The Truth About Integration

I have been challenged by readers to write something less depressing about the state of the country. Not an easy task. But there is one area where the UK is comfortably outperforming its European peers: integration.

You wouldn’t think so from the language being used by politicians and large chunks of the media. The Prime Minister talked a few weeks ago of a "growing consensus that mob rule is replacing democratic rule". In the light of angry Pro-Palestinian protests in central London and George Galloway’s victory in Rochdale, columnists are, again, writing pieces with titles like “Political correctness has suppressed debate on migration we must have”, or “No wonder Britain is so divided — we’re too diverse”.

There are, of course, areas of the country that have been segregated for a long time, particularly the band of old mill towns across the North-West and Yorkshire, and parts of cities like Tower Hamlets in East London. It is not a coincidence that Galloway’s three election wins, after leaving Labour, have come in these places. Nor that UKIP were very strong in the band between Manchester and Leeds. They very nearly won a by-election in Heywood and Middleton, a largely white constituency sitting between Rochdale and Oldham, in 2014.

None of this is new. A series of race riots in Oldham, Bradford and Burnley in the summer of 2001 led New Labour to attempt the first serious integration strategy. Following the child sexual exploitation scandals in Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere, Baroness Louise Casey was asked, in 2016, to conduct a broader review into integration which focused particularly on Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities. More recent flare-ups, such as the protests around a Batley teacher (who remains in hiding) showing a cartoon of Mohammad, or in the Sparkhill area of Birmingham around teaching gay rights in schools, and now tensions over the fighting in Gaza, have kept the challenges in the media spotlight.

Concerns about these flashpoints are widely held. In the survey I did a few weeks ago of Conservative 2019 voters on immigration, the primary cultural concern was around segregation – and the sense that some immigrant communities cut themselves off from the rest of the country.

Left/liberals get a lot of criticism from the right for ignoring or downplaying these issues. And there can be a tendency to do that. They are typically younger and more likely to be living in very diverse cities. The problems of Rochdale, Oldham, or Blackburn, seem distant. Plus seeing highly polarising figures like Nigel Farage trying to exploit tensions for their own political benefit encourages avoidance. It’s nevertheless self-defeating as it means the arguments are dominated by the most divisive voices (including Galloway).

In addition it means that these arguments are conducted with very little context. The critical question is how are things changing over time and is it in the right direction?. After all assimilation isn’t something that happens quickly. My great great grandparents spoke Yiddish and lived in tight-knit communities of Jewish immigrants seen, by many at the time, as a threat to British values. Some of them lived in the same Tower Hamlets wards that now mainly house Bangladeshi families. But by the time of my grandparents’ generation they were almost entirely assimilated, while keeping a religious and cultural attachment to their Jewish identity.

A key driver of that change for Jews in England was education. And one of our greatest unspoken success stories of the last few decades is that the same is happening with more recent immigrant communities.

The power of education

For those of us with a background in education policy the triennial OECD PISA studies of 15-year olds’ academic performance are something of a holy grail. Though the methodology is by no means perfect, it is comfortably the best source of comparative education data.

One of the big stories from the 2022 study, released a few months ago, was the variation in the performance of immigrant pupils. The UK was the only country in Europe (apart from Serbia) where second generation immigrant students outperformed non-immigrants. Remarkably, first generation immigrants did almost as well. This is a major reason why the UK is now one of the best performing European countries in PISA.

The UK looks much more like other parts of the English-speaking world. The other three developed countries where second generation immigrants outscore their peers are Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Clearly language is playing a big role here, English is spoken as a first or second language globally whereas German and Dutch are not. This helps educational integration.

But this underplays the UK’s relative success. Immigration into Canada, Australia and New Zealand is very high but largely controlled and skilled. There is significant immigration from China, which has exceptional cultural attachment to academic education, to all three countries.

In the UK, prior to Brexit, EU immigration was subject to free movement. Prior to 2012 there was no income requirement for family unification visas. The pattern of UK immigration is somewhere in-between EU countries, which have historically taken many more asylum seekers from countries with poor education systems, and places like Australia that focus on skilled labour.

At least some of the UK’s success here is down to the work of schools in our most segregated areas, including groups like Star Academies, which is the highest performing large Multi-Academy Trust in the country, and runs many Muslim faith schools in that “mill town” band. Or Mulberry Schools Trust in London which has done a phenomenal job, particularly in improving the outcomes of Bangladeshi girls.

This success can be seen in GCSE data. Back in 2005/6 Bangladeshi and Pakistani students performed significantly worse, on average, than white British ones. By 2018/19, the last year for which we have comparable data, there had been a clear shift.

And this underplays what has happened because white British students are, on average, from wealthier families. On a new measure called “Attainment 8”, which adds up GCSE point scores, Bangladeshi students on free school meals do better than the average for all white British students regardless of economic status. This is extraordinary.

It is also reflected in higher education numbers. 58% of Bangladeshi students on free school meals (47% of Pakistani) go to university compared to just 16% of white British free school meals students. I don’t think it’s widely appreciated that Asian and black students are now much more likely to go to university than white ones.

Education and segregation

The relationship between integration and education is not completely straightforward, but it is positive. People with higher qualifications tend to be more able to integrate and more able to take advantage of opportunities which require doing so.

So you would expect, given these results, to see the country becoming less segregated over time. And that is exactly what is happening. Initial results from the 2021 census show “increasing numbers of neighbourhoods are home to a substantial mix of people from different ethnic groups”. There are still, of course, highly segregated areas. Change is gradual. But it is moving in the right direction.

Broadly speaking we have super diverse inner cities where the (mainly young) white population has stabilised but there are no dominant ethnic groups, and increasingly diverse suburbs and commuter belts, as minority families move out to buy houses. Right-wing commentators tend to focus on the decreasing numbers of areas or schools that are majority white, but those that are not tend to be more ethnically diverse rather than monocultural.

As a report from the not noticeably woke think-tank Policy Exchange put it:

“Virtually all ethnic groups show a modest decline in measures of segregation. Indeed, this suggests most minorities do not wish to self-segregate  but are moving in search of better housing and amenities commensurate with their upward mobility.”

We are seeing the same pattern with schools. The most recent analysis from 2021 found:

“That between 2006 and 2019 the median level of ethnic school segregation within English neighbourhoods fell by 25%, which suggests students from different ethnic groups have become more evenly spread across local schools.” 

Again, this doesn’t mean there isn’t any school segregation, particularly in those parts of the country that have a history of racial tension. But for every ethnic group things are moving towards greater integration.

This gradual assimilation is visible in attitudes as well. The chart below is taken from a study by Lucinda Platt (from an article by John Burn-Murdoch) and shows that, as one would expect, second generation immigrants are more assimilated. Platt looks at the theory of “reactive religious identity” in the second generation which argues that communities, particularly more segregated ones, can become more attached to their religious identity over time as a result of feeling isolated. But she finds no evidence of this, including for Muslim immigrants. This study is now a decade old, and other data we have suggests this pattern has continued. A recent poll of British Muslims found that 86% believed that Britain is a good place to live when it comes to people having the opportunities to progress and thrive in life, compared to 70% of the wider population.

Another example of this attitudinal shift is cousin marriage. The article I linked to at the start of the post headlined “Political correctness has suppressed debate on migration we must have” is from a recent Sunday Times column by Matthew Syed. In it he argues:

“In many iterations of Islam, people marry within their tribe or baradari. They worship the same god but their lives are dominated by the kinship group…..‘endogamous’ marriage, typically between cousins, maintains a clear demarcation between one’s in-group and everyone else. Your children remain in the clan, creating continuity of property and ideology.

And this isn’t merely about history and foreign practice. A recent pape… suggests between 38 per cent and 59 per cent of British Pakistanis marry first cousins; Alison Shaw, a professor of social anthropology at Oxford, has noted the rate may be rising. Some have rightly worried about the birth defects caused by ‘consanguinity’ but we have missed how the practice is the fundamental instrument of cultural sequestration.”

He's right that in some of the more segregated Pakistani communities cousin marriage has been common. But he is wrong that the rate is rising. The numbers have been historically highest in Bradford, because most Pakistani families come from same place, the Mirpur District in Kashmir. The “Born in Bradford” study of 13,500 families between 2007-2010 found that 60% of Pakistani couples were related by blood (37% first cousins). The rate was half that if both partners were born in the UK. In a follow-up study conducted between 2016-2020 the rate had fallen to 43%. This change happened in less than a decade so we can assume it is continuing at pace.

This is exactly what you’d expect from an increasingly well-educated, mobile, and assimilated community. (At least one set of my great-grandparents were cousins – my grandparents were not).

Building on Success

None of this is an attempt to close down debates on integration, or suggest there are no problems. There are parts of the county that remain highly segregated and where relations remain fraught. For all their talk the government have no proper integration strategy and what is happening at local levels is of mixed quality. There is certainly space for the next government to do more, given the likelihood that flashpoints will continue to arise, whether over perceived insults to Islam or conflicts in the Middle East. This analysis underlines the importance of liberals supporting policy that builds on progress made in recent decades by schools.

Equally, though, we should all push back against the sort of catastrophising we have seen recenty. It gets us nowhere. UK society is becoming less segregated and more assimilated. The success of our educational institutions in supporting this to happen at rapid pace is seriously under-recognised as one of the big national achievements of the past few decades. As Sunder Katwala, Director of British Future, wrote recently:

“Integration is often invisible when it works, while failures of integration stick out like a sore thumb. We naturally take the everyday lived experience of living together in schools, workplaces and neighbourhoods for granted.”

But we should not take it for granted. Our position is in marked contrast to the continent, where the educational performance of immigrants is much weaker. While we shouldn’t be complacent about the potential rise of populist right extremism in the UK, this does help to explain why (along with electoral systems) figures like Geert Wilders are having so much success across Europe. And why parties like his, or Marine Le Pen’s, do so much better with younger generations than Reform do here. There genuinely are deeper cultural barriers.

There are enough areas where Britain really is struggling badly without us trying to turn one of our success stories into a tragedy.