours per week or per term on a particular subject. Mr Phillips: Why I am resisting the word "ethos" is that I am a sort of practical person. We talk a lot about "practical identity" and "ethos" always sounds a little bit abstract to me, but I understand what you mean. For example (and I may be over-stressing it this morning), I think manners and etiquette are part of citizenship actually. The head teacher who says, "In this school we wear uniforms in a particular way and we do not run in the corridors", is also communicating something about citizenship if he or she does it properly, because they will be saying, "This is about how we live together. It is not just because I fancy it; it is about how we as a community live together." I guess what I am trying to emphasise is I think that there has to be a relationship between what you are taught and the lived experience. To come directly to the issue of curriculum, and perhaps we might return to this later, if we are thinking about history David Cameron, for example, has recently spoken, I think very persuasively, about the tradition of English dissent, that is to say that one of the reasons that we learn history is to tell us about that tradition. Why do we need to know about that tradition? We need to know about that tradition because it is a guide to the way that we act in this polity; what is the way that we do things. Why is this practically important? If you sit where I do and you deal a lot with new migrants, one of the things that becomes very clear, for example, at the Commission for Racial Equality is that there are many people who should avail themselves of the CRE's services but, because they come from countries where there is no tradition of questioning authority, when they know someone has discriminated against them they know it; there is no sense in them that they should and can appeal to an authority to give them remedy; and that is why, I think, that there is a relationship between what you are taught in history (and, by the way, I think there are similar issues in relation to geography, for example) and what you do. I am not trying to dodge your question, but I am resisting the idea of separating the teaching of facts and the way that we behave. Q442 Chairman: That is a fair point. Can I touch on another difference, and, whilst I do not want to delve into anything outside citizenship, some people are bemused that you and the Mayor of London seem to have a very strong difference of opinion - certainly he seems to differ from you. Is that difference between you and the Mayor (after all, you had a lot in common in the past in terms of politics, in terms of London and so on) essentially a difference over your concept of citizenship? What is at the heart of that? Mr Phillips: I would say the Mayor of London has more differences with me than I have with him. The way that we look at this is very straightforward. I do not want to get into what he has said because, frankly, I do not fully understand it. Q443 Chairman: No, I drew on it in the frame of are you disagreeing about citizenship? Mr Phillips: I want to come to that. He has said that he does not understand what we at the Commission for Racial Equality have been saying in relation to multiculturalism. My view about that is very simple. What we say and do on this matter actually, to some extent, arises from what I think is some very brave work done by many people, including the Mayor of London and the late Bernie Grant, 20 or so years ago to get people to recognise diversity. What we think is happening and we are in danger of doing is not moving on to recognise the new circumstances that we are in. I said at the beginning, for example, that today we have 42 communities of size in this city alone. That was not true in that way 20 years ago. So, the issues that are thrown up are rather different, and the need for us to have ways of living together, I think, is now at least as important as the issues which are to do with recognising our differences. I think, if I can put it this way, our differences are more to do with phasing and timing. I think that some people have to recognise that things have moved on. By the way, I think they also have to recognise that London, in this respect, is very different to almost anywhere else in the world, never mind anywhere else in England and Wales, and in relation to citizenship, if we take our test of citizenship being a question of how does it help us to live together, if we have a difference it is that I think that in modern Britain the test and the difficulties of living together are sharper than they were 20 or 25 years ago. Chairman: Let us move on. I am going to ask Jeff Ennis to open the questioning. Q444 Jeff Ennis: Following on from one of the themes that you have just been pursuing, Chairman, in your memorandum, Trevor (something I strongly agree with), you say that citizenship should be central to the whole school ethos and should be part and parcel of the whole school ethos. Many schools and quite a few LEAs are trying to promote that particular approach. Is this the only approach that you would recommend schools and LEAs to follow, or are there more ways of promoting citizenship within the school other than by the whole school ethos? Mr Phillips: I think there are alternative ways, I suppose, which make citizenship very narrow, but we support the whole school ethos really for the reasons which I gave earlier on, and that is that citizenship is one of the skills. It is a "learnt competence", as I think the educationalists now call it. It is not one of those things which you can pick up and you can discard it when you decide you only want to do three A Levels rather than five subjects or the IB, or whatever it is. Perhaps the best way to put it is this. We should think of citizenship much more as a learnt competence and development (and I am on rather dangerous grounds here) rather like PE, which is not just about learning a set of things to do, or even perhaps learning a skill, it is literally life-changing. Citizenship should be life-changing. That is why we talk about the whole school ethos, because it is not just about what you learn in period three on a Wednesday, it is about how you position yourself relative to other people, what consideration you have for them, how you understand the way you settle disputes, violent or not violent, for example; and that is why, I think, the whole school approach has to be the way to deal with this, because you cannot in period three on Wednesday say one thing and then at lunch-time the school teaches you something different by the way it acts. It seems to me, if we are serious about this, if we are genuine about it, there is no other way. By the way, it also means that in other subjects we have to be consistent, and I can say something about what I think about that in relation to history or geography, if you wish. Q445 Jeff Ennis: Do you think that individual schools should be left to set their own citizenship agenda, or is there a role for LEAs in promoting citizenship across all the schools in their area, and is there a role for other agencies or bodies in promoting citizenship within the classroom? Mr Phillips: As a general precedent, I think that schools ought to be given as much freedom as they can be to meet the standards that are set by local education authorities and by government acting on behalf of the community as a whole. What I would say about that is that I would expect local education authorities to set quite high expectations for their schools, both in a cognitive sense - what do you learn - but also in the way that the students demonstrate their citizenship. For example, I think volunteering should be an aspect of citizenship and I think the local education authorities should have a big role to play in offering schools resources and opportunities for volunteering. You ask also about other agencies. I do not know enough about this, to be perfectly honest, but I would be disappointed if the new Ofsted were not to regard citizenship education and citizenship competence, in its widest sense, as an essential part of its brief. Q446 Jeff Ennis: You mentioned the growth of 42 distinct communities that have 10,000 people or more. Another thing we have had a distinct growth of in the last ten years in a lot of schools has been the setting up of school councils. I attended a school's council in a special school with children with learning disabilities in my constituency last year and it was very enlightening, very interesting to attend that particular school's council. We have also seen a setting up of the UK Youth Parliament in the last five years or so. How do these sorts of development aid the delivery of citizenship within schools today and are they an important part of the promotion of citizenship? Mr Phillips: I think they are essential. I am prejudiced on this, in a sense, because, as some of you know, I came into public life through student politics and, like lots of people of my generation, that experience transformed my life and the way I looked at things and, I hope, the way that I behave as a citizen and my understanding of citizenship. I referred in my opening remarks to the historic role of, let us call them, labour movement institutions in what people used to call political education but I think would be proxy for citizenship now. For all sorts of reasons, that is not as prevalent and as possible as it used to be. It seems to me, however, that schools are still significant, pivotal institutions within communities and, entirely apart from what happens in the PSHE or the citizenship class, I think in the way they behave in the responsibilities they give the students, in the opportunities they give students, they are all pivotal in teaching the reality, the practicality of citizenship. So, my straight answer to that is the more the better, and, by the way, I think the more the better for schools themselves. Q447 Jeff Ennis: What, if any, values, as opposed to skills, should children be taught as part of citizenship education? Mr Phillips: There is a simple and platitudinous answer, which is democracy, equality, freedom, et cetera, et cetera, and I think we can probably all agree on that. We might have slight differences about the precise nature of the list and order of them and so on. If the pure question is, "What are the values that one wants to communicate?", you can make a list which looks something like what I have just said, but I think actually it has to do more than that because, in my view, values are not significant unless we talk about their expression in the real world. I am very persuaded and supportive of those who, for example, like the Chancellor, think that Britishness has meaning, and I am supportive of that view for this reason. I think that Britishness, properly defined, is an encapsulation of the way that we express universal values. That is to say, for example, both we and Americans believe very strongly in freedom. However, because of America's history and actually, I think, partly to do with its geography, the way that Americans express the idea of freedom is very different to the way that we think of it. Freedom, for example, in the United States is very allied to the frontier myth: you can go and find a place where you can be exactly what you want to be, up in the high hills, in the mountains of Montana, or whatever it is, or you can be (and I will be careful what I say here) as eccentric as you like and you go to California. It is a way that is peculiarly American and it works for them. Q448 Jeff Ennis: Huddersfield would be the equivalent in our country! Mr Phillips: I am just thinking of the saloon bars of Huddersfield! There are up-sides to that; there are also down-sides by the way. I think the American idea of freedom also underpins its persistent and engrained racial segregation actually, because one interpretation of it is, "I want to live with people like me, and that is my freedom", and all that. We, of course, interpret freedom in quite a different way and, I think, in a much more communal way, in some ways a more domestic way. We think our freedom is, "An Englishman's home is his castle", and all of that. It is our freedom to be private, for example, but the point I want to make here is that I am very much in favour of the expression of British values through citizenship but not in abstract. Again, I come back to my point earlier on about the tradition of dissent. It seems to me that the relationship between what you learn in history and what you learn and do in relation to citizenship should be such that no child should leave school without a thorough grounding and a thorough appreciation of their right to be bolshy and eccentric, which is how you would describe that tradition of dissent today. Q449 Paul Holmes: Can I follow up slightly on Jeff's question two questions ago about what values should be taught in the citizenship curriculum. You have talked about the wide range of communities that now exist in cities coming from other countries, other cultures, other religious traditions which can have quite different values to what UK Law talks about, for example. UK Law now says, fairly recently, that homosexuals have got equality. UK Law says things about racial equality, about gender equality, but some of these communities come from traditions which would not accept that. What values should be taught in schools that cover this wide range of communities who have different value traditions? Mr Phillips: The reason I suppose I am looking a little bit puzzled, and the reason I cannot quite answer the question in the way you put it, is I just do not accept the premise that there are communities which have different values. There may be communities or groups of people which have different lifestyles, inherited traditions, aspects of cultural expression, and so on, but I think that we need to be careful about saying that there are communities which have different values as though they existed outside of British society. I do not think they do, and there are very few people, in my experience, who really genuinely believe that they should live according to different standards, because that is really what it comes to. There are very few people in this country who, for example, seriously would not accept the primacy of a parliamentary democracy. We can all question it. For example, the House of Commons, we can all look at it and say, "Is it very representative?" Well, actually, if you are a black or Muslim person, no, and if you are a woman, certainly not, but, of course, then another value kicks in, which is that we change that through the exercise of the democratic process and we argue about it, we shout about it and we march from Trafalgar Square to Hyde Park, or the other way round, about it. What we do not do is say, because we do not like it, it does not count for us. It seems to me that these are core values that almost everybody accepts, and there can be a bit of a tendency, driven by - I am always reluctant to blame the media because, speaking as a journalist, I know that most journalists are not leaders, we are followers, we follow public sentiment, by and large we follow what goes on in here, but there is a sort of tendency for the political media classes to get very excited by fringe and small but noisy groups who say something different; but actually, for most people of all backgrounds, the acceptance of basic values - democracy, equality, personal freedom, that we negotiate our differences rather than fight about them - these are basic things that most people accept in this country, and, by the way, my experience is that most minority communities actually are even more attached to these things than anybody else because they know what the alternative looks like. So, whilst I sort of understand the sentiment that drives your question, I do not think, to be perfectly honest, it is one that in reality arises. To answer it absolutely directly, in a situation where what you might regard as those core values somehow conflict with the expression of historic traditions, those core values always have to win. You cannot compromise on that; they always have to win. Q450 Paul Holmes: For example, MPs are currently being lobbied by various religious groups who want exemption from the law in relationship to equality of employment for certain groups of people such as gay people. So, there are clearly groups, some of which are very indigenous to this country, they are not recent arrivals, who are writing to MPs now saying, "We want to be exempt from this law." On the other hand, the Government is massively expanding faith schools. So, you have got quite a clear conflict there between certain cultural or religious values and traditions and the law of the land. How do the schools deal with that? What is the Government's guidance on values in that situation? Mr Phillips: Let me make two points in response to that. I do not really accept the premise that the Government is massively expanding faith schools. It just is not true. There are seven thousand or so faith schools, denominational schools, in this country. What people are really concerned about, let us get straight to the point here, are Muslims going to get schools? At most you are going to get about another 100. Q451 Paul Holmes: Can I stop you there, because that is not what I asked. In fact the religions who are currently lobbying are not Muslims? Mr Phillips: I know, but I want to put on record that I do not accept the premise, because I think it is said quite often, and rather popularly, that there is this massive boom and this means something. Actually it does not. What people are concerned about (and this comes more to the point that you are making) is that faith schools of a certain kind, where faith is very closely aligned to ethnicity - not true of Roman Catholics or Church of England but very true of Jews, Muslims and Sikhs - are in themselves exclusive. My view about this is that it is a very small issue in practice and it is not one on which you ought to make law. On the wider issue, which is, for example, the resistance by some of the traditional denominations, the big battalions, as it were, to being told in what circumstances they might employ this person or that person and what their qualifications might be, here I think the rule is very straightforward, and this is a kind of core value which is based on equality. You compete for a job and you are judged on your suitability for the job. The question of attributes or characteristics that you might have which have no bearing upon your capability of doing the job should never enter into it; and in that situation, though I respect the attempts of different faiths, and so on, here is where I think the core value of equality trumps religious diversity. I do not think we can say to anybody or promise anybody that because you feel a bit different because of your traditions and so on, we respect that, but that does not allow you to override a very basic tenet of our society, which is equality, and in the context of employment equality means that you compete on the basis of your capability to do the job, not on anything else. Q452 Paul Holmes: One other question. The Government guidelines on how citizenship should be delivered are very flexible or vague, depending on your point of view. It could be a separate subject, and I was teaching it as a separate subject 20 years go, long before people invented the word "citizenship" for it, or it can be taught through other subjects like history, or RE, or it can be taught in all sorts of general ways through school councils; so there is a very wide range of ways. The recent Ofsted evaluation has said that, in fact, there are a lot of schools where it is fairly weak, precisely because there is no clear way of delivering, no clear accountability, no clear programme. What is your opinion on that? Mr Phillips: My view about this is very straightforward. There are three components. Let me preface that by saying that it occurs to me, out of this conversation and having read your previous session, that maybe part of the problem we have is the expression of views in citizenship education, and we seem to be leaning on that: because historically we think "education" and what we mean is academic transmission of a kind of academic law, and we might be better off talking about "citizenship competence". What is the aim here? It is not to transmit - I saw the new film The History Boys last night, so some of the language might be coming through here - gobbets of knowledge. What we are trying to do is to get people to a place where they are capable of dealing, as citizens, with the current society in which we live. Of course, I am concerned, for example, specifically with the issue of coping diversity, but there are all sorts of other bits of this competence. If we think about it as citizenship competence, there are probably three ways in which we communicate that. First of all, by knowledge, and that does mean specific classes which tell you how the system works. It is inconceivable that you can say to people you can be a competent citizen if you really have no idea, I was going to say, what the difference between different political parties are, but lots of people have trouble working that out, but, if you have no idea that there are different political parties. We know that is a problem for some youngsters. So, there is some pure transmission of knowledge, and that is for teachers and people who are expert to explain what might be in that packet not for me. Secondly, I think that there is real life experience, and that is why I referred to volunteering, I referred to the way that schools do their business, schools councils, and so on, and that is the second aspect of it. I think then there is perhaps a third, maybe more murky, arena which is perhaps better referred to by way of teaching by example. How do the rest of us do things with young people - families, parliamentarians, people in the media, and so on? Are we teaching by example? I think part of the difficulty that we sometimes have is that the lessons that we teach about glorious revolution, and so on and so forth, might not look like they have meant anything because we have behaved in a different way, and that is a bit more murky, and one on which I do not have a great deal to offer this morning, but I do think all three elements are essential. Q453 Paul Holmes: How direct do you think schools should be in teaching things? You talked about the tradition of English dissent and that that was a valuable one. When the Committee was in Dublin some time ago we saw some citizenship lessons where the kids were writing to the Taoiseach lobbying him about cuts he had made in funding to voluntary services, for example, to voluntary groups, and a few weeks before they had been writing to the British Government and lobbying about radio-active pollution in the Irish Sea. Yet, in English schools there is a tendency to shy way from that sort of thing because it would be too political, with a large "P". Do you think we should be directly teaching the tradition of dissent in that way? Mr Phillips: Yes, we should learn. Let us learn from the Irish. There were three categories I gave you. I am sorry, I may be slightly confused. There is formal teaching in citizen classes, then there is teaching citizenship in other aspects of the curriculum - history, geography and so on - that is the point at which the tradition of dissent enters - and then there is the third, the environment in which they act. The writing to the Taoiseach is the third bit of it, the school's council is a bit of it and what we do is a part of that third leg. I do not see any reason at all why we should not be encouraging that. In fact, I am very much in favour of it. Q454 Mr Wilson: Can I now turn to the subject of integration. Of course, one of the CRE's primary goals is to create an integrated society. You have had quite a lot to say on this matter, in particular about segregation in communities and also segregation in schools. In fact, you have raised concerns about different races in schools growing up "strangers to each other", I believe. I want to get some idea of the scale of the problem and how significant you think the problem of racially and ethnically segregated schools actually is. Mr Phillips: Firstly, I should say that the most important thing about this particular discussion is that we are going to have it at all. For 40 years we did not have it at all, and the problem that I discovered when I went to the Commission for Racial Equality is that that meant that the Britain that we were talking about was not the Britain that people actually experienced. For example, it is true that there is much to celebrate in our diversities: great energy, people learn new things, they learn ways of doing things which are better from people who are not like themselves, and I have never resiled from that. I think that the problem that we had was that most people who live in most large English cities recognise that that picture is right, but there is another part to the picture, and the part to the picture is one into which they, generally speaking, do not mix with people who are not like themselves ethnically. We have done some survey work, and I know my colleagues spoke to you about it last time. It is still true that most people of different ethnicities do not mix socially away from work, secondly, that residentially in some areas some ethnic minorities are becoming more isolated rather than less isolated, and, thirdly (and that is the reason I am making available that information), there is new information coming forward all the time about the segregation of the schools and there is some new work which has just been sent to me - I just read it yesterday - from Bristol University, from Simon Burgess and his colleagues, who have been doing some really brilliant work on this, brilliant in the sense that it does not always tie with what I believe are my own prejudices, but actually I believe it because it is very, very thorough. What their latest work says is a development on what they have told us in the last couple of years. What they say now is that segregation in British schools is not increasing, but what they do say is that in the areas where there is the largest ethnic minority population it is already pretty extreme, and that is, of course, one reason why it cannot increase very much, because if you have got a 95 per cent Asian school there is not much more to go, a 95 per cent white school, so there is not very far to go, but what they are observing is that, in a sense, it is settling, it is becoming a pattern, and we think this is a serious issue, it is a serious problem because it does not help to prepare the children in those schools for what we would like to be the real world where they meet and interact with people who are not like themselves. Secondly, generally speaking, the separation of children in schools by ethnicity is to the disadvantage of ethnic minorities, though not entirely, and, thirdly, and I cannot give you research evidence for this but this is what we get from our front-line race equality councils and local groups, we find that it is contributing to conflict amongst general people. Gangs really form to some extent out of schools and the ethnicisation of youth gang culture is, in part, due to that. Q455 Mr Wilson: Could I characterise that answer as segregation is bad, but it is not getting any worse? Is that fair, or is that generally in society or not speaking in schools? Mr Phillips: The more precise way to put it is we know quite a lot about segregation but we do not know enough. What we do know tells us that in some parts of the country it is a serious problem, and there are two aspects of it, one is residential and the other is social. There is some confusion about residential segregation. Forgive me if I do not get too technical about it because it would take hours, but in essence the best work on this, which is done by Mike Poulsen of Macquarie University, tells us that what is happening is that it is true that residentially quite a lot of areas are becoming more mixed, but they are becoming more mixed in the sense that completely all white areas have a few ethnic minority people in them; and, indeed, in some areas there is a greater level of mix between ethnic minorities and whites, but this is a process in transition. For example, areas which have had a 20 per cent ethnic minority population now might have a 30, 40 per cent ethnic minority population. Except that what Poulsen says is that what is happening is that these are areas in transition to becoming 100 per cent ethnic minority areas. So, the picture is dynamic and it can be a little bit confusing, but the overall historic trend is towards residential segregation and with it some social segregation. The second point that we know is that at present for schools in England and Wales specifically what the work from Bristol University, which has done this most thoroughly - they have gone through all the class data for the whole of England and Wales - does is it tells us that schools, with the exception of faith schools, tend to be more segregated in the areas in which they are settled and in which they sit, the latest work tells us that my contention last year that this was becoming worse is probably only partially true in some specific kinds of areas. I am trying to be precise here, because I know these things can get out of hand. Q456 Mr Wilson: My next question is not too bad. The first part is about schools and segregation. What do you think schools can reasonably do to help with the problems that we have for segregation? I will come to the second part of the question in a minute. Mr Phillips: Schools cannot do very much about where people live, though actually they are probably, in many cities, amongst the most significant reasons for people living where they do. White flight, which is still a significant factor, the latest work from Bristol shows us pretty clearly, is driven more by school places or competition for school places and school choice than any other single factor. To put it crudely, white parents particularly are unhappy about putting children in schools where they think that their children, they would put it, are going to be in the minority, and that starts a dynamic of white flight from those schools and, therefore, residentially from those areas. Schools themselves cannot do very much about that, because they are what they are, but what they can do is a number of things. First of all, and this is perhaps a role partly for local education authorities, they can think harder about the way they draw up catchment areas, and I think it cannot be beyond the wit of man or woman to find ways in which you can combat that trend. You cannot stop it, but you can combat it. Secondly, schools themselves can make sure that where there are choices about who they admit, they are monitoring their admissions properly to ensure that there is no hidden bias going on. Thirdly, in what they do (and this is talked about a lot) by twinning, by who they play sport with, projects that they do on art, and so on, the things that they do voluntarily, that they expose their students to groups of students who are not like themselves; and the third is not easy, by the way, because these things lead to conflict, and so on, but in some areas they are very well managed. Q457 Mr Wilson: What you have said leads on to something that just occurs to me. What is your view on quotas for minorities in schools rather than catchment areas? Do you have a view on quotas for ethnic minorities, disadvantaged children, and so forth? Mr Phillips: Not helpful, not practical and, frankly, not something that we need at the present time. I understand that this has been raised in the last 24 hours, and I am as open to discussion as anybody else on this, but I would not have said this is the first place that we need to go. Q458 Mr Wilson: The first point I was making was: what can schools do? The second point I wanted to get out of you is: what can the Government actually do? Is raising the whole issue of what people can and cannot wear within schools---- Mr Phillips: What people can and cannot wear? Q459 Mr Wilson: Yes. For example, the veil. There seems to be this growing campaign against the wearing of the veil. Do you think that is helpful, or is it hindering the process towards full integration? Mr Phillips: We have to separate out a couple of things here, and I will say precisely what our view is on the issue of uniform. You will know that in Luton three years ago, I think it is now, there was a case, it has been through all the states of courts and is now in Europe, a human rights case, over a student who wanted to wear the hijab. We took the view, and this is because we ourselves have been involved in establishing the schools' uniform policy, that if there was a school which has a uniform and that uniform is compliant to the needs of Muslim families, as they themselves have expressed it, then everybody should be required to wear that uniform. That is the point of uniform. In this particular case the young woman was offered places at other schools which did not have a uniform policy, and it seems to us very straightforward here. Provided a uniform policy is arrived at properly, with consultation, and so on, and is Sharia-compliant and so forth, then there can be no case for someone saying that their interpretation of what is Sharia-compliant should be respected over and above the uniform policy of the school. If there had been no alternative school, one might want to say that the uniform policy needed to take that into account, but that was not the case here. So, the view that I take is very straightforward, that in itself, if a school has a uniform, we think the uniform policy needs to be inclusive and compliant with the needs of the children and families who attend that school, and, once that is agreed properly, that is what everybody has to live with. The issue of the veil, I think, is a rather separate one and it has been raised in a separate way. Jack Straw has, as I understand it, said two things. First of all, the veil in his surgery made him feel uncomfortable and interfered with his capacity to carry out his job as a public servant. That is the first thing he said. The second thing he said is that he thought, entirely aside from what happens in his surgery, that the wearing of the hijab is a sign of separation, or the wish to separate is implied. Those are not the words he used, but that is the implication. There are two questions about this. First of all, does he have the right to say either or both of those things? The answer to that must unequivocally be, "Yes", on both counts. Secondly, what is the appropriate response to the questions he raises? The first thing, on the issue of the veil in his surgery and his discomfort, I think it is perfectly reasonable for him to say he feels uncomfortable about it, I think it is perfectly right (and this is where I return to the point of the code of manners and codes of civility) for him to say, "Would you mind? Would you mind not making me feel uncomfortable in this particular case?", as long as it is clearly understood that the answer to that can be, "No", and that the woman can refuse. There are issues and shades of power in a relationship, and all of that, which we can talk about, but that to me is the formal point. The separate issue about whether there should be social pressure to make the wearing of the veil unacceptable is, in my view, a separate question than that encounter, because that is about a workplace, it is about a relationship between someone who is offering the services of a client, and so on. We talk about that a lot in our employment code. I think that there have to be separate considerations when what we are talking about is really a social convention. To put it crudely, when we are talking about masks: if we are talking about surgeons they have to wear a mask. Nobody is ever going to question that because that is what they have to do to do the job. When we are talking about the ease of communication ... not even the ease of communication, but the ease of feeling in any particular encounter, that is social convention. We have to be careful to follow exactly what Jack Straw did, which is to separate the requirements of a particular work situation or public situation from social convention. On the latter, I go with those who say that it always has to be a matter for negotiation. It cannot be for prescription. We cannot tell people what to wear in what situation. The answer is that Jack was completely right to raise this. He has raised it in a proper way. By the way, it is an interesting point that the media found itself completely incapable of dealing with this. All the headlines over the weekend were: Who politically agrees with Straw and who does not politically agree with Straw? - which is not the point. It is completely irrelevant. It is not that sort of question. This question is not about, as it were, public policy, but, where it is contentious, of social etiquette and manners. I am sorry to go on about this. This is a rather complicated and difficult question that people have made more difficult than it needs to be. We are about to have laws about smoking in public places - that is, we have a law about public places. But it is a different question when somebody comes to your house. Do they smoke in your house or not? Here, social convention and the negotiations of social convention become very important. Twenty years ago, they would light up - because people did and it was not an issue - and the homeowner might say, "I'd rather you did not smoke." Today, it works the other way round. Most people, if they go to somebody else's house and they want to smoke, will say, "Do you mind if I smoke?" This is what I mean by social convention. It is subtle, it is a nuance, but it is extremely important. Q460 Chairman: Are you evading something that would interest this Committee particularly, being the Education and Skills Committee? Some teachers have certainly said to me that it would be very difficult if people in their classroom or in their lecture room were wearing the veil because it is difficult to teach and to communicate with someone. You cannot have that relationship - alluded to by Jack Straw - of a face-to-face relationship. Mr Phillips: I am not evading the point at all. I am really trying to say that the issue here is how you take a decision about it. It is not what the decision is. In that specific case, I would say that this cannot be a matter for the individual teacher. There has to be a school policy. A university, of which I am a member of the court, last year took the decision that certain kinds of garment, including the veil, could not be worn on campus, because it is in a particular place where there are issues of security and people need to be identified. That I think was probably the right decision. The manner in which it was taken was probably not quite right because it was not discussed in campus and so on. The problem there was that they should have had a proper discussion, and I suspect that if they had had that proper discussion there would never have been any issue at all. All staff and all students would have agreed on that basis. I think the answer to your question in relation to schools is that if that is raised it should be raised as a matter of school policy. So that I am not at all accused of evading the question: if I were the headteacher or a teacher in that school, I would probably say that veils should not be worn in the classroom. Q461 Mr Wilson: In the same way that hoodies should not be worn in the classroom, I am sure. Mr Phillips: Exactly. Q462 Mr Wilson: Obviously these are very thorny issues that we have come to now and I wonder what you think the overall impact of citizenship lessons could be on these sorts of issues, because they seem in some ways so remote. Mr Phillips: I do not think they are remote at all. I think citizenship lessons are not the only thing we need to do but they are one of the things we need to do which is to develop a way of negotiating difference. I am not competent to talk about the wider issues of citizenship; I am interested in the way that citizenship, education in citizenship competence, helps us to deal with the problems of diversity. In practice, this is the thing that people talk about, this is the thing that kids talk about in school: Why is he or she different? What are they up to? I think citizenship can help people in the real world to find ways of negotiating those differences. That, to me, is one of the great values of it. It is not just about bits of information; it is about how you behave. The citizenship curriculum talks about democracy. It is not just about 649 people or a local council or whatever it is; it is a very basic lesson that says in any society of this kind the way that we deal with the fact that we do have differences, we want different things as citizens, is that we discuss it, we vote. I think that is the lesson, and it is a lesson that people exercise in their own lives. That is why I think it is so important. That is the sort of reason why I think it is so important. Q463 Helen Jones: I would like to take you back to this issue of segregation in schools and try to clarify, first of all, exactly what is happening. If I understood what you said correctly, you seemed to indicate that the problem was not particularly in faith schools but in normal state schools. Would that be correct? Mr Phillips: Correct. Q464 Helen Jones: How then do you see things proceeding as we institute a number of Muslim schools, Sikh schools and so on? Does that have implications for how we deliver citizenship education in those schools - and a knock-on effect in other schools in the area, clearly, if we are looking at why schools are not mixed? Mr Phillips: Let me clarify on the issue of faith schools and segregation. If we are talking about faith schools, as opposed to Muslim schools, we are talking about Roman Catholic and Church of England schools, nearly 700 of them. Andrew Adonis reported last week that the average ethnic participation in non-denominational schools is about 16.5 per cent. In Church of England schools it is rather higher than that, towards 18 per cent, and in Catholic schools it is round about 21 per cent, so there are more ethnic minority pupils, on average, within denominational schools than in non-denominational schools. Q465 Helen Jones: Could I ask you to clarify something for the Committee before you proceed to the second part of your answer. I come with a bias. I was taught in Roman Catholic schools and have taught at them myself. Are those figures in some sense skewed, because in some areas of the country the churches have made a particular effort, particularly where the education of girls is concerned, to attract more ethnic minorities in their schools? Do they, as far as you know, vary from one part of the country to the other? In other words, is the average any use to us? Mr Phillips: I am not aware of the answer to that question. I doubt, to be honest, if anybody knows. I think it reflects something quite different. It reflects the fact that the catchment area for denominational schools is always wider than that for non-denominational schools. The Catholic school across the street from my house takes its pupils from miles away, whereas the primary school the other way down the street takes its children from, I think, within a radius of about 400 yards. I suspect this is much more a reflection of two things: residential segregation and the pan-ethnicity of certain faiths. That brings me on to the second point. The difference we have - and this is why we have to make the distinction - is with those faith schools which are not in practice pan-ethnic. Not all Muslims in this country are South Asian, but two-thirds or more are, and Jews, as well as being a faith group, are also an ethnic group by law. There are two things about this. One is that when talking about faith schools I always find myself in difficulties, because people bring it up - and I know this is not what you are saying - because they really want to say, "Let's get rid of all faith schools" but they do not want to say "Let's get rid of the Catholic schools" because that is all very difficult and middleclass parents would go bonkers and so on. Q466 Helen Jones: Everybody in my constituency. Mr Phillips: If people wanted to say that, I wish that is what they would say and let us have that argument. But that has nothing to do with ethnicity; that has to do with one's view about faith and its place in public life. Secondly, there are people who argue that faith schools are ethnically exclusive, and the reason I gave you the numbers is that, to my surprise - I did not really expect this when we did the work - it is exactly the opposite. The explanation I have given you is the one that I think is the right one. What implications does this have in the ethnically exclusive faith schools for Muslims, Jews and Sikhs in relationship to citizenship? I would have thought the implications are that they should be expected to do exactly the same as everybody else. I do not think they can and ought to be expected to have different standards in relation to citizenship from any other school, bearing in mind my answer to your question, which is that I think headteachers need to be given latitude to meet those standards but they should meet the same standards as everyone. Q467 Helen Jones: The problem in any segregated school, whether it is a faith school or whether it is a school that has become segregated on racial lines because of the residential area, is that, as you said to us earlier - and I think all the Committee agree - part of citizenship is how we learn to live with one another, how we learn to negotiate differences. Is there not then a real problem in schools which are segregated, for whatever reason that segregation has come about, and how do you propose that we tackle that problem? It is a problem, I suppose, that applies equally in certain areas, like my own, which do not have a large ethnic minority population at all. It is over 99 per cent white. Learning to live with people in your own town is not the same as learning to live with people in the wider community in Britain. We all face a problem in dealing with it. Do you have any suggestions as to how it is best dealt with? Mr Phillips: You have anticipated my first glib answer, which is that I think it would be a good idea if we worried more about the 70 or 80 per cent of schools which are pretty much all white and how the children in those schools come to terms with a more diverse Britain. I think we should spend quite a lot of time worrying about them, rather than the 100 or so schools which are specifically based on faith. My feeling about this - and I do not want to seem complacent about it - is that we get a little bit too worried about it. My experience of those schools is that they are the ones which really most want their children to understand what it is like to be, let us say, a Hindu or a Jew in British society. I think you can put requirements on them in the same way as you do to other schools. You can ask them - if you are a local education authority and they are voluntary aided and so on - to do things with other schools, to participate in borough-wide activities and so forth. I think that is as much as you can do. I do not think you can ask too much more. I think there are things you can do aside from the school. For example, this summer the CRE funded a pilot summer camp. We took 80 kids to Cumbria on what was called a leadership course but which was really a way of giving them an opportunity - which they wanted, which most kids would want - to go somewhere away at somebody else's expense, where they could do things - climb up and down cliffs and all the rest of it - with kinds of people that they would never meet in their own area, so that, after that week, they would go back home and, rather than saying, "What is it about those Muslims?" they can say, "Actually, I met a Muslim" and "He was like me. He likes football" or "She likes art" or whatever it is. I think there are extra-curricular things we can do, particularly with the extended school day, which will account for those kinds of schools. My biggest worry, to be perfectly honest, in relation to the issue of segregation and social segregation, is not faith schools. The most seriously segregated schools in most cities are non-denominational community schools. That is where you have 75 or 80 per cent ethnic minority and 100 per cent white. That is really where we need to be exercising our ingenuity. Q468 Helen Jones: I have a two-part question for my last question. Bearing in mind the problem you have outlined, segregated community schools and what you have said about extra-curricular activities, two things seem to arise. Why do you think there is the kind of white-flight that you have described in inner cities? Is there anything that you think can be done in tackling some of the fears of parents who move out of faith schools? The second question is really about the role of volunteering. I am one who believes that citizenship has to be active: we have to have people doing things. Is there not much more scope in using active citizenship to get people working and volunteering outside their own communities and what do you think LEAs can do to facilitate that? Mr Phillips: I am not sure I have a sensible answer to the second. Let me think about that one for a second. On white-flight, here we have to deal with the rude realities of the world. We cannot say to people: "You must not" as long as we offer them choice. Of course this is one of the core issues in basic school choice leading to greater segregation or not. There is a prior question there: Even if it is, is it right to take it away or reduce school choice to parents? My own view - and this is a personal view entirely, it is not something on which the Commission has formulated a view - is that every parent should have the maximum level of choice. I do not think it is the place of the state to reduce the level of choice available to families because the bureaucrats of the state are worried that they are going to make the wrong choice. That leads us in all the wrong directions. If we start from the premise that people do have choice and they will exercise it in a particular way, what can we do to make them exercise it in a way that does not have this segregating or separating or, more precisely, polarising effect? I think there are a couple of things that we can do. In the end, people will choose schools because they are successful. I think I said very early on in this conversation that it is not entirely the case that separate schools end up being unequal schools. There are some signs that in some areas, for example, in North West London, the success of some ethnic minority communities at GCSE and A level is attracting white families because they see, for example, a school which has a majority of Gujarati Indian children is doing extremely well and they want their children to be there as well. There are no numbers on this, this is all anecdotal, but you can see why that would have a reverse effect. The first thing is to ensure that the performance of those schools where there is this possible effect is as high as it could be. That might mean - that might mean - ensuring that there are more and better resources funnelled to those schools. Because that is what will stop white-flight: parents believing that their children will do well. There is a separate issue, which is of course a straightforward social one. Ethnic minority families have had to live, for certainly most of my life, with the possibility that their children, by definition, will be the only ones in the class or one of the very few. That is something you just get used to. For a lot of white families, that is not something they have "not yet got used to" and it is not something they feel comfortable with. How we get over that, I do not know. I think that it has to begin with some kind of dialogue. They have to get used to the idea that maybe that is sometimes the way it is going to be. I cannot give you a straight answer to that, because I do not know, to be perfectly honest, how you persuade white parents that their child being in a minority of 20 per cent is acceptable. That is not the society that we live in. In a fair society, it would not be a problem, because a lot of us have had to live like that for all our lives, but it is not something we know how to deal with. On the issue of local education authorities giving greater opportunities, I think I would go back to what I said earlier on: I would like to see local authorities being more proactive really in giving young people and parents, particularly mothers, more opportunities to meet each other in places not necessarily outside of schools but outside of school hours. This is not a direct parallel, but one of the most interesting things I saw a year and a half ago in the United States was schools which attracted black fathers back to support their sons by offering them evenings of black fathers. I do not suggest that is exactly what you want to do here but I think that there may be a parallel. If we could be more imaginative about using the schools for opportunities for parents to find something useful to do there, they might meet more, and they might begin to establish higher levels of trust across the race and faith lines. Q469 Chairman: One of the things this Committee would urge you to look at, in parallel with the Adonis figures you gave on the percentage of ethnic minorities in faith schools, is something which has absorbed this Committee, the percentage of pupils on free school meals and with special educational needs in the same schools. It would be of some interest to your Commission, I would have thought, if the faith schools were creaming off the highest achieving ethnic minority children, because what that says about other schools is quite significant. I do not even know those figures, but in the past we have looked at that and that has been a cause for concern. Mr Phillips: I think that is a very, very fair point and certainly one that I will look at, but I will just give you this note of caution: if you look at DfES's key stage 4 performance graph, corrected for free school meals, there still are huge differences by race. Huge differences. Particularly for some groups: Afro-Caribbeans, Pakistanis, Somalis. Chairman: We are familiar with those figures. Q470 Stephen Williams: You have talked about worries about segregation and that sort of implies that you would prefer society to be integrated. I read somewhere else in our brief that that was part of the mission of the CRE, to build an integrated society. In the context of teaching citizenship or discussing these issues in schools, how does integration sit easily with multiculturalism and celebrating diversity? Is there a conflict? Mr Phillips: There does not need to be one. First of all, what exactly do we mean by integration? Technically, we mean no aspect of an individual's experience, life chances or opportunities should statistically be related to their ethnicity. That is to say, aside from our differences in ages, a perfectly integrated society would be one in which nobody could predict on the basis of our difference in colour what job, what salary, what likelihood of us getting a job there is between you and me. There might be other things that determine that, but our colour would not be it. That, by the way, would be the same for our choice of friends, who we marry and so forth. We are very far from that in this society because, on virtually every index you can name pretty much - housing, health and so on and so forth - you will find that there are differences correlated to race, even when you correct for class and for location. That is what we mean by integration, that essentially your race and your colour should not mean anything more than what you chose to make it mean. Does that conflict with multiculturalism? Answer: unfortunately it depends what you mean by "multiculturalism". If you mean does that conflict with the existence of a society in which there are people who come from different backgrounds, contain different heritage and profess different traditions and so on, then there is no conflict at all. In fact, that is the point of integration: to make a diverse society one in which those differences do not mean anything more than what the individuals want them to mean. I think where it comes into conflict - and this has been our issue - is where, as part of our official policy (the way we divide resources, the way we accord status and so forth), we overemphasise the need to reward and recognise difference compared to the need to treat people equally. These two things are always in balance. Twenty-five years ago - and I refer to the work of Bernie Grant - it would probably be true to say that everybody across the political spectrum thought about equality and did not think about recognising difference at all. Our concern is that policies of multiculturalism have now reached a place where we recognise difference even if it is at the cost of equality, and we think that has to be wrong. Q471 Stephen Williams: You mentioned in answer to an earlier question that you should worry about the schools that are overwhelmingly or entirely white and concentrate on those, rather than on the rather small number of schools that are overwhelmingly ethnic minority. What guidance does the CRE give to what would be the vast majority of schools in, say, rural Devon, Somerset, Hampshire, about multicultural modern Britain? What guidance do you offer those schools and is that different from what you might offer to the schools in inner city Bristol that I represent? Mr Phillips: I think the principles of it are no different. Bearing in mind that we are a statutory authority and our business is to promote and enforce the law, the sort of guidance we give is that, first of all, every school needs to have a policy. It needs to recognise, whatever the composition of its current student body, that they live in a society which is ethnically, racially diverse. In the way the school does its business and in the way it teaches, it needs to recognise that. What in practice does that mean? It means that all the children, even if it is an all-white school or an all-Asian school, in what is taught have to have - coming back to my earlier usage - competence in managing difference. This means very simple things. You know that there are people who do not look like you racially and are likely to have a different religious code. Even if you do not know exactly what the religious code is, you respect that that might be the case, and at least you look out for it and you try to understand what it might be and therefore how you might relate to that person. On a deeper level, we want to make sure that schools, in what they teach, do not just teach whatever it is - history or even maths or chemistry - as though they were teaching it in a society which was all white and, indeed, all male. Simple things, like the examples you use and so on, are different. If I may give you a small example: seven years ago somebody that I know wrote a book about parenting which was translated into French. There were lots of examples and she used a variety of names: English names, French names, Muslim names and so on. In France, they took out all the Muslim names and replaced them with Jean, Patrice and so on, and there was a great dispute about this. That is what we used to do. We do not do that any more. That is the kind of thing. This matters, even if you are in a school which is multi-ethnic. So the guidance at that level is the same wherever you are. I would not expect a school which is 95 per cent Muslim only to teach as though everybody in Britain were called Mohammed or Ahmed. The guidance is the same. The specific advice to, let us say, inner city schools might be a bit different from what you might advise in, say, Sedgefield - which I read the other day is the whitest constituency in the country - but the principles are pretty much the same. Q472 Stephen Williams: Are you satisfied, in those areas such as Sedgefield that are overwhelmingly white, that your guidance has been followed and schools adequately teach that curriculum? Mr Phillips: I am not satisfied that schools in general are following the law. The last survey we did of schools' compliance with the data equality duties imposed on them - which is to have a race equality policy under the 2000 Amendment Act - showed that they were pretty poor. I think there is a lot of work to do. Chairman: One bit of light at the end of a certain tunnel was that yesterday, when I presented prizes at the Arts and Minds NASUWT celebration of ethnicity through art and literature, across all the 800 schools competing, two of the schools, one in Wales and one in Scotland, had no ethnic minority population at all. It was rather nice to see them having produced art and literature. It was very high class. Q473 Mr Carswell: I would like to probe multiculturalism and what is meant by it. I have just been reading The New East End, that fascinating book, and, reading that, I wondered if multiculturalism, in reality, had perhaps not turned out to be a bit of a one-way street. Do the high priests of multiculturalism perhaps not seem to disprove of monoculture where it happens to be white working-class but approve of it where it happens to be something different? I wonder: Is multiculturalism perhaps in danger of being in a transitional phase, between one form of cultural primacy in one locality being replaced with another? Mr Phillips: I do not think so. I am not quite sure about the high priests of multiculturalism. I suspect I would have been described as one not so long ago. I do not want to repeat what I said earlier on, but, look, the fundamental point about this is very simple: it is a matter of balance. We must recognise difference. Increasingly, because of the sort of diversity I outlined right at the beginning, it is important for us as a society. Otherwise we cannot function. We cannot expect people - and our French neighbours discovered this recently - simply to dump all their baggage at the door and become something else. The real issue for us in this society is how we negotiate the way that we live together so that we have enough in common to allow us to share experiences, ambitions, and to work together communally, but preserve the things which are essential to us as individuals. This is not just an issue of ethnicity, by the way. You can cut this in many, many different ways. It is faith; it is gender; and so on. The multiculturalism argument is very entertaining and all the rest of it - and I know that I am partly responsible for it - but I think we need not to get into a place where somebody has to win this. This is not a battle about: Do the multiculturalists win or do the integrationists win? In response to the Chairman's question earlier on about the Mayor of London's remarks I made the point that we have moved on, and in a different situation we need to have answers which respond to that situation. In response to your question, I really would not like to frame it like that. I do not think the recognition of diversity is damaging to our society. What is damaging to our society is the recognition of diversity without the recognition of commonality, and getting those two things out of balance. The balance will change. The point of equilibrium - which is how we sometimes talk about in CRE - will change according to what society you are in and what the traditions are; so the point of equilibrium in the United States or France will be rather different from here and the point of equilibrium today in the United Kingdom is different from what it was 20 years ago. Q474 Mr Carswell: What specifically is the CRE doing, in schools in particular, to deal with challenging issues of cultural and religious differences? Is there something that you are doing specifically in the schools? Mr Phillips: Our principal job, to come back to what I was saying a moment ago, is to ensure that the law which was brought in in 2000 - the 2000 Act, which is a framework in which schools are meant to find a way of dealing with these things - is enforced; to make sure that schools are thinking about that; that they have a policy; that they are thinking about what they teach; that they are thinking about how they treat pupils. They are simple things. We know, for example, particularly in secondary schools, that all children feel very strongly about unfairness and the form of unfairness they are most concerned about today is racism. One of the things schools can look at, coming back to a point we discussed at much length earlier on, is their own behaviour. So with exclusions, discipline - a very big issue in many schools - do schools know that that they are treating all children equally? This, again and again, has been a trigger issue for conflict within schools, where one particular ethnic group - not always black, but often - feels they are being given harsher punishments, more frequent punishments and so forth. Schools now have numbers which tell them whether they are treating one group differently from another. That is the kind of thing that, in practice, schools need to do defensively. There are positive things they can do, which I have referred to - what they do with their curriculum, the way they relate to parents, the way they relate to communities and so on - but the very basic thing they need to do is to ensure that they are treating all their children fairly and equally. Aside from that - and this takes us off into slightly different territory, so I do not want to expand on it - the biggest thing for most schools which are ethnically diverse is to make sure that their levels of achievement are less and less correlated with ethnicity. That is a big job. Q475 Mr Carswell: As the debate is moving on from the traditional multiculturalism and the implicit cultural relativism that goes with it, if you are talking in terms of a citizenship curriculum should that be seeking to teach people that there are certain aspects of certain cultures that are unacceptable: the unequal treatment of women, prejudice against homosexuals, child brides? Should we be active as a matter of public policy and say "This is not British"? Mr Phillips: First you have to define which cultures you are talking about and identify if you really think that is what that culture believes. I would prefer the words I have used in the past: "an assertion of a core of Britishness". I think it is smarter to do this positively. It is smarter to say, "This is how we do things. This is how we do things in this country" if at some point a concrete issue arises about the conflict between the way that we express those core values of democracy, freedom and so forth, and the way that some traditional cultures are expressed. For example, my family comes from the Caribbean. Lots of us are typically rural people and a lot of the things that are true about us are true not about Caribbean people as such, but they are true of rural people. Does that mean there may be a conflict there? In which case, sometimes we have to say, "Okay, that might have been true back in the village but it cannot be right in Peckham." But we negotiate that. That is why, by the way, what was happening last week is so important. We can only negotiate these things if we can say the words, if we can speak about them openly. But what is absolutely essential is that we do not speak about them openly in the way - and I am sure it is not what you were trying to suggest - that is implied by some people, which is to say, "You must buckle under. You must abandon what you were." I think it is reasonable to say, "What your parents might have been and what your grandparents might have been, in the situation we are in is not appropriate or does not work here." Actually, most people in ethnic minority communities are the first people to recognise this. I think there are ways of doing this which are smarter and more productive than simply having a war that says, "We've got a way, you must look at it." This is what I should have said right at the very beginning: integration is a two-way street, where people are talking to each other. We always need to remember that there are British ways but what we call British ways today are in many respects hugely different from what were British ways 200 years ago or even a century ago. The process of integration does not just change the minority, it changes the majority. That is why the conversation and negotiation is so important. Chairman: Thank you for that. What was acceptable and common in 1966 is very different from today. Q476 Mr Marsden: Through what you have said to us today we come across two recurrent themes or words. One is "balance" and the other is "phasing". You have talked about the way in which things need to be phased and all the rest of it. I wonder what you thought, in the context of integration and multiculturalism, about the relative balance and phasing that there needs to be. Robert Putnam has done this major study, Bowling Alone, in which he talks about the atomisation of society - and, incidentally, he is about to do a major new project between Harvard and Manchester universities on this. I wondered what you thought the balance should be. Obviously, the bonding within communities, particularly communities that have come into this country, is very important, as is the bonding of traditional communities. But there is also an aspect of bridging. Speaking as a Lancashire MP who has seen some of the downsides of bonding in the disturbances we have had in Oldham and Burnley, I wondered where you felt the balance between bonding within societies and bridging across societies comes in. Mr Phillips: Robert is saying two different things, both of which are important. The measure he is really using is trust. That is what he is talking about: Do we leave our doors open? Would we trust our neighbours to look after our children? and so on. He is working with us on some specific projects and we have talked a lot about this. His work in the United States suggests pretty clearly that more diverse communities tend to have lower levels of trust - not just, by the way, between different ethnicities but even within one's own ethnicity; that is to say, in more diverse communities white people do not trust each other and they do not trust the police and so forth. I think this is all helpful to know. The issue of what it tells us about the process by which we arrive at an equilibrium, by which we get a balance, is less clear to me. I guess the answer that I would give to your question is as follows: first of all, in this country, which is different from the United States, where our cities are not binary but are basically several different groups - rather than black/white or Hispanic/white - the dynamics are quite different. We are embarking on some projects in what we call "plural cities" - and I am thinking of Leicester and Birmingham, for example - which will quite soon be cities where there is a minority of whites but there is no single majority. This is a whole new phenomenon which is at the moment largely European. This issue of balance is not about Muslim and non-Muslim, it is about several different groups. Here, again - I may be sounding a bit like a stuck record - what becomes important is not the outcome but the process of negotiation. It is the fact that everybody in that community feels they have a voice in working out, for example, what the schools' policy be should be. Should there be a uniform policy? If so, what is it across the city? How do you arrive at that? I was in Holland on Monday. They have a great tradition of this, which unfortunately they have abandoned in the last five or six years. That is one of the reasons they are in such trouble: they are not doing that negotiation My answer to your question about balance is that the first thing is not to worry so much about where we get to but worry more about how we get there. At the moment, one of our difficulties is that we do not have really good ways of talking about these things. Typically, in a local authority, you might say the focus for this is the local council shop. The problem is that local councils are not always as representative of the diversity of the city as they should be. If that is not the case, we need to find other mechanisms to bring different groups in. If there are no Somali councillors, how do we talk to Somalis? Who are the Somalis we talk to? The other point I would make is this: we should not talk about these processes as though they are all static. Everybody changes. This has been the thing that bedevils a lot of this conversation. We talk about communities and groups of people as though they never change. We are talking about the veil at the moment. I bet everybody in this room a tenner that in ten years the issue of the veil will be no more significant than the Sikh turban was 15 years ago - and remember what a fuss we got into over that. We found a way. I think people change. The example I always use is that, when I was a kid, being black was different. I was different. As it happened, I grew up in the Caribbean, so in some ways I was even more different. If I go to the Caribbean now and I stand in the street, nobody can tell I am different, but if I start walking, everybody knows I am different because I am walking faster. I go into a shop, I look for the queue, and everybody knows I am from England because I look for the queue. What being black British is has changed hugely in my lifetime. Q477 Mr Marsden: I accept all that and I accept the fluidity but how realistic is it to embark on a series of bridging initiatives, which is the sort of thing obviously you and the CRE have been trying to do and will do, if we do not look at the broader issues - again, to come back to Putnam - the atomisation, which sometimes - to take, for example, your white community in Burnley, where traditional social, industrial and other structures have been disrupted - makes them feel they have to spend more time bonding than bridging? Mr Phillips: There are two things here - one, a prefatory remark. May I say - and I would like you to take this as the most important thing I say this morning, if you do not mind, because I realise I have not said it - none of this works if they think they are unequal. The precondition for any of this to work is equality - which is why I say the CRE's first role is to enforcement of the law and so on and so forth - because it does not really matter whether it is whites or blacks or Asians and so on, you are never going to get them to have this sort of conversation at all if they think they are going to be second-class citizens. Speaking to your point about white communities, one of the hypotheses - and I put it no stronger than that - we have is that one of the reasons this is happening is not so much about atomisation but our pet name is the "identity spike". We think that one of the things which is happening in some white communities, which makes some to vote for, let us say, far right extremist parties, whilst identical communities just down the road have no interest in that kind of politics, is that sometimes communities have a kind of spike of identity which is provoked by some kind of trauma. The best moan concerns a story got around in Barking that people were paying Africans £50,000 to move from one part of London into Barking. For white people in Barking, not unreasonably - what is unreasonable is that people believed it, but let us leave that aside, they did believe it - started to take the view that local authorities were so fixated with race that it determined everything they did and all their policies. White people in Barking began to believe - and to some extent still do believe - that all the things that happen to them, happened to them because they are white. There is a very good example of that concerning two identical housing estates in the North, identical in every respect in their specifications and so on except that one set had lamps outside and the other one did not. The estate that had lamps was largely Asian and the one that did not was white, and all the whites on this estate were convinced that the people with lamps also had Jacuzzis inside and so on. The next thing you know, five BMP councillors. The point I am making here is that we can do all the other things - and I understand the point about atomisation and so on and so forth - but one of the things we have to try to do is to makes sure in our policies that we do not create the conditions for this kind of identity spike. That is one reason, by the way, why the CRE has recently launched an investigation into regeneration, because we know from our people on the ground that one of the problems that is creating this, again and again, is that billions are being spent on regeneration and it is improving areas but one of the side effects of this is that different ethnic groups think that another ethnic group is getting all the goodies. It is almost never true, or, if it is true, it is nothing to do with ethnicity but the needs of the town or locational possibility and so on, but people believe it, and that then sets off a chain of events which does exactly what you are talking about. Q478 Fiona Mactaggart: You spoke right at the beginning about your belief as a chemist that there should be a theory that underpinned stuff. I was wondering: what is your theory which underpins the values that you think are at the heart of citizenship teaching and Britishness? Mr Phillips: That is a question which is slightly above my intellectual pay grade, but I will try to answer it in this way. I think there are some givens - and I have spoken about some of them today: democracy, an attachment to freedom, individual liberty, certain equality - but these are generalities and you are inviting me not to go straight to the specifics and the practicalities. I think there is something in between that, and, as you will know, since I have recently been given a new task by the Secretary of State for Communities, I have begun to take an interest in human rights. It seems to me that, though there is a lot of conversation to be had about this, we will usefully begin to think about what a human rights culture means and its relationship to citizenship - because, if we get it right, and we have a human rights culture which is not individual and legalistic but socially just and one that gives the right place to social solidarity and so on, then we have the beginnings of a platform for an underlying idea of citizenship that properly expresses not something new but the things that we do value as a society. The best way to answer your question is to say that I think we have some givens, I think we have some practices and some traditions which we should value and we should transmit, but in between, if you are thinking about, if you like, the kind of policy filling between the abstract and the here and now, the development of a human rights culture might be part of the approach to underpinning the idea of citizenship. Q479 Fiona Mactaggart: I am glad to hear that, because I think it is at the heart of any concept of citizenship. One of the things that I am interested in is this focus on Britishness. One of the things about human rights is that they are universal. The United Nations Declaration and the European Convention, these are transnational, and in a globalised world it seems to me that the values of citizenship should be thus and that much of what you are talking about in terms of Britishness - and you used etiquette and manners earlier - is more what goes on top of that. I want you to look into this and to tell me what you think is substantially different about the theory of citizenship in - to take two countries you know well - France and Guyana and the British one. Mr Phillips: I have a very firm view on this. If I may put in plug here, I think the running down and abandonment of history as part of the school curriculum is a disastrous proposition - disastrous - for this reason: I think that the answer to your question is that Britishness in its pure form is not something abstract but the expression of those values that we hold. I am quite interested in the idea of a written constitution if it can help us to crystallise this, but, in essence, the notion of Britishness tells us how it is that we in this country have expressed those values in our history. I talked about the tradition of dissent. That is part of our expression of freedom. Other people do not do it that way. If I were to think about, as you say, Guyana, I would say that the expression of the idea of democracy - though I have to be careful what I say about Guyana - is much more strongly inflected by the history of slavery and specifically by the history of multi-ethnicity in a way that would be unimaginable in Europe. Guyana essentially has political parties which are ethnic political parties. There is no way of getting away from that. It is just a fact. That is the way that the Guyanese express their politics. They express their politics in that particular way because ethnicity does determine the choices that they make in a way that is just not true in Europe. When I talk about Britishness, I am talking about the accretion of history, the accretion of events, the accretion of ways of doing things that are peculiar to our country and that express those values. I talked earlier on about the American idea of freedom. One of the things you might think about - and this is going to be for scholars and so on to talk about - is why in this country, for example, it is a particular idea of the land. The Americans have the frontier myth; we have what they called the Robin Hood type myth and gardens and all this kind of thing. What is it that attaches us so strongly to the land? So much of our wealth, I suppose, is bound up in land and so forth. This might seem a little bit abstract but I am trying to say that we express these values in a particular way that arises out of our history. For example, our history is not revolutionary but it is evolutionary and so on. That is why, for example, the way we handle the integration issue is much more to do with negotiating, it is much more spoken. We do not, generally speaking, set down codes - although, frankly, I am beginning to think that we need to move more in that direction - but my point is that Britishness is not abstract. It is an expression of the way that through time British people have expressed those values that we talked about earlier. Q480 Fiona Mactaggart: Is it more important to teach children the values or the modes of expression of them? Mr Phillips: I do not think the values have any meaning at all without the modes of expression. Q481 Fiona Mactaggart: I suppose, if you look at the announcement that was made in May by Bill Rammell, this seems to be in this zone, that he thought that the way in which the National Curriculum deals with diversity issues and how history is dealt with is something that we need to review. It provoked the Association of Citizenship Teaching to suggest that this is not appropriate and would create a risk of bias and indoctrination. It seems to me that you are arguing for that approach, the approach which might, according to the Association of Citizenship Teaching, create bias and indoctrination. Is there one British way? Or is there more than one British way? Mr Phillips: There is one British way but it is capacious. Q482 Chairman: Capacious or capricious? Mr Phillips: Capricious is not something that I would ever accuse Britain of being. We are not exciting enough, sometimes. The whole point about British identity - and this is exactly an example of what I was saying in my last, I am afraid rather long, answer - is it is marked by the need - and this was the point of Britishness - to accommodate several different traditions: Welsh, Scottish, English. That is part of the point about Britishness. That is one of the things that makes it different from Frenchness. The reason for it existing is to be able to bring all of these things together. The reason for a French identity to exist in the way that it did was so that Napoleon could tell everybody what to do. Q483 Fiona Mactaggart: Is that not why we have ended up believing in multiculturalism? Mr Phillips: Yes, of course. The point is that that tradition - and that is why we are so successful at it - does allow us to respond to changes. That is why we do not have revolutions. That is why, by and large, we do not have too much serious ... One civil war! One civil war? That is really dull. I think this point is extremely important. The point is we do have one tradition but its genius is its capacity to embrace several different ways of doing things. One of our problems at the moment is that I think we are in danger of not understanding how to apply that tradition in a rapidly changing, more diverse Britain. That is why we need this conversation, to find how we apply that rather brilliant history to today's world. I do not think I have given you all the answers, and I know it may sound a bit wet to say part of the answer is to keep talking about it, but my experience, certainly in my own lifetime, is that is what we do. We do not make too many rules, but we keep talking about it, and suddenly in this country we find ourselves in a place where we all feel comfortable again. I had an argument with somebody at a party conference. I used the expression that our real aim in the organisation which I am now going to head, the Commission for Equality in Human Rights, is to create a nation which is at ease with all the kinds of its diversity. He said, "Why aren't you talking about celebrating it?" My answer is that the British do not do celebration. It is a little too aggressive. We like to be at ease with it. That is the way we do it and that is one of the things that makes us different from other nations. Q484 Mr Marsden: My colleague Helen Jones earlier on declared her prejudice, as someone who was educated in Catholic schools. I declare my prejudice in saying that I agree wholeheartedly with what you have said about history. As a former editor of History Today we used to have a slogan which said "What happened then matters now". We still use it in our advertising and I still think it is very relevant. I want to take that on to the question we have just been talking about of accretion and accommodation. Where does this leave us with the thing that has been mooted quite a lot in the past and, particularly in the context of the Olympic bid, of the idea of multiple identities, the idea that somebody might be a black Londoner and a British citizen or a Glaswegian of Italian extraction but a British citizen and how do you play those various things out? Or is it a rather sterile academic argument? Mr Phillips: I would not say it is sterile. It is slightly overstated. Someone once said to me that the whole point about identity is that it only matters when someone asks you what you are. The truth is, depending on who asks you and whether they ask you, you will give a different answer. I do not think any of us goes around having a great big conflict about: "Am I a Londoner? Am I black?" Each of us is a configuration of a series of things. That is how we recognise and are recognised by others as individuals. Where this becomes an issue - coming back to the point I made earlier on about the identity spike - is when one bit of our identity perhaps becomes so inflated, so significant, that it overshadows everything else. As I have said, some white communities come to believe that the only thing that matters about them to the officials and everybody else is that they are white. Similarly for some minority communities in some faith groups now, since world events, they have come to believe that the only thing that matters to them and to anybody else is this bit of their identity. That is unhealthy. Q485 Chairman: There was a point in our history when the most important thing in the lives of many, many people was their religion. It was paramount. It was more important than state, government, subservience to that government. That is a long, long way away in our history, but there are people in our country now who believe that religion is far more important than anything else. How are you going to come to terms with that? Mr Phillips: We could go back to E P Thompson and argue that case. I completely agree with you that at various points in our past in this country religion has been more important than anything else - and Protestantism is integral to the shape of what we consider as Britishness. But it has never been exclusively and only the characteristic that makes us what we are - in contrast, for example, to some other societies. There are some theocracies where religion is a complete description of the state and the culture. Protestantism - and Catholicism even - has never been a complete description of a European state or culture. Q486 Mr Marsden: You were saying about the importance of not putting things in boxes. Does that make it more important, therefore, in the teaching of British culture and social history in the way that Bill Rammell was talking about it, that, if you like, the bittiness of that process, the fact that there are ambiguities and overlaps, is emphasised so that we do not run the risk of having it represented as a prescriptive view of British values? Mr Phillips: I am against fragmenting it. I think we have to have an overall aim and an overall ambition. There are different aspects, as I said earlier on - formal teaching, the way that other subjects reflect it and the way that schools, for example, behave - but I think there needs to be a single idea running through it and the idea that I would like to choose is that citizenship is a way of helping us to live together rather than as individuals. Q487 Stephen Williams: You have alluded to your future job in the Commission for Equality in Human Rights - and it sounds as though you are going to take a John Major type approach to it by making us all "at ease" with each other! Putting together age, religion, sexuality, gender, whatever, you mentioned earlier that none of this works unless we accept equality. There must be absolute equality. Do you not have real challenges in getting this across in schools, about absolute equality, say between homosexuals and people from different religious backgrounds or even racial backgrounds? There are issues that we dance around about the attitude of Afro-Caribbean men or African men to white gay men. Mr Phillips: I do not think so. I think this next generation presents a huge opportunity to do exactly the opposite. Our sense and all our surveys tell us that this is a generation which, certainly more than my generation, wants to think of itself as a generation without prejudice. I think the schools now present us with a huge opportunity. The problem is what my colleagues in Northern Ireland call the "secret truth": what is said in the family kitchen about that lot or that lot. One of my colleagues in Northern Ireland made a speech in July, in which he said, "The secret truth here - which means that since Good Friday we have become slightly more separate - is that one community says 'We're better than them' and the other community says, 'We never did anything to them.' That is a secret truth that is circulated within those communities, never sees the light of day, is never discussed." I think that is what we are battling. As far as young people in schools are concerned, I think they are a great opportunity - a great opportunity. Q488 Chairman: This has been a very good session, but I just notice a slight hint of complacency. When you refer to France, and Holland to some extent, are you saying, in a sense, "We are doing better than they are" and "We have been more successful"? - partly, perhaps to do with the work of your Commission and partly to your Commission's efforts. Is there a hint of that? Mr Phillips: No. Q489 Chairman: Or is it just true that we are better at this than the French and the Dutch? Mr Phillips: I think that is the answer. Over the sweep of history we have just done better at it. I think we have a better record in relation to integration. If we think about the purpose of integration as social tranquillity and movement towards equality and so on, I think we have a better record, we have historically a better way of doing it. That does not mean we need to be complacent. In fact, quite the opposite. I think we are faced with new challenges but I am saying that our traditions give us the edge in applying the ways we have always done this to these new situations. But we do have to do it rather than simply saying, "Oh, it will get worked out. Don't worry." Chairman: Thank you very much. This has been an excellent session. Thank you for being here for a long time. We will be in touch with you again.
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