Skrywer: Dan Roodt

A majority of pupils in many areas of the country – particularly in deprived former mill towns in the north of England – have little contact with children from different ethnic backgrounds, even though they live in close proximity.

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According to the Department for Education and Skills, Blackburn with Darwen council, recently the subject of a BBC Panorama documentary on the parallel lives led by different communities, is one of the most divided boroughs. Four secondary schools out of nine there attract more than 90 per cent of their pupils from just one community.

The Tories last night outlined a dramatic plan to reverse the segregation – setting targets to ensure white and Asian pupils are educated together at any academies set up in northern towns such as Blackburn.

David Willetts, the shadow education secretary, told The Observer: ‘There are towns which have been divided into two where social, ethnic and religious divisions are all aligned and create enormous tensions. Schools in these towns are becoming more and more segregated. One way to tackle them is, if you’re creating an academy, you set a target that it should take its students from both communities.’

His remarks came after new government figures illustrate the recent warning by Jack Straw, the Commons leader and MP for Blackburn, that people are ‘breathing the same air but walking past each other’.

In Straw’s borough, there are three overwhelmingly white schools – Darwen Vale High (95.5 per cent white), Darwen Moorland High (91.6 per cent white) and St Bede’s Roman Catholic High (96.3 per cent white). The segregation is matched on the other side of the racial divide. At Beardwood High, 94.5 per cent of pupils are Asian. Just 2.5 per cent of the school’s pupils are white. Only one school in the borough reflects the ethnic breakdown of a community whose population is 70.5 per cent white and 26.5 per cent Asian. Of the pupils who go to Witton Park High, 71.7 per cent are white and 26.6 per cent are Asian.

The position in Bradford, scene of race riots in 2001, is not much better. Of 28 secondary schools, 10 have 90 per cent or more pupils from one community.

Bradford’s population is 62.8 per cent white and 32.7 per cent Asian. At Ilkley Grammar School, 93.8 per cent of pupils are white, with just 2.3 per cent from the city’s Asian community. Of the pupils attending Belle Vue Boys’ School, 95.6 per cent are Asian and just 1.2 per cent are white.

Stephen Byers, a former schools minister, told The Observer: ‘These figures show that in parts of the country we are sleepwalking towards the segregation of schools on racial grounds. With no public debate, we are enshrining division and discrimination at an early age. Separate communities are growing up alongside each other with little or any common point of reference.

‘As a result people, living in neighbouring communities could for all intents and purposes be on a different planet from each other. If we want to see the development of an inclusive and healthy society, this is an issue that needs to be addressed and not simply ignored.’

Experts say there are many reasons why pupils tend to flock to schools dominated by their own community. Faith schools, for instance, are unlikely to attract many pupils from across the ethnic divide.

Ted Cantle, who wrote the landmark ‘parallel lives’ report following the 2001 riots in Burnley, Oldham and Bradford, told The Observer: ‘There is some evidence that once a school starts to divide it does reach a tipping point where one side or the other feels this school is no longer for them.’

Simon Burgess, professor of economics at Bristol University, said: ‘If you compare segregation in schools with the ethnic segregation in the neighbourhoods around that school then the segregation in schools is higher than that in the surrounding neighbourhoods.’

London – and to a lesser extent Birmingham – presents a more positive picture. Tim Brighouse, the capital’s schools ‘tsar’, said: ‘London has always been a place where waves of people have gone to over the years.’

Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, said the government was tackling the problem. ‘This is exactly why we are bringing in a new duty to promote community cohesion. Faith schools and also non-faith schools will have to undertake action to enhance community cohesion. This can involve twinning and sharing teachers so that this kind of problem can be tackled.’

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[…] 

Africa’s best universities, the grand institutions that educated a revolutionary generation of nation builders and statesmen, doctors and engineers, writers and intellectuals, are collapsing. It is partly a self-inflicted crisis of mismanagement and neglect, but it is also a result of international development policies that for decades have favored basic education over higher learning even as a population explosion propels more young people than ever toward the already strained institutions.

The decrepitude is forcing the best and brightest from countries across Africa to seek their education and fortunes abroad and depriving dozens of nations of the homegrown expertise that could lift millions out of poverty.

The Commission for Africa, a British government research organization, said in a 2005 report that African universities were in a “state of crisis” and were failing to produce the professionals desperately needed to develop the poorest continent. Far from being a tool of social mobility, the repository of a nation’s hopes for the future, Africa’s universities have instead become warehouses for a generation of young people for whom society has little use and who can expect to be just as poor as their uneducated parents.

“Without universities there is no hope of progress, but they have been allowed to crumble,” said Penda Mbow, a historian and labor activist at Cheikh Anta Diop who has struggled to improve conditions for students and professors. “We are throwing away a whole generation.”

As a result, universities across Africa have become hotbeds of discontent, occupying a dangerous place at the intersection of politics and crime. In Ivory Coast, student union leaders played a large role in stirring up xenophobia that led to civil war. In Nigeria, elite schools have been overrun by violent criminal gangs. Those gangs have hired themselves out to politicians, contributing to the deterioration of the electoral process there.

In Senegal, the university has been racked repeatedly by sometimes violent strikes by students seeking improvements in their living conditions and increases in the tiny stipends for living expenses. Students have refused to attend classes and set up burning barricades on a central avenue that runs past the university.

In the early days, postcolonial Africa had few institutions as venerable and fully developed as its universities. The University of Ibadan in southwest Nigeria, the intellectual home of the Nobel Prize-winning writer Wole Soyinka, was regarded in 1960 as one of the best universities in the British Commonwealth. Makerere University in Uganda was considered the Harvard of Africa, and it trained a whole generation of postcolonial leaders, including Julius Nyerere of Tanzania.

And in Senegal, Cheikh Anta Diop, then known as the University of Dakar, drew students from across francophone Africa and transformed them into doctors, engineers and lawyers whose credentials were considered equal to those of their French counterparts.

[…]

Today, nearly 60,000 students are crammed on a campus with just 5,000 dormitory beds. Renting a room in Dakar is so expensive that students pack themselves into tiny rooms by the half dozen.

[…]

The graffiti-scarred dormitories, crisscrossed by clotheslines, look more like housing projects for the poor than rooms for the country’s brightest youths. A $12 million renovation of the library modernized what had been a musty, crowded outpost on campus into a modern building with Internet access. But technology does not help with its most basic problem: it still only has 1,700 chairs. Students study in stairwells and sprawled in corners.

In a chemistry lab in the science department, students take turns carrying out basic experiments with broken beakers and pipettes.

Equally frustrated are the professors, many of whom could pursue careers abroad but choose to remain in Senegal. Alphonse Tiné, a professor of chemistry, said he struggled to balance his research with the demands of teaching thousands of students.

[…]

The disarray of Africa’s universities did not happen by chance. In the 1960s, universities were seen as the incubator of the vanguard that would drive development in the young nations of newly liberated Africa, and postcolonial governments spent lavishly on campuses, research facilities, scholarships and salaries for academics.

But corruption and mismanagement led to the economic collapses that swept much of Africa in the 1970s, and universities were among the first institutions to suffer. As idealistic postcolonial governments gave way to more cynical and authoritarian ones, universities, with their academic freedoms, democratic tendencies and elitist airs, became a nuisance.

When the World Bank and International Monetary Fund came to bail out African governments with their economic reforms—a bitter cocktail that included currency devaluation, opening of markets and privatization—higher education was usually low on the list of priorities. Fighting poverty required basic skills and literacy, not doctoral students. In the mid-1980s nearly a fifth of World Bank’s education spending worldwide went to higher education. A decade later, it had dwindled to just 7 percent.

Meanwhile, welcome money flooded into primary and secondary education. But it set up a time bomb: as more young people got a basic education, more wanted to go to college. In 1984, just half of Senegal’s children went to primary school, but 20 years later more than 90 percent do.

And more of those children have gone on to high school: Africa has the world’s highest growth rate of high school attendance. Abdou Salam Sall, rector of the Cheikh Anta Diop, said 9,000 students earned a baccalaureate in Senegal in 2000, entitling them to university admission. By 2006 there were more than twice that. The university cannot handle the influx. Its budget is $32 million, less than $600 per student. That money must also maintain a 430-acre campus, pay salaries and finance research.

Even those lucky enough to graduate will have difficulty finding a job in their struggling economies. As few as one third of African university graduates find work, according to the Association of African Universities.

Governments and donors in some countries are starting to spend more on higher education. The World Bank chipped in for Cheikh Anta Diop’s library renovation, and a coalition of foundations called the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa has pledged $200 million to help African universities over the next five years.

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