Learning and Integration in the UK

Abstract

Education policies for refugees in the UK have for a long time emphasized integration and assimilation. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, more than 100,000 French Huguenot refugees found a new home in the South of England. Between 1880 and 1914 around 200,000 Jews also found refuge in the UK. The educational response towards these two waves of refugees and migrants was a policy of assimilation and integration: teachers aimed at a faster integration of immigrant children into British society focusing on basic English literacy (Rutter 1994: 46–47). Since the mid-1960s, assimilationist policies have changed to embrace multicultural education with the arrival of immigrants from the Commonwealth countries. The difference between assimilation and multicultural education is that the former aimed at ‘compensating’ ethnic minority’s perceived lack of integration, whilst the latter recognizes the value of students’ diverse home culture, and linguistic and religious backgrounds. Moreover, the multicultural approach aimed at sensitizing all children for life in a multi-ethnic society. In 1979, the British government set up a Committee of Inquiry into the Education of Children from Ethnic Minority Groups. Anti-racism and the stereotyping of ethnic minorities was also an important theme of the report. Under the guidance of Lord Swann a report was produced describing good practices in multicultural education, while emphasizing at the same time that dissonance arises in settings of conflicting social values between ethnic communities and mainstream society (The Swann Report 1985).