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James Eldon's avatar

Sam, as the Headteacher of a large, city centre Academy in Manchester which is diverse on every measure - this is such a vital message. There is so much to celebrate in the way schools integrate and reflect on collective values to shape a better future. This needs to permeate the election discourse this year. (Thanks also for your address at the UL conference!)

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Jack Smith's avatar

For me, where the UK's success in integration really stands out is compared to France. Pre-1970s, at least, the two countries had a broadly similar approach to immigration. When they had labour shortages, they looked towards former colonies to meet them. This was not the case in countries like Germany or the Netherlands, which relied more on guest-workers from countries that they had no shared history with.

The biggest and most visible non-white communities in France come from places like Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, or Lebanon, all former colonies. That means you don't have the same language barriers as the guest-workers. Many of these people, especially the Algerians, would have also been at least somewhat familiar with the French administrative system.

You'd expect the outcomes to be similar. Instead, what you have are clear gaps between educational attainment and general quality of life that exist in France, but not in the UK. This is not only the case for foreign-born people living in France today, but also for second or third-generation French people from these former colonies. This is all despite the fact that this is a well-known problem in France, and there have been many attempts to try and fix it.

I'm a bit divided on whether this reflects things the UK did right, or things that France did wrong. What worries me about the UK now is that a lot of the right-wing rhetoric sounds pretty French, in a bad way. Where issues do exist, there is an excessive focus on cultural incompatibility, and not on the structural socio-economic barriers to integration.

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