A culture of fear and intimidation has developed inside some of Birmingham‘s state-funded schools, says Ofsted‘s chief inspector, Michael Wilshaw. Islamic “extremism” wants to rule the roost (my quote marks are there not to imply irony or scepticism, but simply because nobody seems sure of what extremism is). Ofsted’s report finds that in Park View school, the sexes are segregated inside the classroom, their sports events are scheduled for different days and that a “madrasa curriculum” denies evolutionary theory and omits reproduction from biology classes. One teacher has handed out a worksheet stating that women must always obey their husbands, and another has been using school facilities to copy Osama bin Laden DVDs.
The general picture is of schools that have cut themselves off from the state’s educational system to cultivate or reinforce intolerant religious and political beliefs that threaten the state’s wellbeing. Vehemently denying this picture, many teachers and parents are anxious to point out the difference between the religiously devout and the politically militant. Michael Gove thinks that every state-funded school in England should be obliged to promote “British values”, forgetting that he once mocked Gordon Brown for coining the phrase, or that its meaningfulness is questionable (hence more quote marks). At such a troubled time, who can resist the feeling that Ray Honeyford was right?
To remember Honeyford is to go back to an age that seems more distant than the year 1985 justifies: to a past separated from the present by a succession of curtains – the Rushdie fatwa, 9/11, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq – where few people knew of, let alone understood, the difference between Shia and Sunni, and where race rather than religion was the primary group identifier. As I remember it, the Honeyford affair was the first time the word “Muslim” become almost as important a personal description as “Pakistani” or “Indian” in an argument over the consequences of immigration.
Looking at pieces I wrote then, I notice my own uncertainty. I define the intake at Bradford’s Drummond Middle school, where Honeyford was headmaster, as 95% “Asian”, even though nearly all of them came from Muslim families originating in Pakistan’s share of the Punjab and Kashmir, which is where Bradford recruited its mill hands in the 1960s. Similarly, when the Bradford Telegraph & Argus published a shorter version of Honeyford’s article for the Salisbury Review, it had the headline “Education and race – an alternative view”. Not “faith” but race, because pre-fatwa and pre-Dawkins, most people had still to disentangle one from the other, and the difference between immigrants, as groups and individuals, lay obscured under a thick cloud of ignorance that the anti-racist philosophy of the time did little to alleviate by insisting that everybody who wasn’t white must be black. “Asians”, to that extent, represented a small advance.
Honeyford was appointed head of Drummond Middle in 1980. Bradford’s education authority stopped its “bussing” policy in the same year, so that the immigrant children were no longer dispersed across the city but went automatically to their neighbourhood schools. The numbers on Drummond’s register rose dramatically. The “cultural diversity perspective” replaced “assimilation” as an educational goal. Bradford’s schools were asked to acknowledge the “central, pervasive influence of racism”, urged to “build on and develop the strengths of cultural and linguistic diversity” and to “respond sensitively to the special needs of minority groups”. Some Islamic groups had begun to demand separate but state-aided Muslim schools. Bradford was determined to show that their children’s education needs could be met “within the framework of a common school curriculum”. Parents were informed of their right to withdraw children from morning (Christian) assemblies, school meals served halal meat, boys and girls went to separate physical education classes and were girls allowed to wear pajamas in swimming lessons. Blind eyes were turned when children went absent for several weeks longer than the Christmas break because their parents had taken them back to Punjab, where the winter weather made a holiday more enjoyable than the summer’s heat.
Honeyford mainly went along with the new elasticity, but he hated its central beliefs and the jargon of its administering bureaucracy. He was from a poor family in Manchester, one of 12 children (seven of whom died in infancy) of a father who worked only sporadically as a labourer because of lungs weakened by gassing in Flanders. He failed his grammar school entrance and left school at 15, seizing the chance 10 years later to take a two-year teacher training course that led in the end to graduate and postgraduate degrees. He was rather austere, and grave and well-read, and given his own childhood, nobody could disbelieve him when he said that he understood “the instrumental value of education”. “Too many schools,” he said when I met him in 1985, “have fallen into the trap of patronising and entertaining.”
For him, a school existed to promote learning rather than cultural diversity. In what turned out to be the clearest and least inflammatory statement of his position, published in the Times Educational Supplement in 1982, he wrote that the “commitment [of immigrants] to a British education was implicit in their decision to become British citizens. Maintenance and transmission of the mother culture has nothing to do with the English secular school [but is] an entirely private decision to be implemented by the immigrant family and community out of school … There should be a welcome for the strangers in our midst, but no attempt by the education service to confer a privileged position on this sub-culture or that.”
Other than a letter to the local newspaper, the article was Honeyford’s first excursion into print. His employers weren’t enthusiastic, but Honeyford enjoyed the experience and wrote again for the TES the following year, and in 1984 published the first of his contributions to the Salisbury Review, the quarterly of the libertarian right then edited by Roger Scruton. It was the controversy over the second of these pieces, reproduced in the Telegraph & Argus and translated into Urdu, that turned Honeyford from an obscure if opinionated headteacher into a national figure, admired on one hand and reviled on the other, and the cause of so many protests and counter-protests that he eventually had to be given a lump sum and effectively sacked.
But was he right? His views on schools – that they exist to teach rather than entertain or placate – have become orthodox long since. That immigrants “have responsibilities as well rights” is a cliche now embedded in every political party, which also demand that immigrants speak and read English before they take citizenship tests. And on the available evidence, the case of the Birmingham schools seems to show what happens when a version of multicultural freedom prevails, which Honeyford so fiercely opposed. By these lights, it’s hard not to think he was right or, if you prefer it more neutrally, well ahead of his time.
The pity of it is that he fell in love with the idea of himself as a writer, and as a thinker on more general matters. He could never understand why his description of a parent as speaking English “like a Peter Sellers’ Indian doctor on an off-day” might be infuriating to the families of his pupils, or why attributing heroin addiction in English cities to migration from Pakistan was a slur on entire communities. Like someone else – could it be Michael Gove? – he developed the headline-grabbing instincts of a newspaper polemicist, to the detriment of the more careful qualities that his proper job demanded. He died, without ever holding that proper job again, in 2012.