- The Guardian,
- Thursday September 2 2004
For some mysterious reason, I was not one of those asked this week by the right-wing thinktank Civitas to become a shareholder in its new model school in north-west London, an educational initiative necessary, in part, to stem the rot of a culture "in serious decline - one might say meltdown".
However, as a long-time resident of the area in which the new model school will open its doors later this month, I did get its arresting yellow leaflet announcing its intention to set up a school promoting "the values and knowledge on which the survival of the culture depends" and calling for local support.
Parents felt alternately intrigued and irritated. More than 100 people attended a fractious meeting in February, at which some dared to suggest that Civitas was playing on middle-class fears of the racial mix in local schools, the so-called "playground effect". In recent years, this patch has become packed with middle-class families, many of them staggering under the burden of high mortgages. But this is also Brent, one of the most multicultural boroughs in the country; inevitably, the schools reflect that. Civitas surely knew exactly what demographics, and what buried sensitivities, it was targeting with its offer of a £3,000-a-year education based on "Judaeo Christian" values. A private education with moral knobs on.
Despite that packed February meeting, the new model school has so far failed to recruit many entrants. According to news reports, only 10 parents have signed up. Hence, the need for this week's appeal to potential shareholders, and the warnings of imminent global moral collapse.
One can only speculate why so few parents have taken up the Civitas offer; low-cost, "no frills" private schooling. But one answer may be a somewhat surprising level of parental support for local schools in Brent.
Despite a significant drain to the private sector in this area and a never-ending debate about the problems of the state sector, there exists among local parents a sense that something really important hangs on the success of our local schools: social cohesion in the inner city, no less. One can sense in their attitude towards the local school something between a belief and a yearning for a sense of community, as well as a wish to come to terms with, rather than shy away from, the complexities of the modern world.
Our daughters' school, a large mixed primary, is minutes away from the sports complex where the new model school will open its doors on September 13. More than 70 languages are spoken; new refugees arrive almost weekly. The 600 or so pupils come from every imaginable social, ethnic and religious background.
In a funny way, our large red-brick primary is a kind of faith school, proud of its secular take on its own social and ethnic mix. Such a sense of excitement and celebration is perhaps easier to sustain at primary level, where the brute power and tricky problems of adolescence have not yet intervened. But where it works, a genuinely mixed, local school daily embodies the wish for, the struggle towards, fairness, tolerance and the chance of higher standards for all, not just those endowed with "social and cultural capital".
Much of this depends on capital of the more basic sort: resources, plus a managing intelligence. At our local primary there is an on-site refugee centre, a strong behaviour policy, and a burgeoning sports and arts programme. There is also an active parental culture.
Nothing is perfect in this imperfect world. But it is in the grind and pleasure of such everyday cooperation that the abstract value of community finds specific and positive meaning. And surely not just in Brent: such an experience is being repeated, largely unreported, in inner cities around modern Britain. I'm not sure what Civitas means by "Judaeo Christian values" but my re-readings of the Old and New Testaments find as much justification for the world view our school promotes as Civitas no doubt finds for the errors of mass migration or the moral failings of the divorced.
Children at our local primary also get the chance to develop what Civitas calls "social skills and good character", only as well as traditional good manners they get a grasp of complex religious difference and the vast inequalities in the world we live in. What our school cannot offer is maths to an "adequate standard for the Common Entrance exams", French for the very young, and a reading age of eight by the age of five.
I remain curious as to why so many undoubtedly anxious local parents have, so far, failed to take up Civitas's offer and why so many seem to have opted instead for the more complex and uncertain adventure of the local school, the noisy truth of community.
Perhaps the playground effect works both ways; it is its thrill, rather than its threat, that has swung it for them. Like me perhaps, they prefer the prospect of lively collaboration, the chance of a range of unexpected friends and experiences, over the rigid certainties of 10 bent heads in a rented sports hall.
· Melissa Benn is co-editor of a book of essays on education and democracy to be published by Continuum press this month
