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Muslims and the State Education System : England C.1965-1997

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Muslims and the State Education System : England C.1965-1997 ORBIT-OnlineRepository ofBirkbeckInstitutionalTheses Enabling Open Access to Birkbeck’s Research Degree output Muslims and the state education system : England c.1965-1997 https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40375/ Version: Full Version Citation: Carr, Helen F. W. (2018) Muslims and the state education sys- tem : England c.1965-1997. [Thesis] (Unpublished) c 2020 The Author(s) All material available through ORBIT is protected by intellectual property law, including copy- right law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit Guide Contact: email Muslims and the state education system: England c.1965-1997 Helen Carr Birkbeck College, University of London PhD Thesis 2018 1 I declare that this thesis is all my own work ........................................................................................ 2 Abstract This thesis considers Muslim-state relations over education in the mid-to-late twentieth century. It examines the period from the mid-1960s – the point when Muslim children first arrived in English schools in significant numbers – until the fall of the Conservative government in 1997. Existing accounts of the history of England’s Muslims generally agree that education was a crucial area of early interaction between Muslims and the state. They also tend to situate the experiences of Muslims in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s in the context of Britain’s developing racial diversity, arguing that the religious identity of Muslims was not acknowledged until the end of the 1980s. The consequent responses of the state to Muslim educational needs have been characterised as ad hoc and disorganised, with the possibility of successful relations undermined by the racial and secular focus of multiculturalism, and a disorganised and disinterested Muslim “community”. This thesis challenges key aspects of this narrative. It offers a new chronology and interpretation which take into account the role and significance of the long history of conservative pluralism in the responses of the British state to diversity, arguing that this can help to explain why some Muslim educational needs were being accommodated from the 1960s onwards. It then demonstrates that the dismantling of the educational framework which underpinned the pluralist approach by the Conservative government of the 1980s adversely affected the ability of Muslims to interact with the state. It argues that the shifting education philosophies of the 1980s, developing conceptions of Britain as a country that was both secular and Judaeo-Christian, and the emergence of Islamophobic attitudes exacerbated the difficulties brought about by the attack on the pluralist framework. It concludes that the effect of this was that the possibilities of a fruitful Muslim-state relationship over education decreased rather than increased towards the end of the twentieth century. 3 List of abbreviations AMA – Association of Metropolitan LMA – London Metropolitan Archives Authorities APS – Assisted Places Scheme LMS – Local Management of Schools BLA – Brent Local Archives MET – Muslim Educational Trust BLSL – Bradford Local Studies Library MPA – Muslim Parents’ Association CFM – Bradford Council for Mosques NA – National Archives CRC – Community Relations Council RE – Religious Education CRE – Commission for Racial Equality RRAG – Race Relations Advisory Group CTC – City Technology College SACRE – Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education DES – Department for Education and TES – Times Educational Supplement Science TVEI – Technical and Vocational Education Initiative DfE – Department for Education UMO – Union of Muslim Organisations of the UK and Eire ERA – Education Reform Act 1988 WYAS – West Yorkshire Archive Service ERB – Education Reform Bill YCCR – Yorkshire Committee for Community Relations GM – Grant Maintained ILEA – Inner London Education Authority IMF – International Monetary Fund IWA – Indian Workers’ Association LAM – Local Authority Memorandum LEA – Local Education Authority 4 Muslims and the State Education System: England c.1965-1997 Contents 1. Introduction 6 2. The Educational Background 45 3. Muslims and the State: the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s 101 4. Bradford Case Study 151 5. State-funded schooling: the background 205 6. The Islamia Primary School: A Case Study 234 7. Conclusion 290 8. Bibliography 303 5 Introduction The focus of this thesis will be the interaction of Muslims and the state over education in England1 in the late twentieth century. It takes as it starting point the mid-1960s. This was the time by which Muslim children, many of them the children of immigrants who arrived in the two decades following the end of the Second World War, had begun appearing in schools in England in sufficient numbers to be noticed, and for their expression of needs different to those of the majority to come to the attention of teachers, local authorities, and at times, central government. Their presence in schools raised questions of how Muslim children and parents were expressing their needs, how the various representatives of the state should respond to those needs, and whether there was space within the educational framework for their accommodation. Reflecting on the situation in Bradford, Clement Richardson wrote in his 1976 work A Geography of Bradford that for second generation immigrants in the city – of whom the vast majority were Muslim – “education….constitutes the principal ‘leak’ in an otherwise closed system”.2 That is to say that education was the area over which Bradford’s immigrants – whose existence was previously quite isolated from the rest of the city’s population – began interacting with the state and wider society. As an early point of contact between Muslims and the state, education is therefore a significant element in the history of England’s Muslim population. It is the ‘leak’ identified by Richardson, and the questions which arise from the period of Muslim-state interactions that it ushered in, that are at the heart of this thesis. 1 Responsibility for education policy and provision are devolved to the constituent countries of the United Kingdom. This thesis will therefore focus on the educational situation in England. However, other policies and research which affected or related to Muslims in England often treated Britain or the United Kingdom as a whole. Where relevant or necessary, therefore, discussions in the thesis that do not specifically refer to education policy may refer to either Britain or the United Kingdom, rather than England. 2 Clement Richardson, A Geography of Bradford (Bradford: University of Bradford, 1976), p.176. 6 1) Britain’s Muslims A useful starting point for a study of Muslims in the education system in England is to address the question of who the Muslim children were, and what brought them to England’s schools in significant numbers by the mid-1960s. Britain’s Muslim population grew considerably in the second half of the twentieth century; however for much of that period there was uncertainty over its exact size. The 2001 census, which was the first to include a question on religion since the Muslim population in Britain had grown, indicated that at the beginning of the twenty-first century there were 1.6 million Muslims in the United Kingdom, making up 2.6 per cent of the population. In a 2006 article, Ceri Peach attempted to use this data to back-project the size of the Muslim population. Describing his results as “indicative rather than precise”, he suggested that there were 21,000 Muslims in the UK in 1951, 55,000 in 1961, a quarter of a million in 1971, almost 600,000 in 1981, just under a million in 1991 and 1.6 million in 2001.3 It is important to highlight, however, that these figures were only available after the 2001 census. Prior to this, while there was general agreement that the Muslim population of the UK was growing, methods of working out its size were complex and often imprecise, meaning that there were considerable differences of opinion about how fast it was growing, and about its size at various points. The vast majority of Britain’s Muslim population in the second half of the twentieth century arrived as part of a larger process of migration which occurred in the aftermath of the Second World War and the end of empire. The 1948 British Nationality Act enabled British subjects from former colonies to enter Britain without restriction and workers soon began to arrive in their masses from the West Indies and South Asia. Around 500,000 arrived between 3 Ceri Peach, ‘Muslims in the 2001 Census of England and Wales: Gender and Economic Disadvantage’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 29.4 (2006), 629–655 (p.637). 7 1948 and 1962 to meet the demand for labour created by the expansion of production in the British economy.4 Amongst these immigrants were a sizeable number of Muslims who arrived from the Indian subcontinent, many of whom were prompted to migrate by the Partition of India in 1947 and by displacement resulting from the building of the Mangla Dam in 1960.5 It was amongst these migrants, their families, and the second and third generations that followed that the majority of Britain’s Muslim population in the late twentieth century could be found: until the early 1980s, South Asians made up 80 per cent of Britain’s Muslim population,6 falling to around two thirds by 2001. The rest of the Muslim population during this period was diverse, including Muslims from Turkish Cyprus,7 East Africa and parts of North Africa and the Middle East8 who arrived in Britain in the 1970s
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