Schools Apart

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How schools can help students from minority backgrounds feel integrated in modern Britain

Anwar Akhtar explores how schools can help children from minority backgrounds feel integrated and included in modern Britain.

Film and theatre producer Anwar Akhtar. director of the educational charity Samosa media, visits schools, exploring diversity and the curriculum and asking questions about difficult topics such as segregation and the importance of an inclusive education.

A Mancunian and first generation son of Pakistani immigrants, Anwar traces his career development to his school days at Loreto College in the 1980s. Educated with students from a range of multicultural backgrounds, he developed a sense of belonging.

But he worries that some second and third generation youngsters from minority backgrounds have not had the same positive, inclusive experience. He has watched as many struggle, feeling marginalised and isolated. He considers why their experience has been so different from his own, exploring the problem of communities living and schooling apart from each other, focusing on the Pennine mill town of Oldham, a few miles from where he grew up. 

Anwar wants to explore solutions, how schools can help divided communities connect to each other. He revisits Loreto college to explore lessons from his own background. He looks at a radical integration project in Oldham in which segregated schools were merged. And he considers the central role of curriculum diversity in helping build a shared identity for young people, talking to pioneering teachers at two London schools, Stepney All Saints and Lilian Baylis in Lambeth. 

At the heart of the programme is Britain's island story, the shared solidarity and cultural capital which built the modern nation. If young people feel included in that story, and are helped in school to connect to it, we can help divided communities come together and help children fulfil their potential. 

Producers: Tom Edgington and Leala Padmanabhan

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