ESRC Society Today

For immediate release - 24th August 2006

This is a key finding of Economic and Social Research Council funded research into diversity in education carried out by Irene Bruegel and Susie Weller of London South Bank University. The researchers found that:

• Primary school children had difficulty recognising different ethnicity and rarely referred to it.
• In primary classes where at least a third of the children were from minority backgrounds there was far greater evidence of mixed ethnicity friendships carrying over to secondary school friendships. Where eighty per cent of the children where white they were significantly less likely to make friends at secondary school across racial divides. Children from the less mixed primary schools were described as 'distinctly different'. None felt that Muslim or Asian children were 'picked on' in their local neighbourhood. 
• Ethnic minority children are also far more likely to make and retain inter-ethnic relationships where they are not in a majority in their primary schools. 
• Children who went to Catholic primary schools were more likely to be in ethnically homogenous classes, compared with other children living in the immediate locality, but that this was not the case for those at CoE primary schools in the areas we studied.
• Less than half the Muslim children (49%) said that their parents knew those of their friends compared with 74% of non-Muslims. This seemed to be because they took their friends home less, whether or not they were Muslim 
• Special sessions mixing children from different primary schools did not have anything like the same effect as day to day contact. White children in the former case still referred to the children they met as 'coming from the brown school' and could not remember their names, as 'too difficult'.  

The study also found that aspirant parents use their contacts and spending power in an effort to influence the child's future social milieu.  

Professor Irene Bruegel of the Families and Social capital Research Group at South Bank said today;
"Proposals in the Education Act reinforcing parental choice could undermine rather than improve social cohesion."

For further details contact:

• Professor Irene Bruegel - 0207 815 5802 / 0207 813 3501 or 07726711772 or email i.bruegel@lsbu.ac.uk
• Or Alexandra Saxon/Annika Howard at ESRC, on 01793 413032/413119 (Email: alexandra.saxon@esrc.ac.uk / annika.howard@esrc.ac.uk)
• Download research briefing 'Locality, school and social capital' (PDF)

Notes for editors:

1. The research was carried out in five contrasting locations: two inner London boroughs, an outer London suburb, a New Town in the South East and a city in the Midlands.  We have followed a number of children [and their parent(s)] from different cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds through the move to secondary school. The study was conducted with two cohorts of children between 2003-2005 using a mixed-method approach.
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